David Ogilvy: lessons from advertising's most formidable founder

Executive overview

David Ogilvy started his agency at 38 with $5,000 in savings, no advertising experience, and a string of odd jobs behind him. Within a decade he had built one of the most celebrated agencies in the world. His edge was simple: more research, better writing, and unshakeable standards.

The good ones know more — and Ogilvy spent his entire life making sure he was one of them.

The man behind the legend

• His grandfather — not his father — was his blueprint: hard, self-made, successful
• Father's financial ruin and near-suicide drove a lifelong obsession with earning money
• Dropped out of Oxford in 1931, describing himself as "unteachable in any subject"
• Formidable: inspiring respect through being impressively intense and capable
• Passionately curious — interrogated everyone, read everything, never pontificated
• Read only biographies and histories of successful leaders; "the good ones know more"

The education that mattered

• Paris kitchen: head chef Patard taught him that extravagant standards make people feel they work for the best
• Door-to-door stove sales in Depression-era Scotland: "no sale, no commission, no commission, no eat"
• Discovered the word "free" as a selling tool; always went through the cook, not the lady of the house
• Wrote The Theory and Practice of Selling the Aga Cooker at 24 — Fortune called it probably the best sales manual ever written
• Used the manual to get his first advertising job; "I tasted blood" when they doubled his salary
• George Gallup: research became a lifelong competitive advantage — he believed most competitors ignored it entirely
• WWII British intelligence: learned the power of terse, precise writing from his boss Stevenson
• Lived briefly with the Amish — admired their rejection of modern noise

Mentors and stolen ideas

• Rosser Reeves: had lunch with him weekly for years, just listening — "two ears, one mouth, use them in that ratio"
• Claude Hopkins: Ogilvy said nobody should work in advertising until they had read Scientific Advertising seven times
• John Caples: "I plagiarized his work unashamedly. Why steal from anyone but the best?"
• Grandfather's advice: study JP Morgan's criteria — "gentlemen with brains and clients; only first-class business, and that in a first-class way" — became part of the agency's founding credo
• Four peers — Ogilvy, McKinsey, Arthur Andersen, Goldman Sachs — met regularly to compare philosophies and push each other toward excellence
• Marvin Bauer of McKinsey told him off for putting profit before clients; Ogilvy rewrote his statement of purpose

Building the agency

• Opened in 1948 with minimal funding and almost no accounts; within five years was counted among the rulers of Madison Avenue
• Wrote down five clients he wanted before he had an agency: Shell, Lever Brothers, Campbell's Soup, General Foods, Bristol Myers — eventually won all five
• First principle: missionaries not mercenaries — people felt they were on a mission, not just doing a job
• "We sell or else" — advertising that didn't sell was not advertising
• Hated committees: walked out of a pitch when told all 12 members would approve the ads
• Kept a giant parliament clock in his office to remind visitors time was passing
• Worked 9am to midnight, seven days a week; took home two stuffed briefcases most nights

On writing

• Drafted 100+ headlines for Rolls Royce before admitting his chosen line came from an article 20 years earlier
• Wrote long, fact-packed copy: "the more you tell, the more you sell"
• Process: studied every competitor ad for the past 20 years, wrote endless headlines, threw away the first 20 drafts of copy
• Edited ruthlessly — stripped adjectives and adverbs, left nouns and verbs
• Double-spaced, short paragraphs, key phrases underlined, sections separated by asterisks
• "I'm a lousy copywriter but a good editor"
• His memos were considered worth saving; his three-word condolence note read: "He was golden"
• Became a great writer because he wrote constantly — his correspondence was so voluminous it caused a nearby French post office to be reclassified

What made campaigns work

• Hathaway shirts: put an eye patch on the model to create "story appeal" — every shirt sold out within a week
• Schweppes: put the US president in the ads — sales leapt 600% in six months
• Rubenstein cosmetics: "news approach" copy — within three weeks, one ad brought in orders equal to 12 months of sales estimates
• American Express: "The American Express card is not for everyone" — built on direct mail principles from his door-to-door sales days
• Ads do not perform equally; some do 20 times more — finding those outliers was the whole game

On company culture and standards

• Anything not perfect is bad (from the Paris kitchen)
• "Raise your sights. Compete with the immortals. Blaze new trails. Soak yourself in research. Never stop selling."
• "Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom"
• "Pay peanuts and you get monkeys"
• "We are looking for gentlemen with brains and fire in their bellies"
• One agency, indivisible — resisted acquisition-led growth to the end: "My ambition is that it should be the best agency, not necessarily the biggest"
• Inside O&M, everyone from the boardroom to the mailroom knew the values — same culture described of McKinsey

Regrets and late wisdom

• Turned down Xerox because he didn't understand the product — never forgave himself
• Sold most of his stock out of fear; the person who made more money from Ogilvy and Mather than he did was Warren Buffett
• Hostile takeover in 1989 for ~$862 million destroyed a part of him — going public made it possible
• "I was always terrified the thing would go bust"
• "I frittered away far too much time on things which were not really important"
• "I made a mistake when I gave up creative work and concentrated on management"
• Never stopped repeating his philosophy until the end: "This has been my philosophy for 50 years and I've never wavered from it"
• Epitaph: "Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead"