The opening section of a talk delivered in 1949, the year after the agency opened, by David Ogilvy, Vice President and Research Director of Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather.
These early remarks, on “Research and its Effect on the Visual Phases of Advertising,” were addressed to the Art Directors Forum in New York. They sound a theme often revisited over the decades.
Here are two ads for the same product. They are the same size. They cost the same. But one reached 31 times as many prospects as the other.
What would you think if the space-buyer in your agency could buy 31 times as much circulation per dollar as other space-buyers?
You would think he was the most important man in the agency business. That is exactly the position you art directors are in.
It is within your power to reach 31 times as many readers per dollar as other art directors.
That is a big difference.
Your space-buyer buys gross circulation, your copywriter gives you the selling story, and your job is to deliver the largest possible net circulation for that story …
Your job, as I see it, is to take the selling appeal you are given, and then go to work and deliver the maximum audience. I mean audience of prospects.
That is where research can help art directors. It can give you some indication as to the type of visual treatment which will deliver the most prospects per dollar …
From a speech at the Annual Advertising Awards dinner, announcing the winner of the Career Award for Distinguished Personal Services to Advertising for 1953:
January 21, 1954
The Juries which select the winners of this award have an extremely difficult job.
This year, for example, we had almost a hundred nominations placed before us …
So we got to studying the list of men who had won the award in the past.
We noticed that it included
great publishers,
great advertising managers,
distinguished officers of associations,
men who have worked for great causes,
above and beyond the call of duty,
and heads of great agencies.
We thought it was curious that the Award had been given so seldom – if ever – for creative services.
After all, it is the creative man who makes the product upon which the whole structure of our business depends.
Unless the creative man produces great advertisements, the rest of us might as well pack up and go home.
So we decided, in principle, to give the Gold Medal Award to a great creative man.
We hoped that, by so doing, we would sound a trumpet call to the copywriters and art directors who work day after day at their typewriters and their drawing boards.
Generally speaking, you don’t hear much about these people. Most of them are more or less unsung – if not totally invisible and anonymous.
It is not surprising that these creative people sometimes get the idea that nobody thinks they matter very much.
By giving the Gold Medal to one of these creative men, the Jury goes on record as believing that nobody in all advertising matters more than the copywriter and the art director …*
From “What the Creative Man Can Do to Increase Public Acceptance of Advertising,” a speech to the Association of National Advertisers, March 1954:
I have only one complaint to make about our session here this morning. It is this: all the speakers are on the same side of the fence. We are all against sin.
Next year I would like to see A.N.A. stage a great debate, with one of our more notorious malefactors here to defend his position. One of the unrepentant weasel merchants.
We might couple him up to a lie detector and then invite him to read some of his own copy out loud.
I have been asked to talk to you about “the growing lack of public confidence in advertising.” First let me say this: I’m far from sure in my own mind that lack of public confidence is growing.
It would be a hard thing to prove. After all, Dr. Gallup wasn’t around to measure public confidence in the bad old days before our reform movement got started.
But of one thing I am very sure. There is a growing uneasiness within our own ranks. Most of the thoughtful men and women I know in the agency field, and particularly the younger generation, are becoming increasingly introspective about their profession – and the part it plays in the body economic …
Now I come to truth in advertising.
Here again, I don’t know the precise state of public opinion. Personally, I think that actual truth has become more or less a dead issue. Most advertising nowadays is a great deal more truthful than the public realizes.
Our problem is to make the public believe the true things we say. It’s no use telling the truth if people don’t believe you. So, how can we copywriters make our ads more believable?
Well, we can start by turning our backs on the weasel. The kind of weasels which still disgrace so much advertising for toothpaste, cigarettes, detergents and low-calorie beer. The kind of weasels that depreciate the whole currency of copy.
Verbal weasels and typographical weasels. Most of us on the creative side are connoisseurs of the weasel. Far more than the public, we comprehend the villainies of the weasel merchants …
Let’s take our tongues out of our cheeks. Let’s try and write like human beings.
We hope that you people, our clients, will encourage us in this, because most of us are very sensitive to what our clients are thinking.
If any of you gentlemen have any private qualms about the continued presence of weasels in your own advertising, I want to suggest that you try a novel experiment.
When you get back to your office on Monday morning, send for your agency people and address them in these terms:
“Our production people are very proud of their product. They think it’s such a damn good product that you ought to be able to advertise it without weaseling.
“Our stockholders include a lot of widows and orphans. Sure, they need profits and dividends. But they don’t want you to cheat in pursuit of their dividends.
“So please take another look at the advertising we have scheduled for 1954. Ask yourself if you would feel any compunction about exposing your own children to it.
“Ask yourself if any of it could possibly fan the flames of public resentment against advertising.
“Ask yourself if any of it could possibly damage our company’s reputation in the long run.
“And finally, ask yourself if any of it is in conflict with your own private standards of morality and good taste. As your clients, we have no desire to increase the load of guilt you carry through life.”
But one word of warning. This can be an extremely dangerous experiment. If you decide to try it, I advise you to make it crystal clear to your agency that you aren’t looking for soft, gutless advertising. And that you aren’t looking for mere entertainment.
