David is fond of lists. Here are a few, the first from a talk to the staff:
The qualifications I look for in our leaders are these:
1. High standards of personal ethics.
2. Big people, without prettiness.
3. Guts under pressure, resilience in defeat.
4. Brilliant brains – not safe plodders.
5. A capacity for hard work and midnight oil.
6. Charisma – charm and persuasiveness.
7. A streak of unorthodoxy – creative innovators.
8. The courage to make tough decisions.
9. Inspiring enthusiasts – with thrust and gusto.
10. A sense of humor.
Although he admits to no prejudices regarding race, religion, etc. – and has never displayed any in his management practices – David is well aware of who’s what.
One September day, shortly after a Jewish copywriter had married a Catholic copywriter, he came bounding down the hall and greeted the husband with “Happy Saint Rosh Hashanah!”
An account manager wrote to David wondering what he considered his worst shortcomings. The reply:
1. I am intolerant of mediocrity – and laziness.
2. I fritter away too much time on things which aren’t important.
3. Like everyone of my age, I talk too much about the past.
4. I have always funked firing people who needed to be fired.
5. I am afraid of flying and go to ridiculous lengths to avoid it.
6. When I was Creative Head in New York, I wrote too much of the advertising myself.
7. I know nothing about finance.
8. I change my mind – about advertising and about people.
9. I am candid to the point of indiscretion.
10. I see too many sides to every argument.
11. I am over-impressed by physical beauty.
12. I have a low threshold of boredom.
To heads of U.S. offices, preceding a swing around the country:
February 2, 1981
I have already sent you my schedule. Now Bill Phillips has suggested that I should give you “some idea of the things you would like to do in each city.”
In principle, I place myself in your hands. However:
(1) The fewer speeches the better. I have to make big ones to an American Express meeting in Florida this month, and to the 4A’s in April. I don’t have much left to say, and writing speeches takes me forever.
(2) Maybe you could invite some people (staff and clients) to see my film The View From Touffou. To be followed by questions?
(3) I hate cocktail parties.
(4) I would like to visit with your best Creative people.
(5) I would like to meet major clients – but only if I know something about their business. Which is not the case, for example, with Mattel.
(6) I get tired after 11 PM and go to bed.
(7) Please give me a little time-off to visit friends.
(8) Please don’t meet me at the railroad station, and please don’t see me off. I hate that. Let me arrive and depart on my own.
(9) Don’t put me in a suite at the hotel. A bedroom is what I like.
(10) Please give me an office, however small. And a copy of The New York Times every day.
(11) I hate drinking in bars, and have to start eating the moment I sit down in restaurants. Waiting for food puts me in a foul mood.
D.O.
A memo to the creative directors of Ogilvy & Mather offices worldwide:
July 1, 1979
1. Are you creating the most remarkable advertising in your country?
2. Is this generally recognized, inside and outside your agency?
3. Can you show new-business prospects at least four campaigns which electrify them?
4. Have you stopped overloading commercials?
5. Have you stopped singing the sales pitch?
6. Do all your commercials start with a visual grabber?
7. Have you stopped using cartoon commercials when selling to adults?
8. Do you show at least six Magic Lanterns to everyone who joins your staff?
9. If they don’t understand English, have you had all the Lanterns translated into their language?
10. Do you repeat the brand name several times in every commercial?
11. Have you stopped using celebrity testimonials in television commercials?
12. Have you got a list of red-hot creative people in other agencies, ready for the day when you can afford to hire them?
13. Do all your campaigns execute an agreed positioning?
14. Do they promise a benefit – which has been tested?
15. Do you always super the promise at least twice in every commercial?
16. Have you had at least three Big Ideas in the last six months?
17. Do you always make the product the hero?
18. Are you going to win more creative awards than any other agency this year?
19. Do you use problem-solution, humor, relevant characters, slice-of-life?
20. Do you eschew life-style commercials?
21. Do your people gladly work nights and weekends?
22. Are you good at injecting news into your campaign?
23. Do you always show the product in use?
24. Does your house reel include some commercials with irresistible charm?
25. Do you always show the package at the end?
26. Have you stopped using visual clichés – like sunsets and happy families at the dinner table? Do you use lots of visual surprises?
