by David Ogilvy
D.O.
From Flagbearer, the New York office’s staff newsletter:
November 19, 1976
Somebody recently asked me for a list of the most useful books on advertising – the books that all our people should read. Here is what I sent her:
1. Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins; Foreword by David Ogilvy. Crown Publishers.
2. Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples; Foreword by David Ogilvy. Prentice-Hall.
3. Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. Atheneum Publishers.
4. How to Advertise by Kenneth Roman and Jane Maas; Foreword by David Ogilvy. St. Martin’s Press.
5. Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves. Alfred Knopf.
6. The Art of Writing Advertising by Bernbach, Burnett, Gribbin, Ogilvy & Reeves. Advertising Publications, Inc., Chicago.
7. The 100 Best Advertisements by Julian Watkins. Dover Publications.
A note to the Board of Directors:
October 21, 1982
“The Pope of Modern Advertising”
The current issue of Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber’s magazine, EXPANSION, is devoted to the Industrial Revolution and lists thirty men who have contributed to it. They include:
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein
John Maynard Keynes
Alfred Krupp
Lenin
Karl Marx
David Ogilvy – “the Pope of modern advertising”
Louis Pasteur
James de Rothschild
Adam Smith
Thomas J. Watson Sr.
Will the College of Cardinals please come to order?
D.O.
In “Raise Your Sights” – a list of 97 tips for copywriters, art directors, and TV producers – this was saved for last:
97. Whenever you write a commercial, bear in mind that it is likely to be seen by your children, your wife – and your conscience.
Addressing annual staff meeting in New York in 1979.
Speeches and Papers
Speeches and Papers
The opening section of a talk delivered in 1949, the year after the agency opened, by David Ogilvy, Vice President and Research Director of Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather.
These early remarks, on “Research and its Effect on the Visual Phases of Advertising,” were addressed to the Art Directors Forum in New York. They sound a theme often revisited over the decades.
Here are two ads for the same product. They are the same size. They cost the same. But one reached 31 times as many prospects as the other.
What would you think if the space-buyer in your agency could buy 31 times as much circulation per dollar as other space-buyers?
You would think he was the most important man in the agency business. That is exactly the position you art directors are in.
It is within your power to reach 31 times as many readers per dollar as other art directors.
That is a big difference.
Your space-buyer buys gross circulation, your copywriter gives you the selling story, and your job is to deliver the largest possible net circulation for that story …
Your job, as I see it, is to take the selling appeal you are given, and then go to work and deliver the maximum audience. I mean audience of prospects.
That is where research can help art directors. It can give you some indication as to the type of visual treatment which will deliver the most prospects per dollar …
From a speech at the Annual Advertising Awards dinner, announcing the winner of the Career Award for Distinguished Personal Services to Advertising for 1953:
January 21, 1954
The Juries which select the winners of this award have an extremely difficult job.
This year, for example, we had almost a hundred nominations placed before us …
So we got to studying the list of men who had won the award in the past.
We noticed that it included
great publishers,
great advertising managers,
distinguished officers of associations,
men who have worked for great causes,
above and beyond the call of duty,
and heads of great agencies.
We thought it was curious that the Award had been given so seldom – if ever – for creative services.
After all, it is the creative man who makes the product upon which the whole structure of our business depends.
Unless the creative man produces great advertisements, the rest of us might as well pack up and go home.
So we decided, in principle, to give the Gold Medal Award to a great creative man.
We hoped that, by so doing, we would sound a trumpet call to the copywriters and art directors who work day after day at their typewriters and their drawing boards.
Generally speaking, you don’t hear much about these people. Most of them are more or less unsung – if not totally invisible and anonymous.
It is not surprising that these creative people sometimes get the idea that nobody thinks they matter very much.
By giving the Gold Medal to one of these creative men, the Jury goes on record as believing that nobody in all advertising matters more than the copywriter and the art director …*
From “What the Creative Man Can Do to Increase Public Acceptance of Advertising,” a speech to the Association of National Advertisers, March 1954:
I have only one complaint to make about our session here this morning. It is this: all the speakers are on the same side of the fence. We are all against sin.
Next year I would like to see A.N.A. stage a great debate, with one of our more notorious malefactors here to defend his position. One of the unrepentant weasel merchants.
We might couple him up to a lie detector and then invite him to read some of his own copy out loud.
I have been asked to talk to you about “the growing lack of public confidence in advertising.” First let me say this: I’m far from sure in my own mind that lack of public confidence is growing.