Explain that you still want advertising with selling teeth in it. Honest teeth, but biting teeth.
The effect on your agency may well be electrifying. I can imagine nothing better calculated to stimulate creative people to produce great advertising for you …
Every time you run an advertisement that is genuinely creative and interesting, you not only benefit your own company, but all your fellow advertisers.
If we in the agency business can create enough interesting campaigns, we can get consumers to drop their resistance.
Don’t let’s be dull bores. We can’t save souls in an empty church.
Someone in the Sydney office of another agency sent David a telex asking him to answer a question, as fodder for a speech.
The question: “What single step would most enhance our reputation for creativity?”
The telexed reply: “Change the name of your agency to Ogilvy.”
From “The Image and the Brand – a New Approach to Creative Operations,” a talk to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in Chicago, October 1955:
When I was invited to speak at luncheon here today, Fred Gamble suggested that I should build my talk around a Creative Credo which I had recently circulated to some of my friends. That sounded delightfully easy. So I agreed.
But the following week Sid Bernstein got hold of a copy of my Credo and printed it in Advertising Age. That put the kibosh on my talk.
So now I have decided to take just one plank out of my Credo, and preach you a short sermon on that one text. It happens to be the first plank, and this is what it says:
“Every advertisement is part of the long-term investment in the personality of the brand.”
I didn’t make that up. I borrowed it, from an article by Burleigh Gardner and Sidney Levy in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review. It is exactly the position we take at Ogilvy, Benson & Mather today.
We hold that every advertisement must be considered as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image – as part of the long-term investment in the reputation of the brand.
I must confess that I have changed my mind on this subject. When I first arrived in this country eighteen years ago, I bought the wicked old Chicago philosophy, as practiced by Claude Hopkins.
I used to deride advertising men who talked about long-term effect. I used to accuse them of hiding behind long-term effect. I used to say that they used long-term effect as an alibi – to conceal their inability to make any single advertisement profitable. In those intolerant days I believed that every advertisement must stand on its own two feet and sell goods at a profit on the cost of the space …
Today, I have come to believe, with Gardner and Levy, that every advertisement must be considered as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image. And I find that if you take that long-term approach, a great many of the day-to-day creative questions answer themselves …
During the last six months we have seen a remarkable demonstration of image building for a new brand. I refer to Marlboro Cigarettes. Leo Burnett and his associates used judgment to decide what kind of image to create for the Marlboro image – before they started to create the advertising.
And incidentally they took a risk which few advertisers would take. They seem to have decided that Marlboro should have an exclusively male personality. What a brave decision.*
I find that most manufacturers are reluctant to accept any such limitation on the image and personality of their brands. They want to be all things to all people. They want their brand to be a male brand and a female brand. An upper-crust brand and a plebeian brand.
And in their greed they almost always end up with a brand which has no personality of any kind – a wishywashy neuter brand. No capon ever rules the roost – and neuter brands get no place in today’s market …
What would you think of a politician who changed his public personality every year? Have you noticed that Winston Churchill has been careful to wear the same ties and the same hats for fifty years – so as not to confuse us?
Think of all the forces that work to change the personality and image of the brand from season to season. The advertising managers come and go. The copywriters, the art directors, and the account executives come and go. Even the agencies come and go.
What guts it takes, what obstinate determination, to stick to one coherent creative policy, year after year, in the face of all the pressures to “come up with something new” every six months …
In the early 1960s, Ogilvy & Mather still had separate copy and art departments. Late one winter afternoon Cliff Field, who was in charge of copy for the massive new Shell account, interviewed a blind man.
It was dark and snowing hard, so after the interview Cliff escorted the applicant to the street to try to find him a taxi.
David came looking for him, asked somebody where he was, and was told: “I don’t quite know, Sir. The last I saw of him he was getting on the elevator in his shirt sleeves, with a blind man and his seeing-eye dog.”
David smote his forehead: “My God! Clifford’s hiring an art director!”
Among those who like to debate the merits of “rational” vs. “emotional” advertising, David somehow got labeled an all-out champion of reason. The label has stuck, but doesn’t bear scrutiny. The following excerpt, from a 1957 talk in England to the Advertising Association Conference, sounds a note played often, both in earlier and later years:
I am astonished to find how many manufacturers, on both sides of the Atlantic, still believe that women can be persuaded by logic and argument to buy one brand in preference to another – even when the two brands are technically identical.
The greater the similarity between products, the less part reason plays in brand selection.
There really isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or the various cigarettes, or the various brands of beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines, and even the motor cars.
The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most favourable image, the most sharply defined personality, is the one who will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit – in the long run.
In our agency we take a long view of our creative responsibilities. We plan ten years ahead, on the assumption that our clients are not out for a fast buck, but intend to stay in business forever.
We try to create sharply defined personalities for our brands. And we stick to those personalities, year after year.
From “The New Business Policies of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather,” a paper written in 1960 for the guidance of the management:
We have exercised care in selecting our clients. That is why our roster is such a remarkable one.
We seek clients who manufacture a product which we can be proud to advertise – a product which we can recommend without reservation to our own families.
We seek clients whose basic attitudes to business are about the same as ours. The agency-client relationship is an intimate one, and it only works well when there is a strong ingredient of mutual respect on both sides.
We seek accounts on which we can make a profit. Ten years’ experience with cost accounting has taught us which kind of accounts are likely to be unprofitable; we avoid them.
We want Ogilvy & Mather to be the best agency. That is one reason why we exercise so much restraint in controlling the speed of our expansion. We must avoid growing so rapidly that our standards of service would have to be diluted.
From a 1960 statement to the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, advocating an advertising campaign to attract European tourists to the United States:
One word of warning. When the time comes for the new Office of International Travel & Tourism to advertise in foreign countries, I suggest that those concerned should be careful not to put anything into their advertisements which could hurt the image of the United States. Indeed, they should try to create advertising which will improve that image …
To run a campaign of this kind in fourteen European countries would cost about $1,362,000 a year for space – say $2,000,000 by the time you have paid for the photographs and the engravings, and the collateral promotion. That’s about the cost of one fighter aircraft.
In his decades as the boss, David liked to speak candidly to the staff at Christmas, summing up the year’s performance, setting goals for the future, and reaffirming standards. From his talk in 1960:
Before I turn to the future, I would like to preach my perennial sermon on the subject of behaviour. I want the newcomers to know what kind of behaviour we admire, and what kind of behaviour we deplore:
1. First, we admire people who work hard. We dislike passengers who don’t pull their weight in the boat.
2. We admire people with first-class brains, because you cannot run a great advertising agency without brainy people.
3. We admire people who avoid politics – office politics, I mean.
4. We despise toadies who suck up to their bosses; they are generally the same people who bully their subordinates.
5. We admire the great professionals, the craftsmen who do their jobs with superlative excellence. We notice that these people always respect the professional expertise of their colleagues in other departments.
6. We admire people who hire subordinates who are good enough to succeed them. We pity people who are so insecure that they feel compelled to hire inferior specimens as their subordinates.
7. We admire people who build up and develop their subordinates, because this is the only way we can promote from within the ranks. We detest having to go outside to fill important jobs, and I look forward to the day when that will never be necessary.
8. We admire people who practice delegation. The more you delegate, the more responsibility will be loaded upon you.
9. We admire kindly people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings – particularly the people who sell things to us. We abhor quarrelsome people. We abhor people who wage paper warfare. We abhor buck passers, and people who don’t tell the truth.
10. We admire well-organized people who keep their offices shipshape, and deliver their work on time.
11. We admire people who are good citizens in their communities – people who work for their local hospitals, their church, the PTA, the Community Chest and so on.
In his talk to the staff at Christmas in 1962, David quoted responses to an internal survey on the strengths and weaknesses of the Agency. This excerpt starts about halfway through the talk.
Those are the main points on the positive side – esprit de corps, hard work, high standards of professional performance, guts in telling our clients the truth, a clearly defined point of view, and better advertising campaigns.
So far, so good. But now we come to the bad part.
One particularly thoughtful individual has this to say:
“As we grow, it seems to me to be more difficult to maintain that great esprit de corps. I have had a feeling that some of our great vitality is waning, and that the agency has less of that zip, bustle and excitement that were so prominent during the first years.”
… Here I want to address those of you who head up departments and account groups, and indeed everyone who is the boss of anyone else. I look to you to become our main sources of inspiration. Perhaps you will not mind if I offer you some advice on how to go about it:
A) Don’t overstaff your departments. People enjoy life most when they have the most work to do.
B) Set exorbitant standards, and give your people hell when they don’t live up to them. There is nothing so demoralizing as a boss who tolerates second-rate work.
C) When your people turn in an exceptional performance, make sure they know you admire them for it.
D) Don’t let your people fall into a rut. Keep leading them along new paths, blazing new trails. Give them a sense of adventurous pioneering.
E) Do your best to educate your people, so that they can be promoted as rapidly as possible.
F) Delegate. Throw your people in over their heads. That is the only way to find out how good they are.
G) Seek advice from your subordinates, and listen more than you talk.
H) Above all, make sure that you are getting the most out of all your people. Men and women are happiest when they know that they are giving everything they’ve got.
Another criticism I have received is that we are too rigid in applying our creative principles:
“Here at Ogilvy, Benson & Mather campaigns are developed according to the disciplines you have established. There is a danger that these disciplines are interpreted too narrowly.”
I make no apology for having established a set of creative principles, but I cannot believe that they represent the last word. I am hungry for younger creative people to come along and enlarge our philosophies.
Start where I leave off.
Another criticism I have received is that there is far too much paper around here:
“One of the first differences I noticed on coming over was the volume of paper work. The amount of it is bad. But what it reflects is good. Much of the paper is the result of a lot of people thinking and having thoughts about a problem.
“A case in point was the torrent that flowed while the 1963 Shell plan was being developed. A score of people were having thoughts. And they had the enthusiasm and the energy to write them down.”
O.K., but I wish to heaven they wouldn’t write them down at such exorbitant length. Really, the amount of paper we have to read nowadays is horrible. For Pete’s sake write shorter memos. Don’t argue with each other on paper. Don’t send copies of trivial memos to 29 people …
I would like you all to make a New Year’s Resolution. Cut your wordage in half. This will make it possible for us to finish our homework before midnight.
Well, I have now reported the three negatives – the problem of inspiration in an agency which is no longer small; rigidity in applying our creative principles; and too much paper.
Adding it all up, the pros and cons, how does Ogilvy, Benson & Mather look to me? How does the OBM of 1962 compare with the agency I dreamed of in 1948?
To tell you the truth, it looks a million times better than I ever dreamed it could look. I just cannot believe what a good agency this has grown to be. I am terribly proud, and terribly grateful.
From a talk to the National Industrial Conference Board, April 1961:
… There is no great trick to doing research. The problem is to get people to use it – particularly when the research reveals that you have been making mistakes.
We all have a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost – for support, not for illumination.
Before Pearl Harbor, the United States Government succeeded in deciphering the telegrams which the Japanese Ambassador in Washington was sending back to Tokyo, reporting his conversations with Cordell Hull. Unfortunately, there was a failure to act on this intelligence.
Later on, the Navy was able to crack the Japanese Naval cipher. This time somebody acted on the intelligence. The happy result was the victory at Midway.
It’s the same way in marketing. The problem is to find people with the guts to act on intelligence reports, particularly when they are unfavorable.
David is often astonished by working habits that differ from his own. Once, discussing a copywriter at another agency whom he admired in some respects, he said:
“Listen to this – every day at precisely five o’clock that man gets up from his desk, puts on his hat and his coat, and goes home.”
Long pause to let it sink in. Then, leaning forward for emphasis: “Think of the extraordinary self-discipline that requires!”
In the modern corporation, who should have the responsibility for reading research reports and deciding what action should be taken? When I was a child I used to lie in bed early in the morning, debating with myself as to what servants I would employ when I grew up and got rich. Would I start by hiring a chef, a chauffeur, a gardener, a butler, or a masseur?
Nowadays, I lie in bed wondering who I would hire if I became a manufacturer. I am inclined to think that I would start with a research analyst – even before an advertising manager …
From a dinner talk to the St Andrew’s Society, November 1962:
Mr. President, Mr. Consul-General, Lord Strathclyde, Sir Alexander Brackenridge, fellow members of the St Andrew’s Society.
Today is the birthday of Sir Winston Churchill. I remember an incident which took place at the end of the Casablanca Conference.
It was the last morning, after the official business was finished. Sir Winston sent for his security officer. The old man had just finished breakfast and was lying in bed smoking a cigar. When the security officer entered the bedroom, Churchill looked up at him and said: “Codrington, I want to visit the bazaars.”
Codrington said that he would have to consult his American colleagues, who were responsible for the security of both delegations. The Americans promptly vetoed the expedition as too dangerous. This placed poor Codrington in a ticklish position, because he knew from bitter experience that Churchill would not like being thwarted.
However, he was an ingenious fellow, so he said to the Prime Minister: “The Americans don’t want you to go. German assassins have been parachuted around Casablanca, and there is no time for the Military Police to clear the streets where the bazaars are situated. The Americans think it would be most dangerous for you to go. Of course I have explained to them that you are indifferent to all considerations of personal danger. So I suppose that you may as well go.
“However, Sir, there is one thing I would like to point out. The bazaars are full of disease. If you were to catch one of these diseases, it wouldn’t matter – you have the constitution of an ox. But I must remind you that your friend, Mr. Roosevelt, is extremely delicate and if he caught the disease from you, well, the consequences might be tragic.”
Churchill winked, and said, “All right, Codrington, I won’t visit the bazaars. However, I would like you to know that I was not planning to visit the bazaars for the particular purpose you seem to have in mind; and even if I had been, and had I had the misfortune to contract one of those loathsome diseases to which you are evidently referring, I can assure you that I would not have transmitted it to the President of the United States.”
I would like to speak in praise of Scotland, my native country. Last time a member of my family tried this he got into terrible trouble.
My Ogilvy kinsman was talking to Oliver Goldsmith – and that repulsive old English bore Samuel Johnson. Here’s how it went, according to Boswell:
“Mr. Ogilvy was unlucky enough to choose for the topic of his conversation the praises of his native country. He began with saying that there was very rich land around Edinburgh. Goldsmith, who had studied physic there, contradicted this, with a sneering laugh.
“Disconcerted a little by this, Mr. Ogilvy then took a new ground, where, I suppose, he thought himself perfectly safe, for he observed that Scotland had a great many noble wild prospects.”
It was at this point that Dr. Johnson delivered his famous snub to my unfortunate ancestor:
“Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious, noble, wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the highroad that leads him to England!”
I kicked the bottom out of my cradle the first time I heard that story. But I couldn’t resist telling it again, because it shows the danger we Ogilvys run when we boast about Scotland.
From a speech to the Life Insurance Agency Management Association delivered in 1965 – some years before direct mail became a major factor in selling insurance:
… The time has come, I suggest, to test some revolutionary innovations.
Murray D. Lincoln is fond of saying that what every big organization needs is a “Vice-President in charge of revolution.” Today I have elected myself as Vice-President in charge of your revolution.
Here, then, is a revolution for you to test. Test direct mail.
