23.12.17 - Confessions of an Advertising Man

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2		Confessions of an Advertising Man
3		By David Ogilvy
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5		Amazon: Link
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7		#	Pg.	TC Highlight
8		1	28	I made a botch of Oxford. Keith Feiling, the historian, had given me a scholarship at Christ Church, and I was the recipient of much kindness from Patrick Gordon-Walker, Roy Harrod, A. S. Russell, and other dons. But I was too preoccupied to do any work, and was duly expelled. That was in 1931, the bottom of the depression. For the next seventeen years, while my friends were establishing themselves as doctors, lawyers, civil servants, and politicians, I adventured about the world, uncertain of purpose. I was a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a social worker in the Edinburgh slums, an associate of Dr. Gallup in research for the motion picture industry, an assistant to Sir William Stephenson in British Security Co-ordination, and a farmer in Pennsylvania. My boyhood hero had been Lloyd George, and I had expected to become Prime Minister when I grew up. Instead, I finally became an advertising agent on Madison Avenue; the revenues of my nineteen clients are now greater than the revenue of Her Majesty’s Government.
9		2	63	Suddenly I became aware that M. Pitard was standing beside me, watching. I was so frightened that my knees knocked together and my hands trembled. He took the pencil from his starched toque and waved it in the air, his signal for the whole brigade to gather. Then he pointed at my frogs’ legs and said, very slowly and very quietly, “That’s how to do it.” I was his slave for life. (Today I praise my staff as rarely as Pitard praised his chefs, in the hope that they too will appreciate it more than a steady gush of appreciation.)
10	X	3	83	In the best establishments, promises are always kept, whatever it may cost in agony and overtime.)
11		4	109	I learned something else at the Majestic: If you can make yourself indispensable to a client, you will never be fired. Our most important client, an American lady who occupied a suite of seven rooms, subjected herself to a diet which was based on a baked apple at every meal. One day she threatened to move to the Ritz unless her apple was always burst. I developed a technique of baking two apples, passing their flesh through a sieve to remove all traces of core, and then replacing the flesh of both apples in one skin. The result was the most voluptuous baked apple our client had ever seen, and more calories than she ever suspected. Word came down to the kitchen that the chef who was baking those apples must be given tenure.
12		5	118	I became still more sauvage when I arrived on Madison Avenue. Managing an advertising agency isn’t all beer and skittles. After fourteen years of it, I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principal responsibility: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work. Dr. William Menninger has described the difficulties with uncanny insight: In the advertising industry to be successful you must, of necessity, accumulate a group of creative people. This probably means a fairly high percentage of high strung, brilliant, eccentric nonconformists.
13		6	125	A special problem with the employees of an advertising agency is that each one watches the other one very carefully to see if one gets a carpet before the other, to see if one has an assistant before the other, or to see if one makes an extra nickel before the other. It isn’t that they want the carpet or the assistant or the nickel so much as it is the recognition of their “standing with father.” The executive is inevitably a father figure. To be a good father, whether it is to his children or to his associates, requires that he be understanding, that he be considerate, and that he be human enough to be affectionate. In the early days of our agency I worked cheek by jowl with every employee; communication and affection were easy. But as our brigade grows bigger I find it more difficult. How can I be a father figure to people who don’t even know me by sight? My agency now employs 497 men and women. I have discovered that they have an average of one hundred friends each—a total of 49,700 friends. If I tell all my staff what we are doing in the agency, what we believe in, what our ambitions are, they will tell their 49,700 friends. And this will give us 49,700 rooters for Ogilvy, Benson & Mather.
14		7	140	(4) I admire people who work with gusto. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing, I beg you to find another job. Remember the Scottish proverb, “Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead.”
15		8	146	(9) I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings. I abhor quarrelsome people. I abhor people who wage paper-warfare. The best way to keep the peace is to be candid. Remember Blake: I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.
16	X	9	170	Creative people are especially observant, and they value accurate observation (telling themselves the truth) more than other people do. They often express part-truths, but this they do vividly; the part they express is the generally unrecognized; by displacement of accent and apparent disproportion in statement they seek to point to the usually unobserved. They see things as others do, but also as others do not. They are born with greater brain capacity; they have more ability to hold many ideas at once, and to compare more ideas with one another—hence to make a richer synthesis. They are by constitution more vigorous, and have available to them an exceptional fund of psychic and physical energy. Their universe is thus more complex, and in addition they usually lead more complex lives. They have more contact than most people do with the life of the unconscious—with fantasy, reverie, the world of imagination.∗
17	X	10	202	The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn’t even verbal. It requires “a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.” The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking, because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked. I am almost incapable of logical thought, but I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my unconscious, in case that disorderly repository has anything to tell me. I hear a great deal of music. I am on friendly terms with John Barleycorn. I take long hot baths. I garden. I go into retreat among the Amish. I watch birds. I go for long walks in the country. And I take frequent vacations, so that my brain can lie fallow—no golf, no cocktail parties, no tennis, no bridge, no concentration; only a bicycle. While thus employed in doing nothing, I receive a constant stream of telegrams from my unconscious, and these become the raw material for my advertisements. But more is required: hard work, an open mind, and ungovernable curiosity.
18	X	11	234	Few of the great creators have bland personalities. They are cantankerous egotists, the kind of men who are unwelcome in the modern corporation. Consider Winston Churchill. He drank like a fish. He was capricious and willful. When opposed, he sulked. He was rude to fools. He was wildly extravagant. He wept on the slightest provocation. His conversation was Rabelaisian. He was inconsiderate to his staff. Yet Lord Alanbrooke, his Chief of Staff, could write: I shall always look back on the years I worked with him as some of the most difficult and trying ones in my life. For all that I thank God that I was given the opportunity of working alongside of such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.
19		12	311	First, I invited ten reporters from the advertising trade press to luncheon. I told them of my insane ambition to build a major agency from scratch. From that point on they gave me priceless tips on new business, and printed every release I sent them, however trivial; bless them. Rosser Reeves protested that nobody went to the bathroom at our agency without the news appearing in the trade press.
20	X	13	322	Fourth, I sent frequent progress reports to 600 people in every walk of life. This barrage of direct mail was read by the most august advertisers. For example, when I solicited part of the Seagram account, Sam Bronfman played back to me the last two paragraphs of a sixteen-page speech I had sent him shortly before; and he hired us.
21		14	324	Gentle reader, if you are shocked by these confessions of selfadvertisement, I can only plead that if I had behaved in a more professional way, it would have taken me twenty years to arrive. I had neither the time nor the money to wait. I was poor, unknown, and in a hurry.
22		15	335	An agency’s first clients are the hardest to get, because it has no credentials, no record of success, no reputation. At this stage it often pays to speculate by conducting a pilot survey on some aspect of your prospective client’s business. There are few manufacturers whose curiosity is not piqued when you offer to show them the results of such a survey.
23	X	16	357	The agencies which are most successful in new business are those whose spokesmen show the most sensitive insight into the psychological make-up of the prospective client.
24	X	17	358	There is one stratagem which seems to work in almost every case: get the prospect to do most of the talking. The more you listen, the wiser he thinks you are.
25		18	481	I have never wanted to get an account so big that I could not afford to lose it. The day you do that, you commit yourself to living with fear. Frightened agencies lose the courage to give candid advice; once you lose that you become a lackey.
26		19	483	This was what lead me to refuse an invitation to compete for the Edsel account. I wrote to Ford: “Your account would represent onehalf of our total billing. This would make it difficult for us to sustain our independence of counsel.” If we had entered the Edsel contest, and if we had won it, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather would have gone down the drain with Edsel.
27		20	629	As the first Lord Leverhulme (and John Wanamaker after him) complained, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
28		21	644	successful polygamy depends upon pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach. If one client asks me what results I have been getting with a campaign for another client, I change the subject. This may irritate him, but if I were to give him the information he asks, he would probably conclude that I would be equally indiscreet with his secrets. Once a client loses confidence in your discretion, you’ve had it.
29		22	677	The head of an agency has so much on his plate that he is apt to see his clients only at times of crisis. This is a mistake. If you get into the habit of seeing clients when the weather is calm, you will establish an easy relationship which may save your life when a storm blows up.
30		23	679	It is important to admit your mistakes, and to do so before you are charged with them. Many clients are surrounded by buck-passers who make a fine art of blaming the agency for their own failures. I seize the earliest opportunity to assume the blame.
31	X	24	787	Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising.
32		25	919	As soon as you find a campaign which tests better than the campaign you are now running, switch to it. But never give up a campaign just because you have grown tired of it; housewives don’t see your advertisements as often as you do. The best thing is to get a great campaign, and then continue it for several years. The problem is to find a great campaign.
33		26	922	(11) Test everything. The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.
34	X	27	927	(12) Hurry. Most young men in big corporations behave as if profit were not a function of time. When Jerry Lambert scored his first breakthrough with Listerine, he speeded up the whole process of marketing by dividing time into months. Instead of locking himself into annual plans, Lambert reviewed his advertising and his profits every month. The result was that he made $25,000,000 in eight years, where it takes most people twelve times as long. In Jerry Lambert’s day, the Lambert Pharmacal Company lived by the month, instead of by the year. I commend that course to all advertisers.
35		28	931	(13) Don’t waste time on problem babies. Most advertisers and their agencies spend too much time worrying about how to revive products which are in trouble, and too little time worrying about how to make successful products even more successful. In advertising, it is the mark of a brave man to look unfavorable test results in the face, cut your loss, and move on.
36		29	956	I have produced my share of advertisements which have been remembered by the advertising world as “admirable pieces of work,” but I belong to the third school, which holds that a good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. It should rivet the reader’s attention on the product. Instead of saying, “What a clever advertisement,” the reader says, “I never knew that before. I must try this product.” It is the professional duty of the advertising agent to conceal his artifice. When Aeschines spoke, they said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.” I’m for Demosthenes.
37	X	30	993	What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form. Your most important job is to decide what you are going to say about your product, what benefit you are going to promise. Two hundred years ago Dr. Johnson said, “Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement.” When he auctioned off the contents of the Anchor Brewery he made the following promise: “We are not here to sell boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”
38		31	1013	(2) Unless Your Campaign Is Built Around a Great Idea, It Will Flop. It isn’t every client who can recognize a great idea when he sees it. I remember presenting a truly brilliant idea to a client who said, “Mr. Ogilvy, you have here the mucus of a good idea.” When I started writing advertisements, I was determined to blaze new trails, to make every one of my campaigns the most successful in the history of the industry concerned. I have not always failed.
39		32	1027	When I was a door-to-door salesman I discovered that the more information I gave about my product, the more I sold. Claude Hopkins made the same discovery about advertising, fifty years ago.
40	X	33	1032	Competition for the consumer’s attention is becoming more ferocious every year. She is being bombarded by a billion dollars’ worth of advertising a month. Thirty thousand brand names are competing for a place in her memory. If you want your voice to be heard above this ear-splitting barrage, your voice must be unique. It is our business to make our clients’ voices heard above the crowd.
41		34	1035	You can’t save souls in an empty church.
42	X	35	1036	I once asked Sir Hugh Rigby, Sergeant Surgeon to King George V, “What makes a great surgeon?” Sir Hugh replied, “There isn’t much to choose between surgeons in manual dexterity. What distinguishes the great surgeon is that he knows more than other surgeons.” It is the same with advertising agents. The good ones know their craft.
43	X	36	1039	(8) If You Are Lucky Enough To Write a Good Advertisement, Repeat It Until It Stops Pulling. Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency, largely because their sponsors got sick of seeing them.
44		37	1043	You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who get married next year.
45		38	1056	The young housewife of 1963 was born after President Roosevelt died. She is living in a new world. At the age of fifty-one I am finding it increasingly difficult to tune in on the young married couples who are starting out in life; that is why most of the copywriters at our agency are so young. They understand the psychology of young consumers better than I do.
46		39	1059	Advertising seems to sell most when it is written by a solitary individual. He must study the product, the research, and the precedents. Then he must shut the door of his office and write the advertisement. The best advertisement I ever wrote went through seventeen drafts, and built a business.
47		40	1061	The Image and the Brand. Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image. If you take that long view, a great many day-to-day problems solve themselves.
48	X	41	1066	Most manufacturers are reluctant to accept any limitation on the image of their brand. They want it to be all things to all people. They want their brand to be a male brand and a female brand. An uppercrust brand and a plebeian brand. They generally end up with a brand which has no personality of any kind, a wishy-washy neuter. No capon ever rules the roost.