It would be a hard thing to prove. After all, Dr. Gallup wasn’t around to measure public confidence in the bad old days before our reform movement got started.
But of one thing I am very sure. There is a growing uneasiness within our own ranks. Most of the thoughtful men and women I know in the agency field, and particularly the younger generation, are becoming increasingly introspective about their profession – and the part it plays in the body economic …
TRUTH AND WEASELS
Now I come to truth in advertising.
Here again, I don’t know the precise state of public opinion. Personally, I think that actual truth has become more or less a dead issue. Most advertising nowadays is a great deal more truthful than the public realizes.
Our problem is to make the public believe the true things we say. It’s no use telling the truth if people don’t believe you. So, how can we copywriters make our ads more believable?
Well, we can start by turning our backs on the weasel. The kind of weasels which still disgrace so much advertising for toothpaste, cigarettes, detergents and low-calorie beer. The kind of weasels that depreciate the whole currency of copy.
Verbal weasels and typographical weasels. Most of us on the creative side are connoisseurs of the weasel. Far more than the public, we comprehend the villainies of the weasel merchants …
Let’s take our tongues out of our cheeks. Let’s try and write like human beings.
We hope that you people, our clients, will encourage us in this, because most of us are very sensitive to what our clients are thinking.
TRY THIS EXPERIMENT
If any of you gentlemen have any private qualms about the continued presence of weasels in your own advertising, I want to suggest that you try a novel experiment.
When you get back to your office on Monday morning, send for your agency people and address them in these terms:
“Our production people are very proud of their product. They think it’s such a dam
n good product that you ought to be able to advertise it without weaseling.
“Our stockholders include a lot of widows and orphans. Sure, they need profits and dividends. But they don’t want you to cheat in pursuit of their dividends.
“So please take another look at the advertising we have scheduled for 1954. Ask yourself if you would feel any compunction about exposing your own children to it.
“Ask yourself if any of it could possibly fan the flames of public resentment against advertising.
“Ask yourself if any of it could possibly damage our company’s reputation in the long run.
“And finally, ask yourself if any of it is in conflict with your own private standards of morality and good taste. As your clients, we have no desire to increase the load of guilt you carry through life.”
But one word of warning. This can be an extremely dangerous experiment. If you decide to try it, I advise you to make it crystal clear to your agency that you aren’t looking for soft, gutless advertising. And that you aren’t looking for mere entertainment.
Explain that you still want advertising with selling teeth in it. Honest teeth, but biting teeth.
The effect on your agency may well be electrifying. I can imagine nothing better calculated to stimulate creative people to produce great advertising for you …
Every time you run an advertisement that is genuinely creative and interesting, you not only benefit your own company, but all your fellow advertisers.
If we in the agency business can create enough interesting campaigns, we can get consumers to drop their resistance.
Don’t let’s be dull bores. We can’t save souls in an empty church.
* * *
HELP FOR A COMPETITOR
Someone in the Sydney office of another agency sent David a telex asking him to answer a question, as fodder for a speech.
The question: “What single step would most enhance our reputation for creativity?”
The telexed reply: “Change the name of your agency to Ogilvy.”
* * *
From “The Image and the Brand – a New Approach to Creative Operations,” a talk to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in Chicago, October 1955:
When I was invited to speak at luncheon here today, Fred Gamble suggested that I should build my talk around a Creative Credo which I had recently circulated to some of my friends. That sounded delightfully easy. So I agreed.
But the following week Sid Bernstein got hold of a copy of my Credo and printed it in Advertising Age. That put the kibosh on my talk.
So now I have decided to take just one plank out of my Credo, and preach you a short sermon on that one text. It happens to be the first plank, and this is what it says:
“Every advertisement is part of the long-term investment in the personality of the brand.”
I didn’t make that up. I borrowed it, from an article by Burleigh Gardner and Sidney Levy in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review. It is exactly the position we take at Ogilvy, Benson & Mather today.
We hold that every advertisement must be considered as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image – as part of the long-term investment in the reputation of the brand.
I must confess that I have changed my mind on this subject. When I first arrived in this country eighteen years ago, I bought the wicked old Chicago philosophy, as practiced by Claude Hopkins.
