by David Ogilvy
They’ve all gone and I’m the lone survivor and I happen to be thought of as a creative man. I am a sort of symbol of creativity. A lot of the younger creative people don’t think so, but the fact is that in the great world at large, I am that.
There’s some advantage to the company in having the last surviving symbolic figure around, I think. It helps to differentiate our agency, our company, from other agencies. Bill Phillips, who’s the head of our company and a very active head, feels this quite strongly. He thinks I have some value to the company and that he can make good use of me. Which he does and I love being made use of.
Sometimes I disagree with Bill. Occasionally there’ll be an issue, sometimes quite an important one, and I disagree with him. I never know whether it’s my duty to keep my disagreement to myself or to argue. And in fact, I do argue with him sometimes. And he could say, “Shut up, I’m running this agency now – you’re not. You keep quiet and if I want to do it, your duty is to help me and support me.”
He doesn’t take that position. He does want to know what I really think on these issues. And on those rare occasions – they aren’t many, but there have been two or three of them – that I have disagreed with him quite strongly, I’ve said so and he’s never shown the slightest sign of resentment. And I salute him for that and I’m grateful to him for that.
I have one other asset for the company. I have no axe to grind now. Beyond giving advice or a strong opinion on an issue, I’ve never got a vested interest in the result. It’s sometimes quite difficult to find directors who have no vested interest in policy.
If you believe in reincarnation, what will you come back as?
I might come back as one of those turtles in the Galápagos, because they live so long. You know there’s a turtle called George in the Galápagos which was alive in the 18th century. It’s the last of its species. When it dies, there’ll be no more of that kind of turtle. I might come back as a Galápagos turtle.
I don’t know. They may lead rather dull lives – long, but they can’t be interesting.
I’d like to come back as a concert pianist. That would be fun. I wouldn’t mind being Pope either. Nobody would argue with me if I were Pope.
Did you ever think the agency was going to fail?
Yes. Every day for years I thought it was going to fail. I was always scared sick – always a terrible worrywart when I was in my heyday at the agency.
I always thought our clients were going to fire us, and all our best people were going to leave. The tragedy of it. We were doing so well, I should have been bursting with happiness and satisfaction with all that success. In fact I was tortured with anxiety. I remember saying one day: If this is success, God deliver me from failure.
So I was always terrified. And it wasn’t till fairly recent years that it dawned on me we were unlikely to go up in smoke. We’d become an institution. We might do better in the future, we might do worse, but we were not going to fail.
So then I relaxed. But by that time it was rather too late for me to get much pleasure out of it.
In the early years, in spite of being terrified, you resigned a lot of accounts. Why? Was there a pattern to the reasons?
There were two main things. In those days I had to deal direct with the clients. We only had one office and about 18 clients and I dealt directly with all of them. Personal dislike made me resign many accounts. I didn’t like having to deal with the sonofabitch. Why should I? We pass this way only once.
Then when clients were demoralizing our people. I went to see the head of ______, a man I liked very much. I said I’ve come to resign your business. He asked why. I said because your Executive Vice President is a shit. And he’s behaving very badly. He’s treating your people atrociously and he’s treating my people atrociously. Now what he does to your people – that’s your business. But I’m not going to allow this man to go on demoralizing the people of Ogilvy & Mather. It’s something I won’t accept. So goodbye.
And I resigned products that didn’t work, like Rolls-Royce. That’s why I resigned the Rolls-Royce account. They went through a very bad two-year period. I wrote to them one day and said – I put the heading “Lemons” on my letter (I don’t know if I stole that from the Volkswagen advertising) – I said that the last 600 cars you sent to the United States don’t work. And I will no longer be a party to recommending that people buy them. I resign.
How did you find out the cars didn’t work?
Because I knew all about it. I knew what was going on. Automatic gears had just come in and their automatic gearbox didn’t work. So they had to go and buy one from Chrysler which did work.
And then they put in air conditioning for Americans and other people who lived in hot countries. They sent six cars over with air conditioning in them. The manager of the American company went down and got these new air-conditioned Rolls-Royces off the boat.
The first one he drove around Central Park. He didn’t go halfway around Central Park before the windows fogged up. He couldn’t see out. Things like that happened all the time.
I wrote this dreadful letter resigning. Even then I thought I was dreadful. Now I think it was unpardonably offensive. But you know they didn’t take offense at all. The head of Rolls-Royce, who was an engineer, wrote back and said I don’t blame you at all. I think you have a point.
For the next few years, whenever they got in a jam they used to come and ask my advice.
Anything you’ve always wanted that eluded you?
A knighthood. I told you about that. A big family. Ten children.
You’ve often given advice to young people about values, how to get ahead, and so on. What about older people in advertising, facing retirement?
Retiring can be fatal, whether it’s retiring voluntarily or getting sacked. At any age.
