David Ogilvy (1911-1999) was a British advertiser. He started his career as a cook in a hotel in Paris, then as a door-to-door salesman of cooking stoves for AGA. He later joined advertising agency Mather & Crowther in London, then Dr. Gallup’s Audience Research Institute, before founding his own agency in New York in 1949. He retired in 1973, and came out of retirement in the 1980s. His firm was taken over by WPP Group in a hostile takeover in 1989. He authored four books, published between 1963 and 1986.

Below are the key lessons from his book Ogilvy on Advertising, published in 1983:

Introduction

• When you write an advertisement, you don’t want people to tell you that they find it ‘creative.’ You want them to find it so interesting that they buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip.’
• Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on.

How to produce advertising that sells

• Start by doing your homework.
• First, study the product you are going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it.
• Then, find out what kind of advertising your competitors have been doing for similar products, and with what success.
• Now comes research among consumers. Find out (1) how they think about your kind of product, (2) what language they use when they discuss the subject, (3) what attributes are important to them, and (4) what promise would be most likely to make them buy your brand.
• Now consider how you want to ‘position’ your product, i.e., what the product does, and who it is for.
  • Dove was positioned as a toilet bar for women with dry skin.
  • SAAB was positioned as a car for winter.
  • Volkswagen was positioned as a protest against Detroit.
• Now decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. The personality of a product is an amalgam of many things – its name, its packaging, its price, the style of its advertising, and, above all, the nature of the product itself.
• Every ad should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image. Your ads should consistently project the same image, year after year.
• It pays to give products an image of quality, especially products whose brand-name is visible to your friends, like beer, cigarettes, automobiles, products you ‘wear.’
• Big ideas come from the unconscious. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. Go for a long walk, take a hot bath, or drink wine. Suddenly, a big idea wells up within you.
• To recognize a big idea, ask yourself 5 questions:
  • Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?
  • Do I wish I had thought of it myself?
  • Is it unique?
  • Does it fit the strategy to perfection?
  • Could it be used for 30 years?
• Make the product itself the hero of your advertising. There are no dull products, only dull writers. Never assign a product to a writer unless he is personally interested in it.
• Many products are no different from their competitors. When faced with selling ‘parity’ products, all you can hope to do is explain their virtues more persuasively than your competitors, and to differentiate them by the style of your advertising.
• If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don’t try to imply that your product is better. Just say what’s good about your product – and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it.
• If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to couples who got married last year will probably be just as successful with couples who get married this year. A good advertisement can be thought of as a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping.
• Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives, and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing.
• Agencies have a way of creating campaigns in committees. They call it ‘team-work’. Committees can criticize, but cannot create. ‘Search the parks in all your cities, You’ll find no statues of committees.’
• Few copywriters are ambitious. It does not occur to them that if they tried hard enough, they might double the client’s sales, and make themselves famous. ‘When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.’
• What distinguishes the great surgeon is that he knows more than other surgeons’ It is the same with advertising agents. The good ones know more.
• Too many advertisers fail to codify experience and to learn the rudiments of the craft. It has not always been so. George Gallup measured the readership of advertisements, accumulated the scores, analyzed them, and found that certain techniques consistently outperformed others. So did Mills Shepherd, Harold Sykes, and Harold Rudolph. They found for example that (1) photographs of finished dishes consistently attracted more readers than photographs of the raw ingredients, (2) ‘editorial’ graphics were consistently high performers, (3) photographs with an element of ‘story appeal’ were far above average in attracting attention. Later, the advertising community turned its back on such research.
• Most general advertisers never know for sure whether their advertisements sell. But direct-response advertisers, who solicit orders by mail or telephone, know to a dollar how much each advertisement sells. They use two-minute commercials, broadcast their commercials late at night, and use long copy.
• What is a good advertisement? An advertisement which pleases you because of its style, or an advertisement which sells the most? Do you want masterpieces that can be framed by copywriters? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?’ ‘If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.’
• What about sex? The test is relevance.

Jobs in advertising — and how to get them

• Most good copywriters 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.
• 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 clients.
  • Become the best-informed person in the agency on your assigned account.
  • Learn to make good presentations.
  • Do not regarding your clients as dopes. Make friends with them.
  • Always tell your client what you would do if you were in his shoes, but don’t grudge him the prerogative of deciding what advertising to run.
  • In day-to-day dealings with clients and colleagues, fight for the kings, queens and bishops, but throw away the pawns. Surrender on trivial issues and it will be harder to resist you when you fight on a major issue.
  • Don’t discuss your clients’ business in public places. Keep their secrets under lock and key. A reputation for leaking can ruin you.
  • Learn to write lucid memoranda. The senior people to whom they are addressed have more homework than you do.
• ‘Why does it take agency researchers three months to answer a few simple questions?’
  • They are too frightened of making mistakes.
  • They cannot agree among themselves on methodology.
  • They concentrate on subjects which are only peripherally related to advertising.
  • They have little or no system for retrieving research which has already been conducted.
  • Advertising research is full of fads.
  • They use incomprehensible graphs, pretentious jargon, and write too long reports.
  • They refuse projects they consider imperfect by their perfectionist standards, even when the project would produce actionable results. (‘PERFECTIONISM is spelled PARALYSIS.’)
• The CEO must:
  • Be a good leader of frightened people.
  • Have financial acumen, administrative skill, thrust, and the courage to fire non-performers.
  • Be a good salesman, because he is responsible for bringing in new clients.
  • Be resilient in adversity.
  • Have the physical stamina to work 12 hours a day, dine out several times a week, and spend half his time in airplanes.
• A creative director must be:
  • A 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 packaged 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 joie de vivre.
• In most agencies, recruiting is still sloppy and haphazard. Agencies rarely ask an applicant’s former employers what they think of him.
• Most advertising teachers lack the practical experience to be relevant. They are handicapped by the poor quality of the textbooks, and very few do research of their own.
• If you need more income than your agency is willing to pay you, make up the difference by moonlighting.
• ‘Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead.’
• When applying for a job:
  • Spell all names right.
  • Identify the sort of job you’re applying for.
  • Be specific and factual. Once you’ve made clear what job you want, then touch on your chief qualifications.
  • Be personal, direct and natural. The more your letter sounds like you, the more it will stand apart from the letters of your competitors.
  • Propose a specific next step. Close your letter with a clear and precise statement of how you wish to proceed toward an interview. At this stage a phone call makes things easy for the person at the other end. If you don’t call him, he has to go to the trouble of calling or writing to you.

How to run an advertising agency

• Running an 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.
• The author sent newly appointed office heads Russian dolls with the following message inside the smallest: ‘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] will become a company of giants.’
• One of the most agreeable things about running an agency is that all your accounts are in different industries. In the morning you discuss the problems and opportunities of a client who makes soap. In the afternoon it is a bank, or an airline, or a manufacturer of medicines. But you pay a price for this variety. Every time you see a client, you have to be sufficiently briefed on his business to give relevant advice.
• Agencies are breeding-grounds for sibling rivalry. What can you do to keep sibling rivalry under control? You can be fair, and you can avoid playing favorites.
• Hire what J.P. Morgan called gentlemen with brains. It doesn’t necessarily mean a high IQ, but rather curiosity, common sense, wisdom, imagination and literacy.
• Look for young men and women who can one day lead your agency.
  Is there any way of predicting the capacity to lead? The only way is to look at their college records. If they were leaders between the ages of 18 and 22, the odds are that they will emerge as leaders in middle life.
• Shell found that the most reliable criteria for selecting Crown Princes are:
  • The power of analysis.
  • Imagination.
  • A sense of reality.
  • The ‘helicopter quality’ – the ability to look at facts and problems from an overall viewpoint.
• When it comes to picking people for senior jobs, character is more important than any of these qualities.
• Promote from within or hire from outside? ‘Mr. Morgan buys his partners,’ said Andrew Carnegie; ‘I grow mine.’ In the early days of Ogilvy & Mather, shortage of cash obliged the author to pay peanut salaries, which attracted monkeys. He chose not to promote his monkeys, but to fill senior openings with stars from outside.
• Never hire your friends, your clients, your client’s children, your own children, or the children of your partners.
• To squelch office politics:
  • Fire the worst of the politicians.
  • Make your people settle their fights face to face.
  • Start a luncheon club. It turns enemies into friends.
  • Discourage poaching.
  • Don’t play favorites.
  • Don’t play politics.
• Sustain unremitting pressure on the professional standards of your staff.
  • Insist that due dates are kept, even if it means working all night and over the weekend. There is nothing like an occasional all-night push to enliven morale – provided you are part of the push. Never leave the bridge in a storm.
  • Insist that your people arrive on time, and that telephones are answered promptly.
  • Be vigilant about the security of your clients’ secrets.
• Start the year by writing down exactly what you want to accomplish, and end the year by measuring how much you have accomplished.
• Most of the men leading great corporations are good problem solvers and decision makers, but few are outstanding leaders.
• Great leaders tend to:
  • Have infectious optimism and the determination to persevere in the face of difficulties.
  • Exude self confidence, even when they themselves are not too certain of the outcome.
  • Leave you with a feeling of uplift and confidence.
  • Have a strong component of unorthodoxy.
  • Symbolize innovation.
  • Not be petty.
  • Pick themselves up after defeat.
  • Be fanatically committed to their jobs.
  • Not suffer from the crippling need to be universally loved.
  • Have the guts to make unpopular decisions such as firing non-performers.
  • Be decisive.
  • Satisfy the psychological needs of their followers.
  • Have the ability to inspire people with their speeches.
• Every company should have a written set of principles and purposes.
• Any service business which gives higher priority to profits than to serving its clients deserves to fail.
  • If you chisel on service, you can make more, but your clients will leave you.
  • If your service is too generous, your clients will love you, but you will go broke.
• Sensible ways of investing your profits include:
  • Opening branch offices in other cities or other countries.
  • Buying the building which houses your office.
  • Building a reserve against a rainy day.
• Never allow two people to do a job which one could do.
• Never summon people to your office; it frightens them. Instead, go to see them in their offices, unannounced.
• If you want to get action, communicate verbally.
• Don’t use products which 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 advertising.
• At presentation meetings, don’t sit the client’s team on one side of the table and your team opposite, like adversaries. Mix everybody up.
• Rehearse before the meeting, but never speak from a prepared text; it locks you into a position which may become irrelevant during the meeting.
• Above all, listen. The more you get the prospective client to talk, the easier it will be to decide whether you really want his account.
• Tell your prospective client what your weak points are, before he notices them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points.
• The day after a new business presentation, send the prospect a three-page letter summarizing the reasons why he should pick your agency. This will help him make the right decision.
• If you are too feeble to get accounts under your own steam, you can buy them – by buying agencies.
• Watch out for credit risks. Your profit margin is too slim to survive a prospective client’s bankruptcy. When in doubt, always ask the head of the incumbent agency.
• Never pay a commission to an outsider who offers to introduce new business. No client who chooses his agency on the basis of such an introduction is worth having; and there is usually dirty work at the crossroads.
• Avoid clients whose ethos is incompatible with yours.
• Beware of ventures which spend little or nothing today but might become major advertisers, if all goes well. Servicing such non-accounts can be expensive, and few of them make it.
• When you are head of an agency, you know that your staff looks to you to bring in new business, more than anything else. If you fail to do so over an extended period, you sense that you are losing their confidence, and are tempted to grab any account you can get. Don’t. Above all, don’t join the melancholy procession of agencies which always accompanies a dying brand on its way to the cemetery.
• It is important to know how your agency is regarded in the marketing community. Don’t trust your own ears; you will only hear favorable opinions. Have a research firm conduct an impartial survey.
• 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 broader your range, the broader the spectrum of accounts you will get. Recruit people with a wide range of talents.
• It is very difficult for small agencies to get big accounts. The other side of the coin is that the bigger an agency grows, the more bureaucratic it becomes. Personal leadership gives way to hierarchy.
• Surprisingly few agencies advertise themselves. Direct mail is probably the most efficient medium. If you can scrape up the money, use space advertising as well, but don’t start it unless you mean to do it consistently.