I used to deride advertising men who talked about long-term effect. I used to accuse them of hiding behind long-term effect. I used to say that they used long-term effect as an alibi – to conceal their inability to make any single advertisement profitable. In those intolerant days I believed that every advertisement must stand on its own two feet and sell goods at a profit on the cost of the space …
Today, I have come to believe, with Gardner and Levy, that every advertisement must be considered as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image. And I find that if you take that long-term approach, a great many of the day-to-day creative questions answer themselves …
During the last six months we have seen a remarkable demonstration of image building for a new brand. I refer to Marlboro Cigarettes. Leo Burnett and his associates used judgment to decide what kind of image to create for the Marlboro image – before they started to create the advertising.
And incidentally they took a risk which few advertisers would take. They seem to have decided that Marlboro should have an exclusively male personality. What a brave decision.*
I find that most manufacturers are reluctant to accept any such limitation on the image and personality of their brands. They want to be all things to all people. They want their brand to be a male brand and a female brand. An upper-crust brand and a plebeian brand.
And in their greed they almost always end up with a brand which has no personality of any kind – a wishywashy neuter brand. No capon ever rules the roost – and neuter brands get no place in today’s market …
What would you think of a politician who changed his public personality every year? Have you noticed that Winston Churchill has been careful to wear the same ties and the same hats for fifty years – so as not to confuse us?
Think of all the forces that work to change the personality and image of the brand from season to season. The advertising managers come and go. The copywriters, the art directors, and the account executives come and go. Even the agencies come and go.
What guts it takes, what obstinate determination, to stick to one coherent creative policy, year after year, in the face of all the pressures to “come up with something new” every six months …
* * *
APPLICANT WITH SEEING-EYE DOG
In the early 1960s, Ogilvy & Mather still had separate copy and art departments. Late one winter afternoon Cliff Field, who was in charge of copy for the massive new Shell account, interviewed a blind man.
It was dark and snowing hard, so after the interview Cliff escorted the applicant to the street to try to find him a taxi.
David came looking for him, asked somebody where he was, and was told: “I don’t quite know, Sir. The last I saw of him he was getting on the elevator in his shirt sleeves, with a blind man and his seeing-eye dog.”
David smote his forehead: “My God! Clifford’s hiring an art director!”
* * *
Among those who like to debate the merits of “rational” vs. “emotional” advertising, David somehow got labeled an all-out champion of reason. The label has stuck, but doesn’t bear scrutiny. The following excerpt, from a 1957 talk in England to the Advertising Association Conference, sounds a note played often, both in earlier and later years:
I am astonished to find how many manufacturers, on both sides of the Atlantic, still believe that women can be persuaded by logic and argument to buy one brand in preference to another – even when the two brands are technically identical.
The greater the similarity between products, the less part reason plays in brand selection.
There really isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or the various cigarettes, or the various brands of beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines, and even the motor cars.
The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most favourable image, the most sharply defined personality, is the one who will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit – in the long run.
In our agency we take a long view of our creative responsibilities. We plan ten years ahead, on the assumption that our clients are not out for a fast buck, but intend to stay in business forever.
We try to create sharply defined personalities for our brands. And we stick to those personalities, year after year.
From “The New Business Policies of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather,” a paper written in 1960 for the guidance of the management:
We have exercised care in selecting our clients. That is why our roster is such
a remarkable one.
We seek clients who manufacture a product which we can be proud to advertise – a product which we can recommend without reservation to our own families.
We seek clients whose basic attitudes to business are about the same as ours. The agency-client relationship is an intimate one, and it only works well when there is a strong ingredient of mutual respect on both sides.
We seek accounts on which we can make a profit. Ten years’ experience with cost accounting has taught us which kind of accounts are likely to be unprofitable; we avoid them.
We want Ogilvy & Mather to be the best agency. That is one reason why we exercise so much restraint in controlling the speed of our expansion. We must avoid growing so rapidly that our standards of service would have to be diluted.
From a 1960 statement to the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, advocating an advertising campaign to attract European tourists to the United States:
One word of warning. When the time comes for the new Office of International Travel & Tourism to advertise in foreign countries, I suggest that those concerned should be careful not to put anything into their advertisements which could hurt the image of the United States. Indeed, they should try to create advertising which will improve that image …
To run a campaign of this kind in fourteen European countries would cost about $1,362,000 a year for space – say $2,000,000 by the time you have paid for the photographs and the engravings, and the collateral promotion. That’s about the cost of one fighter aircraft.
In his decades as the boss, David liked to speak candidly to the staff at Christmas, summing up the year’s performance, setting goals for the future, and reaffirming standards. From his talk in 1960:
Before I turn to the future, I would like to preach my perennial sermon on the subject of behaviour. I want the newcomers to know what kind of behaviour we admire, and what kind of behaviour we deplore: