by David Ogilvy
From a talk to the students at Fettes, David’s school in Scotland, on Founder’s Day, 1968:
My family’s connection with Fettes goes back 111 years. In 1857 my Great Uncle Lord Inglis of Glencorse became a Trustee. Lord Normand used to say that it was in great measure due to my Uncle that Fettes takes the form it now bears.
Well, Uncle John may have been a great judge, but apparently he could not read a will.
Sir William Fettes left the residue of his estate “for the maintenance, education, and outfit of young people whose parents … are unable to give suitable education to their children.”
Sir William Fettes specified children. Now I ask you, fellow Fettesians, what right had my dear old Uncle to decide that Sir William meant only boy children?
… I wonder how many of you boys would like to see girls admitted to Fettes. Let us be democratic. Let us take a vote. Will those in favor of girls please raise their right hands?
The motion is carried, NEMINE CONTRADICENTE.
If the Governors continue to ignore the wishes of our Founder, I expect you boys will follow the example of your contemporaries at many great universities: riot.
I am deeply sorry for the present generation of Fettesians. You have to endure the horrors of A levels and O levels. The masters have to cram you full of facts, so that you can pass those odious examinations. This is like cramming corn down the throat of a goose to enlarge his liver. It may produce excellent pâté de foie gras, but it does the goose no permanent good.
The mission of a great school is not to cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them a few weeks later at an exam. This gives many boys such a distaste for learning that they never read another book as long as they live. No, the mission of a school is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship – a taste which will last you all your life. Dr. Potts inspired that taste in my father – he read Horace in the lavatory to his dying day.
It was not conventional crammers who inspired me at Fettes. It was eccentric scholars – Mr. Sellar, Mr. Pyatt, Mr. Newman and Dr. Havergal. God bless them!
Alas, I wasn’t a great scholar. I was a duffer at games. I detested the philistines who ruled the roost. I was an irreconcilable rebel – a misfit. In short, I was a dud.
In the last edition of the Fettes register, Lord Normand – then Chairman of the Governors – wrote something remarkably candid:
“To be a dud in a large school where only classical learning counts in the form room, and only cricket and football outside it, is little better than living in a concentration camp.”
My only claim to fame was that I was the first prefect who refused to take part in corporal punishment; I refused to do any beating.
… Last summer the Queen asked me what I did for a living. When I said ADVERTISING, you should have seen the expression on her beautiful face – a mixture of horror, incredulity, and amusement.
Far be it from me to argue with the Sovereign – or the Headmaster. I can only plead that QUIDVIS RECTE FACTUM, QUAMVIS HUMILE, PREACLARUM. “Whatever you do in life, however humble, is OK if you do it right.”
I think that motto would apply to our Founder. Sir William Fettes was a grocer, but he did it right. So don’t let’s look down our noses at grocers – or even advertising men. Indeed, I dare to suggest that if Fettes produced more marketers and advertising men, Britain’s balance of payments would not be in such miserable shape.
On Founder’s Day four years ago, my old friend Lord Drumalbyn advised you to “avoid excess in all things.” Mr. Ashcroft used to say the same thing – avoid excess in all things.
That is a recipe for dullness and mediocrity – in my humble opinion …
From a talk to executives of McKinsey & Company, February 1972:
When I was a boy, we used to sing a song:
“Who takes care of the caretaker’s daughter
When the caretaker’s busy taking care?”
I have always wondered who management consultants consult. Now I know. You consult me, that’s who.
I cannot tell you what a charge I got when Marvin Bower invited me to come here today. My admiration for Marvin, and for McKinsey, amounts to hero-worship. My partners are sick to death of hearing me exhort them to conduct our business the way you guys conduct yours.
It occurs to me that McKinsey and Ogilvy & Mather have a few things in common:
We are both service businesses, selling our ideas.
We are about the same size – our income is about $50,000,000 a year.
We both went international about ten years ago.
We both derive about half our present billings from outside the U.S.
We are both running out of new countries to enter.
Some of your clients are also clients of ours – like Shell, General Foods, KLM, ICI, American Express.
Of course our two companies are also very different. To name only two differences:
We don’t have anything like your up-or-out policy.
You pay your top people more than we do. Only three of our 3500 employees get as much as $100,000 a year.
I can only hope that we have enough in common to give some slight trace of relevance to what I am going to say.
I will begin with an old-fashioned affirmation in the supreme value of hard work.
The harder your people work, the happier they will be. I believe in the Scottish proverb: “Hard work never killed a man.” Men die of boredom, psychological conflict and disease. They never die of hard work.
I am a stickler for meeting deadlines. I can do almost any job in one weekend. I think everyone can. The trouble is that most chaps are too lazy to burn the midnight oil. They are unwilling to rise to the occasion.
On the other hand, I believe in lots of vacations. When one of my partners gets abrasive, it is usually because he has worked too long without a vacation. I also believe that the partners in a service business should be given sabbaticals to recharge their batteries.
Besides, sabbaticals are fun. Are you guys having any fun? Somebody said to me the other day, “I have never seen a management consultant laugh.” Jerome Bruner, the Harvard psychologist, says that he has never visited a lab that was worth a damn where the people weren’t having a lot of fun. The physicists at Niels Bohr’s lab in Denmark, where they first split the atom, were always playing practical jokes on each other.
… When people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good work. Kill grimness with laughter. Encourage exuberance. Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom.
In our kind of business it is awfully difficult to evaluate people in terms of their performance. What criteria can we use? “Systematic employee performance ratings?” The evaluations are inevitably subjective. So how can we decide what to pay our senior people?
I am beginning to think that we should follow the example of Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, the law firm. They pay all their partners the same, and they have been doing so since the 1880’s. They figure that the young partners need as much money as the old ones, and probably more. By paying all the partners the same, they remove the major cause of that sibling rivalry which causes such hellish politics in a service business; they also eliminate the impossible chore of evaluating performance at the partner level.
When a service business grows big, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain high professional standards. You have to operate systems of quality control. The poor taskmasters have to scrutinize the reports before they go to clients, and most of the time they have to criticize them as superficial, or badly written, or just plain stupid.
This is hell for all concerned, including the taskmaster. He becomes a common scold, an obstructionist to be circumvented – by hook or by crook. The people whose work he excoriates may lose their self-confidence, or sulk, or walk out. It is an odious duty, but is part of “the will to manage.”
When a client hires Ogilvy & Mather – or McKinsey – he expects the best. If you don’t make sure that he gets it, you shortchange
him – and he won’t come back for more.
A few years ago I had to draft a report for the British Export Marketing Advisory Committee. I rather fancy myself as a report-writer, and I have exorbitant standards when it comes to criticizing other people’s drafts. But this time I got my comeuppance, because one member of our Committee had far higher standards than I had. My God, he gave me a bad time, challenging every bloody paragraph. Guess who. Marvin Bower, that’s who.
From a talk to American Express executives, February 1981:
How do you know when you are getting old? It began to dawn on me when the United States elected President Kennedy; he was six years younger than me. Two years ago the Cardinals elected a Pope who is nine years younger than me. Now I am old enough to be your Chairman’s father – easily.
When you ask a man of my age to talk, you can be sure of two things. First, that he will talk about the past. Second, that he will talk with avuncular candor.
In 1959 John D. Rockefeller III asked me to sell the concept of Lincoln Center to the inhabitants of New York. I had a team of volunteers to help me. The best of those volunteers was a girl called Jean Selden.
Two years later Jean married Howard Clark – and suggested that he might want to hire Ogilvy & Mather. I have spent the subsequent eighteen years trying to justify Jean’s advocacy.
The man who was then President of our agency thought I was nuts to take your account. He said it was too small – about a million bucks, which had to cover Cheques, Cards and Travel. He told me, “Jesus Christ could perform a miracle by feeding the multitude with three loaves and two small fishes, but you ain’t Jesus Christ.”
So I waited for our President to go on vacation, and then signed up …
If I were Chairman of American Express, or head of one of your Divisions, I would keep asking myself eight questions:
(1) Do I encourage my people to bombard me with new ideas? Is the atmosphere around here creative and innovative, or dull and bureaucratic? Walter Wriston recently said, “There’s no reason you can’t have an innovative bureaucracy if you put out the word that fame and fortune come from rocking the boat.”
Creativity and innovation function best in an atmosphere of fun and foment. Creativity hardly functions at all in an atmosphere of politics and fear.
(2) I would ask myself, “Are we operating as a team, as a band of brothers? Or are we competing with each other like silly babies?”
(3) Are we freewheeling entrepreneurs, ready to take risks in new ventures? Or are we too frightened of making mistakes? When the toy-buyer at Sears made a mistake which cost his company 10 million bucks, I asked the head of Sears, “Are you going to fire him?” “Hell no,” he replied, “I fire people who don’t make mistakes.”
(4) Are we devoting too much time and money to salvaging our flops, our dry holes – and not enough to exploiting our breakthroughs?
(5) Are we leaders or followers? Do our competitors imitate us, or do we imitate them? You may remember Kipling’s long poem about Sir Anthony Gloster, the old shipping tycoon. On his deathbed, he is telling his son about his competitors:
* * *
TRIUMPHANT GRAPE NUTS
On one of his visits to Chicago, unexpected circumstances caused David to be invited to three dinners in a week at the home of one of his longtime partners.
During the second dinner he carried on at such length about Post Grape Nuts being the ideal main course – “nourishing, easy to digest, doesn’t leave you feeling stuffed” – that his hostess felt obliged to put a heaping bowl of this nouvelle cuisine at his place when he showed up a third evening. He ate it with gusto and, back in France, sent her this postcard:
Dearest Marikay,
Never before in all my longish life has anyone else ever invited me to dinner three times in one week. Each dinner was better than the last, culminating in your triumphant Grape Nuts. Thank you, my dear … Love to you both from your grateful friend,
David
* * *
“They copied all they could follow,
But they couldn’t copy my mind.