Open letter to a client in search of an agency

• Don’t delegate the selection to a committee. Do it yourself.
• Make a list of the commercials you envy, and find out which agencies did them.
• You now have a list of agencies. Find out which are working for your competitors, and thus unavailable to you.
• By this time you have a short list. Meet the head of each agency and his Creative Director. Make sure the chemistry between you and them is good. But don’t ask to meet the working-level people who would be assigned to your account. You have no way of judging their talent.
• Ask to see each agency’s six best print ads and six best television commercials. Pick the agency whose campaigns interest you the most.
• Ask what the agency charges. If it is 15 per cent, insist on paying 16 per cent. The extra one per cent won’t kill you, but it will double the agency’s normal profit, and you will get better service. Whatever you do, don’t haggle over the agency’s compensation.
• Insist on a five-year contract. This will delight the agency – and protect you from being resigned if one of your competitors ever tries to seduce them with a bigger budget.
• Now you have your agency, are you going to get the best out of them? Clients get the advertising they deserve. Don’t keep a dog and bark yourself. Any fool can write a bad advertisement, but it takes a genius to keep his hands off a good one.
• Once a year give your agency a formal report on its performance. This will serve as an early warning of trouble which, if ignored, could end badly for all concerned.
• Even the best copywriters are thin-skinned. When you have to reject their work, do it gently, and praise them to the skies when they perform well. They are the geese who can lay golden eggs. Inspire them to keep laying.
• ‘If a company rests its policy of not letting its agencies serve competitors on the need for security of information, it does not have a very solid base.
• If your account is too small to interest a good agency, find an experienced copywriter who has retired and pay him to do your advertising.

Print advertising

Headlines

• Five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. Unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money.
• Headlines which work best promise the reader a benefit – like a whiter wash, more miles per gallon, freedom from pimples, fewer cavities.
• Headlines which contain news are sure-fire. On the average, ads with news are recalled by 22 per cent more people than ads without news. The news can be the announcement of a new product, an improvement in an old product, or a new way to use an old product.
• Headlines that offer the reader helpful information, like HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, attract above-average readership.
• Include the brand name in your headline.
• If you are advertising a kind of product which is only bought by a small group of people, put a word in your headline which will flag them down,
• Long headlines sell more merchandise than short ones.
• Specifics are more credible and more memorable than generalities.
• When you put your headline in quotes, you increase recall by an average of 28%.
• When you advertise in local newspapers, you get better results if you include the name of each city in your headline. People are mostly interested in what is happening where they live.
• A psychologist flashed hundreds of words on a screen and used an electric gadget to measure emotional reactions. High marks went to darling.
• Tricky headlines (double meanings, puns) are counter-productive.
• Blind headlines (which don’t say what the product is, or what it will do for you) are about 20% below average in recall.

Illustrations

• The subject of your illustration is all important.
• Photographs which work best are those which arouse the reader’s curiosity. He glances at the photograph and says to himself, ‘What goes on here?’ Then he reads your copy to find out.
• When you don’t have a story to tell, make your product the subject of your illustration.
• Illustrate the end-result of using your product. Before-and-after pictures fascinate readers.
• Photographs attract more readers, are more believable, and better remembered than drawings.
• The use of characters known to people who see your television commercials boosts the recall of your print advertisements.
• Keep your illustrations as simple as possible, with the focus on one person.
• Don’t show human faces enlarged bigger than life size. They seem to repel readers.
• Historical subjects bore the majority of readers.
• Do not assume that subjects which interest you will necessarily interest consumers.
• Readers are most interested in photographs of babies, animals, and sex.
• People are more interested in actors of their own sex – with whom they can identify – than actors of the opposite sex. When you use a photograph of a woman, men ignore your advertisement.
• Color ads cost more than black-and-white add, but are 100% more memorable.
• When you advertise cooking products, show a photograph of the finished dish, not of the ingredients.
• Illustrations are often misunderstood.

