Today we review the deep lessons that David Ogilvy teaches us on advertising and business from the book Confessions of an Advertising Man.
Sharing what I learned by reading Confessions of an Advertising Many by David Ogilvy, who In 1948, at 37 years old with no clients, no money, and no American reputation hung out his shingle in New York and wrote down the five companies he intended to have: General Foods, Bristol-Myers, Campbell Soup, Lever Brothers, and Shell. He called it an act of mad presumption. Inside twelve years, every one of them was his.
Getting there took him seventeen years of wandering. He won a history scholarship to Oxford and left without a degree, he says he was expelled, but the truth is he flunked out, and what he did to that fact tells you everything about the man. He was a chef in a Paris kitchen, a door-to-door salesman in Scotland, a social worker in the Edinburgh slums, a researcher for Dr. Gallup testing what American moviegoers actually wanted, an assistant in British wartime intelligence, and a tobacco farmer in Pennsylvania. The drive was in him the whole time. It just took seventeen years to find somewhere to point.
The foundation was laid at the Hotel Majestic in Paris, where thirty-seven chefs worked sixty-three-hour weeks under Monsieur Pitard, who worked seventy-two. Pitard praised almost never, so when he gathered the whole brigade to point at a young Ogilvy's frog legs and says "that's how you do it," Ogilvy said he was his slave for life. Pitard would not tolerate incompetence beside professionals. He inspected every plate that left the kitchen. And when Ogilvy told a waiter they were out of the plat du jour, Pitard nearly fired him, in a great kitchen you honor what you promised on the menu, whatever it costs you. Thirty years later Ogilvy was inspecting every campaign before it reached a client and sending most of them back.
We work through the agency he built on those lessons: only nineteen clients, because the pursuit of excellence beat the pursuit of bigness. One new account every two years, so he never outgrew his ability to train people. Hiring nonconformists, dissenters and rebels. Refusing the New York Times because he didn't believe he could beat the work they were already running. Flying to London on a hunch and inviting the president of Shell to lunch at the House of Commons.
Plus the craft itself: what you say matters more than how you say it, spend eighty percent of your time on the headline, give people facts because the consumer isn't a moron, and never stop testing. Repeat a good ad until it stops selling, his Dove campaign ran thirty-one years because you aren't advertising to a standing army, you're advertising to a moving parade.
And one idea that changed how I look at my own mailbox: Ogilvy spent twenty-seven years studying mail-order advertising, the stuff we throw away, because it was the only kind anyone could actually measure. The junk mail run is a learning run.
Along the way we bring in Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, Estée Lauder, Harry Snyder, Charlie Munger, and Claude Hopkins, men and women who arrived at the same conclusions from very different rooms.
Podcasts Mentioned
#82 David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising) | Founders Podcast
#89 David Ogilvy (Confessions of an Advertising Man) | Founders Podcast
Past Deeply Driven Podcasts
#36 Becoming Steve Jobs - The Long Journey to Greatness
Estée Lauder: Divine Purpose of Beauty
#7 Elon Musk - Birth of SpaceX (What I Learned)
E18 Harry Snyder: In-N-Out and the Power of “Keep It Real Simple”
Sam Walton: Simple Ideas & Deep Business Impacts