I suspect that your best prospect is your present policyholder. You know all about him – his name and address, his age, how many children he has, his occupation, his medical record, his wife’s name, and so on. It is time you made some use of this gold mine of intelligence.
I believe that you can sell a lot of insurance, very cheaply, to your present policyholders by using direct mail – good direct mail …
One insurance company I know spends sixty times as much on salesmen’s commissions as it spends on selling by direct mail. Many companies spend nothing on selling by direct mail. Goodness knows why not. Maybe they just never got around to it.
I myself have life insurance policies with three companies. Not one of them has ever written me a letter suggesting that I buy more insurance from them. All they ever send me is premium notices.
Bloody fools …
From an ad-lib talk to the Direct Mail Advertising Association in Washington in October 1965, after Ogilvy & Mather’s five-page letter for Mercedes-Benz had won the Gold Mail Box Award for the best direct mail campaign of 1964:
I have owned a few motor cars in my life … I have never received a selling letter from one of the factories whose cars I drive suggesting that maybe the time had come for me to get a new one.
They simply don’t do it.
I’m here to predict that in the next five years you are going to see the advertising agencies – the good ones – grow up into Direct Mail. You are going to see Direct Mail emerge as a medium we agency people use, and use professionally.
From “Ten Bees in My Bonnet,” a talk at a dinner at Colby College in June 1966. David was a Colby Trustee. Here are his introductory remarks, and five of his ten “bees”:
What I am going to say does not in any way reflect the views of your Board of Trustees. I speak only for myself.
I am not an alumnus of Colby – or indeed of any other American college. I went to Oxford, 3,500 miles away. This places me at some disadvantage. If anyone wants to say that I don’t know what I am talking about, I can only plead that my relative detachment helps me to see things through an objective eye.
What I know about Colby and other colleges derives from four sources:
First, from listening to the talk at meetings of the Colby Board of Trustees during the last four years.
Second, from reading a good deal about education in general, and other colleges in particular.
Third, from observing my son’s experiences at the University of Virginia.
Fourth, from being married to a Barnard undergraduate.
I have come to some general conclusions, and this is my opportunity to ventilate them. They are more than conclusions – they are veritable bees in my bonnet.
1. First, I agree with Professor Nathan Glazer that “A very large part of what students and teachers do in the best colleges and universities is sheer waste.”
I will now prove this.
Dr. Gallup tested a cross section of college graduates of all ages, all over the country. He found that 62 percent cannot identify Immanuel Kant.
Two thirds cannot translate the word sister into French or German or Spanish.
Less than half can name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Only half know that elections for seats in the House of Representatives are held every two years.
One third have not read a single book of any kind during the last year.
If Dr. Gallup had confined his poll to Colby graduates, instead of interviewing a cross section of all college graduates, the results might have been somewhat more encouraging.
However, I am inclined to think that the present system of college education, even here at Colby, needs improvement …
When Dave McCall was Associate Copy Chief at Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, he had dinner with David and his teenage son, David Fairfield Ogilvy. Much of the talk centered on the prep school David’s son was going to and how, if David were headmaster, he’d run things there.
After a while his son said, “Well I sure wouldn’t want to go to any school where you were headmaster.”
David’s fatherly response: “That’s a rather rude thing to say in present company. Mr. McCall goes to such a school.”
3. I would like to see tenure abolished.
The tenure system is imposed on colleges by the American Association of University Professors – which is one of the most powerful trade unions I have ever encountered.
The pity is that the students don’t have a trade union of their own, to protect them against the all-powerful professors’ union.
The case for tenure revolves around the protection of teachers who advocate unorthodox theories. Such protection is, of course, very desirable indeed. But I believe that it is even more desirable to protect students from poor teachers …
Incidentally, it is preposterous that tenure should be a one-way contract. If a professor cannot be sacked, he should also be unable to quit in search of richer pastures in another college …
5. Next I come to psychiatry.
A lot of people still regard psychiatry as new-fangled nonsense – until their children drop out of college, or are sent to the Menninger Clinic with a serious breakdown.
There are now eleven psychiatrists on the medical staff at Harvard. How many at Colby? None – not one.
This is silly. A psychiatrist could do a great deal for students who get mixed-up – and a lot of students do, nowadays.
No Colby student should be flunked out until he has had a few sessions with a psychiatrist. This would save a lot of students – and it is our duty to save them, if we possibly can.
6. A college of limited resources cannot achieve the same degree of distinction in all its academic departments.
There is a hue and cry to add new departments at Colby. I would prefer to concentrate on increasing the excellence of some of our present departments; we have some excellent departments. I agree with the Oxford don who said, “The strength of a college can be measured by the number of subjects it refuses to teach.”
7. I believe that one of the most useful things we can teach our students is to write lucid reports. If you are going to be a businessman, you won’t get far unless you can write lucid reports – and very few college graduates can. If you are going to be a doctor, it will help if you can contribute lucid articles to medical journals. Knowledge is useless unless you know how to communicate it – in writing.
From a talk to the students at Fettes, David’s school in Scotland, on Founder’s Day, 1968:
My family’s connection with Fettes goes back 111 years. In 1857 my Great Uncle Lord Inglis of Glencorse became a Trustee. Lord Normand used to say that it was in great measure due to my Uncle that Fettes takes the form it now bears.
Well, Uncle John may have been a great judge, but apparently he could not read a will.
Sir William Fettes left the residue of his estate “for the maintenance, education, and outfit of young people whose parents … are unable to give suitable education to their children.”
Sir William Fettes specified children. Now I ask you, fellow Fettesians, what right had my dear old Uncle to decide that Sir William meant only boy children?
… I wonder how many of you boys would like to see girls admitted to Fettes. Let us be democratic. Let us take a vote. Will those in favor of girls please raise their right hands?
The motion is carried, NEMINE CONTRADICENTE.
If the Governors continue to ignore the wishes of our Founder, I expect you boys will follow the example of your contemporaries at many great universities: riot.
I am deeply sorry for the present generation of Fettesians. You have to endure the horrors of A levels and O levels. The masters have to cram you full of facts, so that you can pass those odious examinations. This is like cramming corn down the throat of a goose to enlarge his liver. It may produce excellent pâté de foie gras, but it does the goose no permanent good.
The mission of a great school is not to cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them a few weeks later at an exam. This gives many boys such a distaste for learning that they never read another book as long as they live. No, the mission of a school is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship – a taste which will last you all your life. Dr. Potts inspired that taste in my father – he read Horace in the lavatory to his dying day.
It was not conventional crammers who inspired me at Fettes. It was eccentric scholars – Mr. Sellar, Mr. Pyatt, Mr. Newman and Dr. Havergal. God bless them!
Alas, I wasn’t a great scholar. I was a duffer at games. I detested the philistines who ruled the roost. I was an irreconcilable rebel – a misfit. In short, I was a dud.
In the last edition of the Fettes register, Lord Normand – then Chairman of the Governors – wrote something remarkably candid:
“To be a dud in a large school where only classical learning counts in the form room, and only cricket and football outside it, is little better than living in a concentration camp.”
My only claim to fame was that I was the first prefect who refused to take part in corporal punishment; I refused to do any beating.
… Last summer the Queen asked me what I did for a living. When I said ADVERTISING, you should have seen the expression on her beautiful face – a mixture of horror, incredulity, and amusement.
Far be it from me to argue with the Sovereign – or the Headmaster. I can only plead that QUIDVIS RECTE FACTUM, QUAMVIS HUMILE, PREACLARUM. “Whatever you do in life, however humble, is OK if you do it right.”
I think that motto would apply to our Founder. Sir William Fettes was a grocer, but he did it right. So don’t let’s look down our noses at grocers – or even advertising men. Indeed, I dare to suggest that if Fettes produced more marketers and advertising men, Britain’s balance of payments would not be in such miserable shape.
On Founder’s Day four years ago, my old friend Lord Drumalbyn advised you to “avoid excess in all things.” Mr. Ashcroft used to say the same thing – avoid excess in all things.
That is a recipe for dullness and mediocrity – in my humble opinion …
From a talk to executives of McKinsey & Company, February 1972:
When I was a boy, we used to sing a song:
“Who takes care of the caretaker’s daughter
When the caretaker’s busy taking care?”
I have always wondered who management consultants consult. Now I know. You consult me, that’s who.
I cannot tell you what a charge I got when Marvin Bower invited me to come here today. My admiration for Marvin, and for McKinsey, amounts to hero-worship. My partners are sick to death of hearing me exhort them to conduct our business the way you guys conduct yours.
It occurs to me that McKinsey and Ogilvy & Mather have a few things in common:
We are both service businesses, selling our ideas.
We are about the same size – our income is about $50,000,000 a year.
We both went international about ten years ago.
We both derive about half our present billings from outside the U.S.
We are both running out of new countries to enter.
Some of your clients are also clients of ours – like Shell, General Foods, KLM, ICI, American Express.
Of course our two companies are also very different. To name only two differences:
We don’t have anything like your up-or-out policy.
You pay your top people more than we do. Only three of our 3500 employees get as much as $100,000 a year.
I can only hope that we have enough in common to give some slight trace of relevance to what I am going to say.
I will begin with an old-fashioned affirmation in the supreme value of hard work.
The harder your people work, the happier they will be. I believe in the Scottish proverb: “Hard work never killed a man.” Men die of boredom, psychological conflict and disease. They never die of hard work.
I am a stickler for meeting deadlines. I can do almost any job in one weekend. I think everyone can. The trouble is that most chaps are too lazy to burn the midnight oil. They are unwilling to rise to the occasion.
On the other hand, I believe in lots of vacations. When one of my partners gets abrasive, it is usually because he has worked too long without a vacation. I also believe that the partners in a service business should be given sabbaticals to recharge their batteries.
Besides, sabbaticals are fun. Are you guys having any fun? Somebody said to me the other day, “I have never seen a management consultant laugh.” Jerome Bruner, the Harvard psychologist, says that he has never visited a lab that was worth a damn where the people weren’t having a lot of fun. The physicists at Niels Bohr’s lab in Denmark, where they first split the atom, were always playing practical jokes on each other.
… When people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good work. Kill grimness with laughter. Encourage exuberance. Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom.
