Ogilvy on Advertising

About the Author

David Ogilvy (1911-1999) was a British advertising tycoon, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, and known as the father of advertising. He attributed the success of his campaigns to meticulous research into consumer habits. Ogilvy dropped out of Oxford after 2 years for failing his exams. He worked as a kitchen hand in Paris, and then a door-to-door salesman in Scotland, where he wrote the instruction manual The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA Cooker. He then got a job at the London advertising agency Mather & Crowther due to the instruction manual, which he took in 1935. This agency sent him to the US for a year, where he went to work for George Gallup's Audience Research Institute in New Jersey. Ogilvy cites Gallup as one of the major influences in his thinking: emphasizing meticulous research methods and adherence to reality. During WW2, he worked for the British Intelligence Service at the British embassy in DC. During the war he was tasked with projects that included successfully ruining the reputation of businessmen who were supplying the Nazis with industrial materials.

After the war, Ogilvy bought a farm in Pennsylvania and lived among the Amish.

The atmosphere of serenity, abundance, and contentment kept Ogilvy and his wife in Pennsylvania for several years, but eventually he admitted his limitations as a harmer and moved to Manhattan.

Ogilvy started his own advertising agency with the backing of Mather and Crowther, the London agency being run by his elder brother, Francis, which later acquired another London agency, S.H. Benson. The new agency was called Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather. Ogilvy admitted that he initially struggled to get clients. The agency was built on Ogilvy's principles: the function of advertising is to sell and that successful advertising for any product is based on information about its consumer. He believed consumers should be treated as intelligent. Ogilvy believed that the best way to get new clients was to do notable work for his existing clients.

At age seventy-five, Ogilvy was asked if there was anything he'd always wanted but had somehow eluded him. His reply was, "Knighthood. And a big family - ten children." His only child, David Fairfield Ogilvy, was born during his first marriage, to Melinda Street. That marriage ended in divorce (1955) as did a second marriage to Anne Cabot. Ogilvy married Herta Lans in France in 1973.

Book Notes

Ogilvy on Advertising

• Advertising is a medium of information. I want you to find it so interesting you buy the product
• Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises value for money

How To Produce Advertising that Sells

• The wrong advertising can actually reduce the sales of a product
• You have to do your homework on the product you are selling
• Find out what kind of advertising your competitors are doing and to what success. This will give you bearings.
• Research consumers. What do they say about your kind of product? What language do they use to discuss the subject? What attributes are important to them? What promise would be most likely to make them buy your brand?
• Informal conversations can sometimes help more than formal surveys
• How to position product: what does the product do and who is it for?
• What Image do you want for your brand? Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities and they can make or break them in the marketplace
• • The personality of a product is an amalgam of many things - its name, its packaging, its price, the style of advertising, and the nature of the product itself
  • Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to brand image and should project the same image every year
  • Give products an image of quality usually
  • Don't argue with advertising
• It takes a big idea to get consumers to buy your product.
• Big ideas come from the well-informed unconscious.
• To recognize big ideas, ask 5 questions:

1. Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?
2. Do I wish I had thought of it myself?
3. Is it unique?
4. Does it fit the strategy to perfection?
5. Could it be used in 30 years?

• Make the product the hero of the advertisement
• Added value of advertising is differentiation from similar products
• Tell people that your product is positively good. Be more clear, more honest, more informative job of saying it
• Repeat good advertisement until it stops selling
• Try to cultivate good word of mouth
• Be ambitious, seek knowledge
• Learn from others who are getting the most sales per dollar
• Advertise like you are going out of business
• Advertising reflects the mores of society but does not influence them

Jobs in Advertising - and How to Get Them

Advertising offers 4 different career paths:

1. Join a television network, a radio station, a magazine or a newspaper and sell time or space to advertisers and their agencies
2. You can join a retailer like sears and work as a copywriter, art director, manager
3. Join a manufacturing company & work as a brand manager
4. Join an advertising agency

• At the start of your career, what you learn is more important than what you earn
• Copywriters
• • most important people in agencies
  • The hallmarks of a potentially successful copywriter include:
  • • Obsessive curiosity about products, people, and advertising
    • A sense of humor
    • A habit of hard work
    • The ability to write interesting prose for printed media, and natural dialogue for television
    • The ability to think visually. Television commercials depend more on pictures than words
    • The ambition to write better campaigns than anyone has ever written before.

'Most good copywriters', says William Maynad of the Bates agency, fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end.' If you are both killer and poet, you get rich.