If you find yourself being fired or quitting when you’re 50ish, it’s so often that you’ve been working in a job that you don’t really like and are probably not any good at. If you were any good at it, you wouldn’t be let go.
It’s tragic to see men and women wasting their lives in work that they hate or do badly. It’s never too late to find out that you’re doing something you don’t like, and are not very good at. Then you’ve got to take hold of yourself and decide what you would like to be doing most and then do it for the rest of your life.
There’s a man called Guy Mountfort, who was for a year or two the Managing Director of what is now our London office. He got to be about 55, 54, and the question was whether he was going to go on. He wanted to go on and I advised him not to go on.
I said to him, you watch the clock in the office. You’re waiting for 5 o’clock when you can go home and do what you really love, which is being an ornithologist. We ad men are a dime a dozen. You ornithologists are rare birds. Go and do it and be happy. And he did it. He retired.
He’s done marvelous work. He was one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund. He got me into it. He’s almost single-handedly saved the tiger from becoming extinct. He’s had a marvelous second life at a thing he was good at and loved.
Of course there are some people who leave advertising agencies when they’re in their 40s and 50s who really don’t have any interest in any other sort of occupation. They have done advertising for a while and that’s what they like, that’s what interests them. What can they do? Well, there’s something I wish happened, and it never seems to happen in agencies – it doesn’t happen in ours.
Off to the village on a household errand.
Let’s say there’s a man called Snodgrass. And he’s 55. And he’s rather run out of gas and he’s not been contributing for some time, and so it’s decided by the management that he just has to go. Some poor devil has to tell him this.
Why does he have to go? Let’s say he’s rather high up in the hierarchy. Lets say he’s a Senior Vice President, or something very grand like that. Why can’t he say to the agency: well I’m sorry you feel this way, but there it is, there’s no point i
n arguing. But I don’t want to leave. I want you to give me another job at a far lower salary. Without any title. I want to just make myself useful, in some sort of very different job. I might be good at that.
Then he would be able to keep in touch with all his friends at the agency, keep in touch with the advertising business, not suffer so badly as you do when you’re separated.
Some people would worry about the loss of face.
Yeah, but there are worse things than loss of face. Like staying home and having absolutely nothing to do and no interest in life and being lonely, out of touch with all the people you like, and so forth.
Most founders of companies either hang on too long, like Leo Burnett, or retire and detach themselves entirely, like Raymond Rubicam. You’ve done neither. How have you sustained your interest at such a high level for so long a time with so little direct control?
I don’t know. I have sustained my interest. I think I’m just as interested in advertising now as I ever was.
I love the interest, it’s a big thing in my life. I’m also not indifferent to the salary. I get a salary. You may think that’s scandalous, but I do. It’s not one of the biggest salaries in the company, but it’s a reasonable, fair thing.
Let’s talk a little about losing direct control. That is often a great frustration for me. Because there are times when I wish I could control things and I can’t. There’s an old French saying: He who is absent is always wrong. And I’m wrong. Some of the decisions I deplore have been taken when I wasn’t at the meeting. Because I’m in France, and the meetings are mostly in New York. So I’ve lost arguments which otherwise I might have won if I’d been there.
What bugs you?
Bullies. (I’m not sure that I’m not a frightful bully myself.)
Bores. Above all bores. I think boring is the ultimate sin.
Creative people who refuse to study the product or the research or to admit there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Incompetence in the advertising business. I look at an ad or commercial, all too many of the commercials in fact, and I say that is just an incompetent piece of work. The guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.
You know what I mean there? It’s not a question of philosophy of advertising. I’m not arguing about that. Whatever he’s trying to do, he doesn’t know how to do it. He’s incompetent. He doesn’t know his trade. He’s an amateur.
What do you look for in young people that suggests leadership potential?
This is a very, very difficult question. I was having dinner with the McKinsey partners a few years ago, and I asked them that question. I said, you know a lot about leadership in business, how do you identify a leader?
They said, ah, that’s the thing you never know. The only thing that may be true is that people who have been leaders when they were in school quite often turn out to be leaders in mature life.
But on the whole leadership seems to be unpredictable. It’s a very serious problem for businesses.
Were you able to spot our leaders early on or were you surprised by who emerged?
I wasn’t able to spot them.
Who’s the most stimulating person you’ve ever met?
I think one of the most stimulating people I’ve ever known was and still is Teodoro Moscoso, the great Puerto Rican head of the Economic Department for Puerto Rico. I’ve always found him intensely stimulating. At least he stimulated me and got very good work out of me.
Can you expand on that? Was it the play of his mind? His energy?
Well, I can give you an example.
One thing that I found very stimulating is that he did things. He got things done. I’ve known a lot of people in different governments and businesses who really couldn’t get anything to happen, but he made things happen.
His job was to get industry to Puerto Rico because they’d got terrible unemployment, poverty. And the campaign went very well. He built up a good department. One day, about three years later, I said to him, Ted, you know this thing of yours in Puerto Rico is going very well, but you watch out because if you keep on going out and getting industry and factories on that beautiful island, it’s going to come to be sort of like Detroit. Do you really want that to happen?
He said, well, what do you suggest?
I said, I’ll tell you what I suggest. My native land is Scotland and that was regarded around the world as a barbaric country without any culture until a refugee from Berlin called Rudolf Bing went to Edinburgh and started the Edinburgh Festival of music and drama. Within about two years, Edinburgh had become a place of pilgrimage of cultured people from all over the world.
Moscoso took out one of our agency pocket diaries we gave away at Christmas and made a little note in it. Within six months, he persuaded Pablo Casals to go and live in Puerto Rico and start the Puerto Rico Music Festival, the Casals Festival they called it.
At the end of a long interview, a tedious reporter asked Abe Burrows, the musical comedy writer, what the low point of his life had been. Burrows replied, “I hate to say, kid, but I think this is it.” What irritates you most about interviews?
Being interviewed by an individual who doesn’t know anything about the subject.
The best interview I ever had was on the Larry King Show, a Washington radio program, Washington D.C. I told several other interviewers I was going to be done by him and they said he’s the best interviewer on the air. And so he is.
The interview was on my book. I arrived in his studio at midnight. It was immediately apparent that Larry King hadn’t opened the book he was about to interview me on. It didn’t matter in the least. He started reading the book and asking me questions as he went along. Nobody could see this, it was just radio.
In about two minutes he had me up and running. The interview took from midnight until three in the morning. He was simply fantastic.
I said afterwards you’re the best of all interviewers. What is your secret? He said: An absolute ungovernable curiosity.
Another thing about interviewing, you can’t control what comes out in an interview. You’re always frightened what words they’re going to put in your mouth, and I’m afraid of indiscretion. When I was young and flighty, in the early days of Ogilvy & Mather, I used to be very outspoken in my interviews. That was one of the reasons I was always being interviewed. They could always get good quotes from me.
I wasn’t afraid of offending clients then. Now I’m terrified of it. I’m terrified of saying something which will annoy a client very much. Or upset the stock market or something. I’ve got much more cautious. Therefore duller than I used to be. Not so exciting in an interview.
Are there any other questions you wish I had asked?
To what do you owe your success?
You wish I’d asked, to what do you owe your success?
Yes.
David, to what do you owe your success?
The fashionable answer to that is to say luck. Pure luck. That’s what modest people say. They don’t want to say I owe my success to my ineffable genius.
It has absolutely nothing to do with luck. Everybody’s equally lucky. I don’t believe in luck.
It was William James, wasn’t it, who referred to success as the bitch goddess in a letter to H.G. Wells? I was talking at my old school not long ago in Scotland and I gave them a little sermon on the subject of success. They should stop thinking about success entirely in terms of material achievements and careers and all that stuff and think of success in terms of their own happiness and the happiness of their family and so on.
To what do I owe my material success? First of all, I’m the most objective man who ever lived, including objective about myself.
Second, I’m a very, very hard worker. I really work very hard when I’m doing a job. I put a lot into it.
Next thing is I’m a good salesman. I used to be good at getting new business. That’s terribly important. It’s underestimated in the advertising business now – getting new business. Most people in adverti
sing don’t know anything about it. They go to work in an agency. They’re given an account or a group of accounts that some joker got a few years ago. The bed is ready made for them.
I had to make my own bed. I was a very, very good salesman. I don’t know why. But I was a good salesman. And that’s an important thing to be.
I had a reasonably original mind, but not too much so. Which helped, not being too original. I thought as clients think. I also thought as women think. One of the advertising directors of Lever Brothers, who left, came to see me to say goodbye, and said David you’re very good at selling things to women. And the reason is, I’ve thought a lot about it, the reason is you are a woman. You think as women think. So that’s another thing.
I had a terrific advantage when I started an agency in New York. I had an English accent. With so many agencies, so much competition, I’d got a gimmick – my English accent, which helped to differentiate me from the ordinary. There are an awful lot of English over there in advertising now, but in those days there were only about two of us. That was very helpful.
I’ve always had an eye for the main chance. I’ve made a lot of speeches and written a lot of talks to different audiences and I’m always selling Ogilvy & Mather. I hope I conceal that sometimes, but I am. The things are loaded with commercials for the agency.
I once went to a lunch, a thing called the Scottish Council. They had a lunch in New York. They were a small group of Scotsmen and got together. There were about ten people. And I smelled billing. And from that lunch I eventually got Shell, because Max Burns, the then President of Shell, was at the lunch. I got Thom McAn shoes because the man who owned Thom McAn shoes was at the lunch. I got British Travel, because Jim Turbayne, head of BTA, New York, was there. And one other. I forget which. All from one lunch. I can smell billing.