In our kind of business it is awfully difficult to evaluate people in terms of their performance. What criteria can we use? “Systematic employee performance ratings?” The evaluations are inevitably subjective. So how can we decide what to pay our senior people?
I am beginning to think that we should follow the example of Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, the law firm. They pay all their partners the same, and they have been doing so since the 1880’s. They figure that the young partners need as much money as the old ones, and probably more. By paying all the partners the same, they remove the major cause of that sibling rivalry which causes such hellish politics in a service business; they also eliminate the impossible chore of evaluating performance at the partner level.
When a service business grows big, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain high professional standards. You have to operate systems of quality control. The poor taskmasters have to scrutinize the reports before they go to clients, and most of the time they have to criticize them as superficial, or badly written, or just plain stupid.
This is hell for all concerned, including the taskmaster. He becomes a common scold, an obstructionist to be circumvented – by hook or by crook. The people whose work he excoriates may lose their self-confidence, or sulk, or walk out. It is an odious duty, but is part of “the will to manage.”
When a client hires Ogilvy & Mather – or McKinsey – he expects the best. If you don’t make sure that he gets it, you shortchange him – and he won’t come back for more.
A few years ago I had to draft a report for the British Export Marketing Advisory Committee. I rather fancy myself as a report-writer, and I have exorbitant standards when it comes to criticizing other people’s drafts. But this time I got my comeuppance, because one member of our Committee had far higher standards than I had. My God, he gave me a bad time, challenging every bloody paragraph. Guess who. Marvin Bower, that’s who.
From a talk to American Express executives, February 1981:
How do you know when you are getting old? It began to dawn on me when the United States elected President Kennedy; he was six years younger than me. Two years ago the Cardinals elected a Pope who is nine years younger than me. Now I am old enough to be your Chairman’s father – easily.
When you ask a man of my age to talk, you can be sure of two things. First, that he will talk about the past. Second, that he will talk with avuncular candor.
In 1959 John D. Rockefeller III asked me to sell the concept of Lincoln Center to the inhabitants of New York. I had a team of volunteers to help me. The best of those volunteers was a girl called Jean Selden.
Two years later Jean married Howard Clark – and suggested that he might want to hire Ogilvy & Mather. I have spent the subsequent eighteen years trying to justify Jean’s advocacy.
The man who was then President of our agency thought I was nuts to take your account. He said it was too small – about a million bucks, which had to cover Cheques, Cards and Travel. He told me, “Jesus Christ could perform a miracle by feeding the multitude with three loaves and two small fishes, but you ain’t Jesus Christ.”
So I waited for our President to go on vacation, and then signed up …
If I were Chairman of American Express, or head of one of your Divisions, I would keep asking myself eight questions:
(1) Do I encourage my people to bombard me with new ideas? Is the atmosphere around here creative and innovative, or dull and bureaucratic? Walter Wriston recently said, “There’s no reason you can’t have an innovative bureaucracy if you put out the word that fame and fortune come from rocking the boat.”
Creativity and innovation function best in an atmosphere of fun and foment. Creativity hardly functions at all in an atmosphere of politics and fear.
(2) I would ask myself, “Are we operating as a team, as a band of brothers? Or are we competing with each other like silly babies?”
(3) Are we freewheeling entrepreneurs, ready to take risks in new ventures? Or are we too frightened of making mistakes? When the toy-buyer at Sears made a mistake which cost his company 10 million bucks, I asked the head of Sears, “Are you going to fire him?” “Hell no,” he replied, “I fire people who don’t make mistakes.”
(4) Are we devoting too much time and money to salvaging our flops, our dry holes – and not enough to exploiting our breakthroughs?
(5) Are we leaders or followers? Do our competitors imitate us, or do we imitate them? You may remember Kipling’s long poem about Sir Anthony Gloster, the old shipping tycoon. On his deathbed, he is telling his son about his competitors:
On one of his visits to Chicago, unexpected circumstances caused David to be invited to three dinners in a week at the home of one of his longtime partners.
During the second dinner he carried on at such length about Post Grape Nuts being the ideal main course – “nourishing, easy to digest, doesn’t leave you feeling stuffed” – that his hostess felt obliged to put a heaping bowl of this nouvelle cuisine at his place when he showed up a third evening. He ate it with gusto and, back in France, sent her this postcard:
Dearest Marikay,
Never before in all my longish life has anyone else ever invited me to dinner three times in one week. Each dinner was better than the last, culminating in your triumphant Grape Nuts. Thank you, my dear … Love to you both from your grateful friend,
David
“They copied all they could follow,
But they couldn’t copy my mind.
And I left ’em sweating and stealing,
A year and a half behind.”
(6) Are we trying hard enough to create new products? How does our Research & Development compare with Merck, who invested $227 million in R&D last year? That’s about eight percent of their sales. IBM invests one billion dollars a year in R&D. In some companies it is easier to get a hundred million for an acquisition than one million for a new product.
(7) How do we stand with our customers – present and prospective? As long as we are rated tops by the consumers of our products, our position in the marketplace is unassailable …
(8) What are the Japanese up to? If they can outperform us in electronics and steel and even automobiles, don’t be surprised if one day they become a major threat to your business. The Japanese have four advantages over us in the West:
A. They take more interest in their employees. They have a saying, “Man, not the bottom line, is the measure of all things.” It seems to work.