49	X	42	1071	It takes uncommon guts to stick to one style in the face of all the pressures to “come up with something new” every six months. It is tragically easy to be stampeded into change. But golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains to create a coherent image, and the stability to stick with it over a long period. As examples, I cite Campbell Soup, Ivory Soap, Esso, Betty Crocker, and Guinness Stout (in England). The men who have been responsible for the advertising of these hardy perennials have understood that every advertisement, every radio program, every TV commercial is not a onetime shot, but a long-term investment in the total personality of their brands. They have presented a consistent image to the world, and grown rich in the process.
50		43	1083	It isn’t easy to perform a face-lifting operation on an old bargain-basement brand. In many cases it would be easier to start again, with a fresh new brand.
51	X	44	1086	The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.
52		45	1100	If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don’t let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else’s advertising.
53		46	1112	(1) The headline is the “ticket on the meat.” Use it to flag down the readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising. If you are selling a remedy for bladder weakness, display the words BLADDER WEAKNESS in your headline; they catch the eye of everyone who suffers from this inconvenience. If you want mothers to read your advertisement, display MOTHERS in your headline. And so on.
54		47	1117	(2) Every headline should appeal to the reader’s self-interest. It should promise her a benefit, as in my headline for Helena Rubinstein’s Hormone Cream: HOW WOMEN OVER 35 CAN LOOK YOUNGER.
55		48	1118	(3) Always try to inject news into your headlines, because the consumer is always on the lookout for new products, or new ways to use an old product, or new improvements in an old product. The two most powerful words you can use in a headline are FREE and NEW. You can seldom use FREE, but you can almost always use NEW—if you try hard enough.
56	X	49	1120	(4) Other words and phrases which work wonders are HOW TO, SUDDENLY, NOW, ANNOUNCING, INTRODUCING, IT’S HERE, JUST ARRIVED, IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT, IMPROVEMENT, AMAZING, SENSATIONAL, REMARKABLE, REVOLUTIONARY, STARTLING, MIRACLE, MAGIC, OFFER, QUICK, EASY, WANTED, CHALLENGE, ADVICE TO, THE TRUTH ABOUT, COMPARE, BARGAIN, HURRY, LAST CHANCE. Don’t turn up your nose at these clichés. They may be shopworn, but they work. That is why you see them turn up so often in the headlines of mail-order advertisers and others who can measure the results of their advertisements.
57		50	1128	(6) Include your selling promise in your headline. This requires long headlines. When the New York University School of Retailing ran headline tests with the cooperation of a big department store, they found that headlines of ten words or longer, containing news and information, consistently sold more merchandise than short headlines.
58		51	1133	(7) People are more likely to read your body copy if your headline arouses their curiosity; so you should end your headline with a lure to read on.
59		52	1140	(9) Research shows that it is dangerous to use negatives in headlines. If, for example, you write OUR SALT CONTAINS NO ARSENIC, many readers will miss the negative and go away with the impression that you wrote OUR SALT CONTAINS ARSENIC.
60	X	53	1146	(2) Avoid superlatives, generalizations, and platitudes. Be specific and factual. Be enthusiastic, friendly, and memorable. Don’t be a bore. Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating.
61	X	54	1158	Says Dr. Charles Edwards of the graduate School of RetaHing at New York University, “The more facts you tell, the more you sell. An advertisement’s chance for success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases.”
62		55	1201	Meanwhile, all copywriters should read Dr. Rudolph Flesch’s Art of Plain Talk. It will persuade them to use short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, and highly personal copy.
63		56	1268	If you want to attract women readers, your best bet is to use a photograph of a baby. Research has shown that they stop almost twice as many women as photographs of families. When you were a baby you were the cynosure of every eye, but by the time you became a mere member of the family, you attracted no special attention.
64	X	57	1283	“Showing the clients’ faces” is also a better stratagem than it may sound, because the public is more interested in personalities than in corporations.
65		58	1293	Always design your layout for the publication in which it will appear, and never approve it until you have seen how it looks when pasted into that publication. The almost universal practice of appraising layouts in vacuo, mounted on gray cardboard and covered with cellophane, is dangerously misleading. A layout must relate to the graphic climate of the newspaper or magazine which is to carry it.
66	X	59	1305	It follows that you should never use a photograph without putting a caption under it, and each caption should be a miniature advertisement, complete with brand name and promise.
67		60	1310	Keep your opening paragraph down to a maximum of eleven words. A long first paragraph frightens readers away. All your paragraphs should be as short as possible; long paragraphs are fatiguing.
68	X	61	1383	The average consumer, poor dear, is now subjected to 10,000 commercials a year. Make sure that she knows the name of the product being advertised in your commercial. Repeat it, ad nauseam, throughout.* Show it in at least one title. And show her the package which you want her to recognize in the store.
69		62	1399	The average consumer now sees 900 commercials a month, and most of them slide off her memory like water off a duck’s back. For this reason you should give your commercials a touch of singularity, a burr that will make them stick in the viewer’s mind. But be very careful how you do this; the viewer is apt to remember your burr but forget your selling promise.
70		63	1443	Your advertisements should establish in the reader’s mind an image which she will never forget. The period of gestation between exposure to an advertisement and the purchase of a ticket is likely to be very long.
71	X	64	1449	People dream about far-away places. Your advertisements should convert their dreams into action—transforming potential energy into kinetic energy. This can best be done by offering the reader specific how-to-do-it information. A combination of mouth-watering photographs and specific information has brought the best results for British, American and Puerto Rican tourism.’
72		65	1453	My “Come To Britain” advertisements have been conspicuously successful, but they have been subjected to a drumfire of criticism in the British press. The charge against them is that they damage British prestige by projecting an antique image—too many thatched cottages, too much pomp and circumstance. I am rebuked for creating the impression that England is a bucolic little kingdom living on the glories of an ancient past. Why don’t I show England “as she really is,” the vital, industrialized, welfare state which has given the world penicillin, jet engines, Henry Moore and atomic-power stations? While this kind of thing might well be politically valuable, the only purpose of our campaign is to attract tourists, and no American is going to cross the briny ocean to look at a power station. He would rather see Westminster Abbey; so would I.
73		66	1476	A person in pain wants to believe that you can help him. His will to believe is an active ingredient in the efficacy of the product.
74		67	1481	First, you must be ambitious, but you must not be so nakedly aggressive that your fellow workers rise up and destroy you. Tout soldat pone dans sa giberne le baton de marechal. Yes, but don’t let it stick out.
75	X	68	1490	Claude Hopkins attributed his success to the fact that he worked twice as long hours as other copywriters, and thus made his way up the ladder at twice their speed. One of the best agencies born in the last forty years owes its supremacy to the fact that its founder was so unhappy with his wife that he rarely left the office before midnight. In my bachelor days I used to work until the small hours. If you prefer to spend all your spare time growing roses or playing with your children, I like you better, but do not complain that you are not being promoted fast enough. Managers promote the men who produce the most.
76		69	1522	You can probably get by if you never function as more than a mere channel of communication between your client and your service departments, like a waiter who shuttles between the chefs in the kitchen and the customers in the dining room. Such account executives are better called “contact men.” No doubt you will perform this necessary function with aplomb, but I hope you will see your job in larger terms. Good account executives acquire the most complicated expertise of all: they become marketers.
77		70	1536	Don’t discuss your client’s business in elevators, and keep their secret papers under lock and key. A reputation for leaking may ruin you.
78	X	71	1540	Learn to write lucid interoffice memoranda. Remember that the senior people to whom they are addressed have more on their plates—and in their brief cases—than you do; the longer your memos, the less likely they are to be read by men who have the power to act on them.
79		72	1558	Once you become the acknowledged authority on any of these troublesome subjects, you will be able to write your own ticket.
80		73	1577	The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
81		74	1647	That’s bound to be, because the success of a company’s advertising is closely tied up with the success of its product development activities.
82		75	1663	never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your own family to see.
83		76	1720	As a practitioner, I know that television is the most potent advertising medium ever devised, and I make most of my living from it. But, as a private person, I would gladly pay for the privilege of watching it without commercial interruptions. Morally, I find myself between the rock and the hard place.
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