And I left ’em sweating and stealing,
A year and a half behind.”
(6) Are we trying hard enough to create new products? How does our Research & Development compare with Merck, who invested $227 million in R&D last year? That’s about eight percent of their sales. IBM invests one billion dollars a year in R&D. In some companies it is easier to get a hundred million for an acquisition than one million for a new product.
(7) How do we stand with our customers – present and prospective? As long as we are rated tops by the consumers of our products, our position in the marketplace is unassailable …
(8) What are the Japanese up to? If they can outperform us in electronics and steel and even automobiles, don’t be surprised if one day they become a major threat to your business. The Japanese have four advantages over us in the West:
A. They take more interest in their employees. They have a saying, “Man, not the bottom line, is the measure of all things.” It seems to work.
B. They don’t have so many lawyers – one lawyer for every 10,000 people in Japan compared with twenty lawyers for every 10,000 people in the U.S. (No offense meant, you twenty-one lawyers here tonight.)
C. They don’t put their wise men out to pasture at the age of sixty-five. (This particularly appeals to me.)
D. They aren’t so obsessed with short-term profit. Short-term profits? What’s so great about short-term profits? I’ll tell you. They impress the jackasses on Wall Street. Ten years ago they valued your shares at $40. Today you are making five times as much profit, and they value your shares at $43. Can’t you find a way to emancipate your company from the stock market? There’s a challenge!
From a speech to the 50th Anniversary Luncheon of the Advertising Research Foundation, in New York, March 18, 1986:
SOUND AN ALARM!
… I started my career with George Gallup at Princeton. Gallup contributed more to advertising research than all the rest of us put together. I miss him dreadfully.
When I started Ogilvy & Mather, I wore two hats. On Thursdays and Fridays I was the Research Director. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I was the Creative Director. I was an hermaphrodite. Jekyll and Hyde. The age-old conflict between the Creative function and the Research function was fought out in my throbbing head.
As far as I know, I am the only creative genius who started his career in research. And now, in old age, I have returned to research, my first love. Alex Biel and I have started a Research and Development center within The Ogilvy Group. We are doing basic research, aided and abetted by some universities.
I have always looked at the creative function through the eyes of a researcher – which does not endear me to my fellow copywriters and art directors. And I look at research through the eyes of a copywriter.
Researchers bug me. They use such awful words – like ATTITUDINAL, PARADIGMS, DEMASSIFICATION, RECONCEPTUALIZE, SYMBIOTIC LINKAGE and so on. Pretentious bullshit.
They are so infernally slow, and their reports are so long. They are masters of NOT INVENTED HERE. One researcher’s methodology is another researcher’s poison.
Creative types also bug me. They are terrified of research – terrified that it will reveal that their genius is not infallible. They shut their eyes to the body of knowledge that we researchers have built up over the years …
As a copywriter, what I want from the researchers is to be told what kind of advertising will make the cash register ring. A creative person who knows nothing about plus and minus factors, and refuses to learn, may sometimes luck into a successful campaign. A blind pig may sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they grow under oak trees.
The advertising community is swimming in research nowadays. It is pouring out of universities, research outfits and advertising agencies. The trouble is that so little of it percolates down to the people on the firing line, like copywriters and art directors
. It might be a good idea to declare a five-year moratorium on new research projects while we analyze the huge volume of discoveries that is gathering dust on the shelves.
Advertising is going through a bad period. Commercial clutter is worse than ever. The cost of media is ballooning. The cost of commercial production is scandalous. The problem of client conflicts is driving agencies round the bend. Worst of all, the trend to cut advertising budgets in favor of below-the-line deals is out of control.
The theme of this conclave is the Next 25 Years. I wonder how much advertising there will be 25 years from now? Do you realize what is going on? Manufacturers of package goods are now spending twice as much on below-the-line deals as on advertising. To put it another way, they are spending twice as much on price-cutting as on building brands. Promotion allowances to retailers are now running at $18 billion a year. They have doubled in the last six years.
Manufacturers are buying volume by price discounting, instead of earning it the old-fashioned way – using advertising to build strong brand franchises. As my partner Graham Phillips says, they are training consumers to buy on price instead of brand.
Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand. The financial rewards do not always come in next quarter’s earnings per share, but come they do. When Philip Morris bought General Foods for five billion dollars they were buying brands.
There used to be a prosperous brand of coffee called Chase & Sanborn. Then they started dealing. They became addicted to price-offs. Where is Chase & Sanborn today? In the cemetery. Dead as a doornail.
I have a habit of prophecy. Listen to three paragraphs from a speech I made to the 4As in 1955 – thirty-one years ago:*