• Art Directors
• • You cannot get a job as an art director unless you have had training in film, layout, photography, and typography. It helps to be endowed with good taste.
• Account Executives
• • The chief role of account executives is to extract the best possible work from the other departments of the agency. They are in daily touch with their clients. A good account executive would have experience in brand management and possibly have worked at a consumer research company.
  • Be the best informed person in the company on the account to which you are assigned.
  • You have to create good presentations.
  • Emulate Talleyard in the sense of not getting involved in another company's politics.
• Researchers
• • To be a good researcher, you need to know statistics and psychology.
  • You need an analytical mind and the ability to write reports.
  • You have to be intellectually honest.
  • Good researchers are: fast, agree on methodology, interested in advertising, have a system for conducting research, avoid fads, use graphs that laymen can understand, take all projects, take initiative, and don't use pretentious jargon.
• Media
• • They need an analytical mind, the ability to communicate numerical data in non-numerical formats, stability under pressure, and a taste for negotiation for owners of media.
• Chief Executive Officer
• • CEO must be a good leader of frightened people. Must have financial acumen, administrative skill, thrust, and the courage to fire non-performers. He / She must be a good salesman, since their chief job is to bring in new clients. Must have the physical stamina for 12 hour days.
• Creative Director
• • Good Psychologist
  • Willing and able to set high standards
  • an efficient administrator
  • Capable of strategic thinking - 'positioning' and all that
  • Research minded
  • Equally good at television and print
  • Equally good at package goods and other kinds of accounts
  • Well versed in graphics and typography
  • A hard worker - and fast
  • Slow to quarrel
  • Prepared to share credit for good work, and accept blame for bad work
  • A good presenter
  • A good teacher and a good recruiter
  • Full of infectious jouie de vivre
• Most big agencies do not like to hire people who studied advertising - instead, they hire people who studied history, languages, economics, and so forth. The fashion for recruiting at schools of business administration seems to have passed its peak.
• If you need more money than your job pays, try moonlighting
• Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead!
• Applying to Jobs:
• • Always apply to a job by writing a letter and including your Resume
  • State the job you want to ap[ply for immediately and clearly. Say what led you to apply - a want ad, recommendation from a friend, ...
  • Be brief in your want
  • Touch on your chief qualifications relating to the job, be specific
  • Be personal, direct, and natural (send your letter to a person, not a company email)
  • Describe how you wish to proceed to an interview in your letter. Include what times you are usually free, maybe suggest a time for a call, and include your contact information.

How to Run an Advertising Agency

Running an advertising agency requires midnight oil, salesmanship of the highest order, a deep keel, guts, thrust, and a genius for sustaining the morale of men and women who work in a continuous state of anxiety.

• Make it fun to work for you. Avoid playing favorites.
• Observations on people who run agencies: they are enthusiasts, intellectually honest, guts to face tough decisions, resilient in adversity, natural charmers, resilient in adversity, natural charmers, not bullies, encourage communication upwards, and they drink too much. The benefit of working for an agency is the amount of diverse business you are exposed to. Agencies are breeding grounds for sibling rivalries - many lofty titles.
• Hire people of exceptional talent, train them thoroughly, and make the most of their talents. Hiring people with brains doesn't mean hiring people with high IQ; it means hiring people with common sense, wisdom, imagination, and literacy. Look for people who are leaders. Look for people on your staff who have:
• • The power of analysis
  • Imagination
  • A sense of reality
  • The 'helicopter quality; - the ability to look at facts and problems from an overall viewpoint.
• Never hire your friends or client's children or your own children and think before hiring people who have been successful in other fields.
• Fire the office politicians; whenever says something bad to you behind someone's back, make them come to you and let the accuser say it to their face; make people settle fights face to face; make people eat lunch together; don't play favorites; don't play politics.
• Sustain unremitting pressure on the professional standards of your staff.
• People who manage great corporations are often great problem-solvers and decision-makers, but they are not often great leaders. Success in leadership depends on the circumstances. There is not a strong correlation between leaders and academic achievement. The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their characters. They symbolize innovation and exude self-confidence. They are never petty, responsible, resilient, frantically committed, don't have to be loved, have the guts to make unpopular decisions, they are decisive. They are complicated men. A great leader satisfies the psychology of his followers. The more centers of leadership you create, the stronger you will become. They have the ability to inspire people with their speeches.
• Field Marshal Montgomery on leadership:

The leader must have infectious optimism, and the determination to preserve in the face of difficulties. He must also radiate confidence, even when he himself is not too certain of the outcome. The final test of a leader is the feeling you have when you leave his presence after a conference. Have you a feeling of uplift and confidence?

• Your alcoholics may include some of your brightest stars. Nevertheless, you should hold an intervention for your alcoholics and get them into treatment.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

• Every company should have a written set of principles and purposes.
• Use profits to expand territory, buy real estate, and as a reserve for a rainy day.
• Tips:
• • Never allow two people to do a job which one could do.
  • Never summon people to your office. Instead, see them in their offices.
  • If you want to get action, communicate verbally.
  • Don't use products that compete with your clients' products.
  • Never write letters of complaint.

How to get clients

• The easiest way to get new clients is to do good business.

Related to the democratization of software:

The selectors show scant interest in the campaigns you have produced for other manufacturers. They want to know what you could do for them, so they invite you to analyze their problems and make finished commercials. They then have your commercials tested. If you get a higher score than your competitors, you win their account.

• Tell your client what your weak points are before he notices them. Don't get bogged down in numbers when selling. The day after the meeting, send a summary of why the client should choose you.
• Opinion always lags behind reality.
• If you aspire to building a portfolio of accounts in a wide variety of industries, you must be able to produce different kinds of advertising.
• The bigger an agency becomes, the more bureaucratic it becomes. Personal leadership gives way to hierarchy.

Open Letter to a client in search of an agency

• Don't put innovation suggestions through more than 2 rounds of review before being seen by the top brass.
• Reject the work of sensitive people with tact.
• Watch out for having multiple clients in the same industry.

Wanted: a renaissance in print advertising

• On average, 5 times as many people read the lines as read the body copy. The headlines are best that promise the reader a benefit. Headlines that contain news are sure-fire. Headlines that offer the reader helpful information attract above-average readership. Headlines in quotes increase recall. Advertisements in local newspapers perform better when they include the name of the city in the headline.
• • This number is probably much larger on the internet.
• A picture can be worth a thousand words:
• • The subject of your illustration is important.
  • The kind of photographs which work hardest are those which arouse the reader's curiosity.
  • Illustrate the end-result of your product.
  • Keep illustrations simple.
  • People want to see people they can identify with.
• Body Copy
• • The amount of people who read body copy depend on whether they are interested in your product and how enticing the headline / illustrations are.
  • Pretend you are writing to each person reading the body individually, instead of a mass of people reading the copy.
  • You can only interest people in buying your product. It pays to write short sentences, short paragraphs, and to avoid using difficult words.
  • Don't write essays; tell your reader about the product and its use succinctly.
  • Write your copy in the form of a story.
  • Avoid analogies.
  • Bragging and boasting about the product convinces nobody.
  • Make testimonials believable.
  • Always include the price of your product.
  • Long copy sells more than short - advertisements with long copy convey the impression that there is something important to say, whether people read the copy or no.
  • The more facts you tell, the more you sell
  • Keep it simple
  • Good typography helps people read the copy, while bad typography prevents them from reading it. Do not put a period at the end of the headline. Sans-serif fonts are more difficult to read.

How to make TV commercials that sell

• Humor sells
• Argue for the merits of your product
• The most effect commercials are those that show loyal users of your product testifying to its effectiveness
• Demonstrations of your product do well
• Show a problem and how your product can dix it
• Extoll the virtues of your product
• Give the viewer a reason why to buy your product
• Don't use celebrities, cartoons, or musicals.
• For radio, identify your brand early in the commercial, identify it often, promise the listener a benefit early in the commercial, repeat it often

Advertising corporations

• Corporate advertising can be a profitable investment. It can make a good impression on the investment community.
• Don't change the name of your corporation to initials
• Disarm with candor; give both sides of the issue; know who your target is

The secrets of success in business-to-business advertising

• Make sure that your promise is important to the consumer, specific,

Reading List

• Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins
• Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples
• Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves
• Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy
• New Adverting: Twenty-One Successful Campaigns from Avis to Volkswagen by Robert Glatzer
• The 100 Greatest Advertisements by Julian Watkins
• The Art of Writing Advertising by Denis Higgins
• How to Advertise by Kenneth Roman
• Adverting Inside Out by Philip Kelinman
• Successful Direct Marketing Methods by Bob Stone
• Or Your Money Back by Alvin Eicoff
• The Art of Plain Talk by Rupert Flesch
• Writing that Works by Kenneth Roman
• The Elements of Style by William Stunk
• Thirty Seconds by Michael Arden
• Speech can Change Your Life by Dorothy Sarnoff
• The Duping of the American Voter: Dishonesty and Deception in Presidential Television Advertising by Robert Spero
• Obvious Adams by Robert Updergraff

Review

Most of the writing I see on the internet from companies is not very good in my opinion. From startups, where I am trying to figure out what they do, to companies' technical documentation, which is oftentimes not very clear or well-structured, I think it could all probably be better. Especially for startups where the company tries to do a Y-combinator like thing of describing/advertising their company in 50 characters or less, I am often left with no idea of really what the product does or how it works. Given how many bad experiences I have had with software products, I think there has to be a better way of communicating your product - this was one of the reasons I wanted to read this book.

I don't plan on going into the advertising industry, but I still enjoyed this book. During my undergraduate degree, when participating in the Business-Engineering-Technology minor, we read some books on business that were somewhat similar to this, and I always enjoyed those. I like these kinds of business books that offer advice, and then offer an anecdote along with the advice. It makes the subject matter interesting, and it probably helps me remember the aforementioned advice.