27. Do the illustrations in your print advertisements contain story appeal?
28. Are you phasing out addy layouts and moving to editorial layouts?
29. Do you sometimes use visualized contrast?
30. Do all your headlines contain the brand name – and the promise?
31. Are all your illustrations photographs?
32. Have you stopped setting copy ragged left and right?
33. Have you stopped using more than 40 characters in a line of copy?
34. Have you stopped setting copy smaller than 10 point and bigger than 12 point?
35. Do you always paste advertisements into magazines or newspapers before you OK them?
36. Have you stopped setting body copy in sans-serif?
37. Have you stopped beating your wife?
If you can answer YES to all these questions, you are the greatest Creative Director on the face of the earth.
D.O.
A memo drafted for the management to circulate as it saw fit:
September 7, 1982
If everybody in our company took an exam in writing, the highest marks would go to the 14 Directors.
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:
(1) Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing.* Read it three times.
(2) Write the way you talk. Naturally.
(3) Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
(4) Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
(5) Never write more than two pages on any subject.
(6) Check your quotations.
(7) Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning – and then edit it.
(8) If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
(9) Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
(10) If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.
David
January 24, 1983
I seem to be big in India. The Sunday Magazine recently published photographs of 54 men and women who made news in 1982. Eleven of them were not Indians:
Andropov
Brezhnev
David Ogilvy
Mitterand
Princess Diana
Pope John Paul II
Lech Walesa
Ayatolla Khomeini
Yasser Arafat
Jimmy Connors
Menachem Begin
Wanted by Ogilvy & Mather International
Trumpeter Swans
In my experience, there are five kinds of Creative Director:
1. Sound on strategy, dull on execution.
2. Good managers who don’t make waves… and don’t produce brilliant campaigns either.
3. Duds.
4. The genius who is a lousy leader.
5. TRUMPETER SWANS who combine personal genius with inspiring leadership.
We have an opening for one of these rare birds in one of our offices overseas.
Write in inviolable secrecy to me, David Ogilvy, Touffou, 86300 Bonnes, France.
Note to Trumpeter Swans:
David Ogilvy no longer handles job applications.
Write to Ogilvy & Mather in your country.
This list, sent to the Board, was later converted into the “help wanted” advertisement overleaf:
May 23, 1981
Five Kinds of Creative Heads
(1) Those whose personal talent amounts to genius; they don’t always make the best managers.
(2) Good managers who get the work out – punctual and competent. They don’t make waves, but they don’t make hot agencies either.
(3) Hep on strategy. Useful on some accounts. Apt to be dull.
(4) Trumpeter Swans. Very rare birds. They combine personal genius with inspiring leadership.
(5) Duds.
D.O.
From Flagbearer, the New York office’s staff newsletter:
November 19, 1976
Somebody recently asked me for a list of the most useful books on advertising – the books that all our people should read. Here is what I sent her:
1. Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins; Foreword by David Ogilvy. Crown Publishers.
2. Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples; Foreword by David Ogilvy. Prentice-Hall.
3. Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. Atheneum Publishers.
4. How to Advertise by Kenneth Roman and Jane Maas; Foreword by David Ogilvy. St. Martin’s Press.
5. Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves. Alfred Knopf.
6. The Art of Writing Advertising by Bernbach, Burnett, Gribbin, Ogilvy & Reeves. Advertising Publications, Inc., Chicago.
7. The 100 Best Advertisements by Julian Watkins. Dover Publications.
A note to the Board of Directors:
October 21, 1982
“The Pope of Modern Advertising”
The current issue of Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber’s magazine, EXPANSION, is devoted to the Industrial Revolution and lists thirty men who have contributed to it. They include:
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein
Alfred Krupp
Lenin
Karl Marx
David Ogilvy – “the Pope of modern advertising”
Louis Pasteur
James de Rothschild
Adam Smith
Thomas J. Watson Sr.
Will the College of Cardinals please come to order?
D.O.
In “Raise Your Sights” – a list of 97 tips for copywriters, art directors, and TV producers – this was saved for last:
97. Whenever you write a commercial, bear in mind that it is likely to be seen by your children, your wife – and your conscience.
Addressing annual staff meeting in New York in 1979.