Body copy

• Your copy may be read by millions, but people are alone when they read it. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client, one human being to another.
• You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.
• Write short sentences and short paragraphs, and avoid difficult words.
• Copy should be written in the language people use in everyday conversation.
• Don’t write essays. Tell your reader what your product will do for him or her, and tell it with specifics.
• Write your copy in the form of a story.
  • ‘The amazing story of a Zippo that worked after being taken from the belly of a fish.’
  • ‘They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano – But When I Started to Play…’.
• Avoid analogies. They are widely misunderstood.
• Stay away from superlatives like ‘Our product is the best in the world.’ This Brag and Boast convinces nobody.
• If you include a testimonial in your copy, you make it more credible. Readers find endorsements of fellow consumers more persuasive than the puffery of anonymous copywriters.
• Sometimes you can cast your entire advertisement in the form of a testimonial.
• Testimonials from celebrities get high recall scores, but (1) readers remember the celebrity and forget the product and (2) assume that the celebrity has been bought.
• Testimonials from experts can be persuasive – like having an ex-burglar testify that he had never been able to crack a Chubb safe.
• Markdowns and special offers are above average in recall.
• Always try to include the price of your products.
• All copy should be signed by the agency. When agencies sign their ads, they produce better ones.
• Long copy sells more than short. Advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say.
• ‘The more facts you tell, the more you sell.’
• If you want your long copy to be read, write it well. Your first paragraph should be a grabber. A Harvard professor used to begin his lectures with the following sentence: ‘Cesare Borgia murdered his brother-in-law for the love of his sister, who was the mistress of their father – the Pope.’
• It is no bad thing to learn the craft of advertising by copying your elders and betters. Until you’ve got a better answer, you copy.

Layouts

• Readers look first at the illustration, then at the headline, then at the copy. So put these elements in that order – illustration at the top, headline under the illustration, copy under the headline.
• More people read the captions under illustrations than read the body copy, so never use an illustration without putting a caption under it. Your caption should include the brand name and the promise.
• Advertisements do not have to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract more readers.
• Successful news magazines use the same graphics:
  • Copy has priority over illustration.
  • The copy is set in serif type.
  • Three columns of type, 35 to 45 characters wide.
  • Every photograph has a caption.
  • The copy starts with drop-initials.
  • The type is set black on white.
• Two-page spreads cost twice as much as single pages, but seldom get twice the readership.
• Next time you construct an ad, pretend you are an editor; you will get more readership.

Posters

• It pays to make your poster a ‘visual scandal.’
• Deliver your selling promise not only in words, but also pictorially.
• Use the largest possible type.
• Make your brand name visible at a long distance.
• Use strong, pure colors.
• Never use more than 3 elements in your design.

Trademarks

• In olden days, before people could read, manufacturers used trademarks to identify their brands. Many companies, unaware that consumers are no longer illiterate, still use graphic symbols to identify their brands, and insist on them being displayed in their advertisements. Readership of the advertisement is reduced.

Typography

• Good typography helps people read your copy, while bad typography prevents them doing so.
• Do you think an advertisement can sell if nobody can read it? You can’t save souls in an empty church.
• Mistakes to avoid include:
  • Setting headlines in capital letters. They retard reading: no ascenders or descenders to help you recognize words, tend to be read letter by letter. People are accustomed to reading books, magazines and newspapers in lower case.
  • Superimposing headlines on your illustration.
  • Putting a period at the end of headlines.
  • Setting copy in a measure which is too wide or too narrow to be legible.
  • Using white type on black background.
• Typographical devices which increase readership include:
  • A subhead of two lines, between your headline and your body copy.
  • Limiting your opening paragraph to a maximum of 11 words.
  • After two or three inches of copy, inserting a cross-head, and thereafter throughout.
  • Using widows (short lines) instead of squaring up paragraphs.
  • If you have a lot of unrelated paragraphs, numbering them.