B. They don’t have so many lawyers – one lawyer for every 10,000 people in Japan compared with twenty lawyers for every 10,000 people in the U.S. (No offense meant, you twenty-one lawyers here tonight.)
C. They don’t put their wise men out to pasture at the age of sixty-five. (This particularly appeals to me.)
D. They aren’t so obsessed with short-term profit. Short-term profits? What’s so great about short-term profits? I’ll tell you. They impress the jackasses on Wall Street. Ten years ago they valued your shares at $40. Today you are making five times as much profit, and they value your shares at $43. Can’t you find a way to emancipate your company from the stock market? There’s a challenge!
From a speech to the 50th Anniversary Luncheon of the Advertising Research Foundation, in New York, March 18, 1986:
… I started my career with George Gallup at Princeton. Gallup contributed more to advertising research than all the rest of us put together. I miss him dreadfully.
When I started Ogilvy & Mather, I wore two hats. On Thursdays and Fridays I was the Research Director. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I was the Creative Director. I was an hermaphrodite. Jekyll and Hyde. The age-old conflict between the Creative function and the Research function was fought out in my throbbing head.
As far as I know, I am the only creative genius who started his career in research. And now, in old age, I have returned to research, my first love. Alex Biel and I have started a Research and Development center within The Ogilvy Group. We are doing basic research, aided and abetted by some universities.
I have always looked at the creative function through the eyes of a researcher – which does not endear me to my fellow copywriters and art directors. And I look at research through the eyes of a copywriter.
Researchers bug me. They use such awful words – like ATTITUDINAL, PARADIGMS, DEMASSIFICATION, RECONCEPTUALIZE, SYMBIOTIC LINKAGE and so on. Pretentious bullshit.
They are so infernally slow, and their reports are so long. They are masters of NOT INVENTED HERE. One researcher’s methodology is another researcher’s poison.
Creative types also bug me. They are terrified of research – terrified that it will reveal that their genius is not infallible. They shut their eyes to the body of knowledge that we researchers have built up over the years …
As a copywriter, what I want from the researchers is to be told what kind of advertising will make the cash register ring. A creative person who knows nothing about plus and minus factors, and refuses to learn, may sometimes luck into a successful campaign. A blind pig may sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they grow under oak trees.
The advertising community is swimming in research nowadays. It is pouring out of universities, research outfits and advertising agencies. The trouble is that so little of it percolates down to the people on the firing line, like copywriters and art directors. It might be a good idea to declare a five-year moratorium on new research projects while we analyze the huge volume of discoveries that is gathering dust on the shelves.
Advertising is going through a bad period. Commercial clutter is worse than ever. The cost of media is ballooning. The cost of commercial production is scandalous. The problem of client conflicts is driving agencies round the bend. Worst of all, the trend to cut advertising budgets in favor of below-the-line deals is out of control.
The theme of this conclave is the Next 25 Years. I wonder how much advertising there will be 25 years from now? Do you realize what is going on? Manufacturers of package goods are now spending twice as much on below-the-line deals as on advertising. To put it another way, they are spending twice as much on price-cutting as on building brands. Promotion allowances to retailers are now running at $18 billion a year. They have doubled in the last six years.
Manufacturers are buying volume by price discounting, instead of earning it the old-fashioned way – using advertising to build strong brand franchises. As my partner Graham Phillips says, they are training consumers to buy on price instead of brand.
Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand. The financial rewards do not always come in next quarter’s earnings per share, but come they do. When Philip Morris bought General Foods for five billion dollars they were buying brands.
There used to be a prosperous brand of coffee called Chase & Sanborn. Then they started dealing. They became addicted to price-offs. Where is Chase & Sanborn today? In the cemetery. Dead as a doornail.
I have a habit of prophecy. Listen to three paragraphs from a speech I made to the 4As in 1955 – thirty-one years ago:*
The manufacturers who dedicate their advertising to building the most favorable image, the most sharply defined personality for their brand, are the ones who will get the largest share of market at the highest profit.
The time has come to sound an alarm, to warn our clients what is going to happen to their brands if they spend so much on deals that there is no money left for advertising to build their brand.
Deals don’t build the kind of indestructible image which is the only thing that can make your brand part of the fabric of American life.
I had a client called Bev Murphy. Bev invented Nielsen’s technique for measuring consumer purchases, and went on to be President of Campbell Soup Company. I once heard him say:
“Promotions cannot produce more than a temporary kink in the sales curve.”
Andrew Ehrenberg of the London Business School has one of the best brains in marketing today. Dr. Ehrenberg says:
“A cut-price offer can induce people to try a brand, but they return to their habitual brands as if nothing had happened.”
Why are so many brand managers addicted to price-cutting deals? Because the men who employ them are more interested in next quarter’s earnings than in building their brands. Why are they so obsessed with next quarter’s earnings? Because they are more concerned with their stock options than the future of their company.
Deals are a drug. Ask a drug-addicted brand manager what happens to his share of market after the delirium of the deal subsides. He will change the subject. Try asking him if the deal increased the profit. Again he will change the subject …
Marketers who have inherited brands built by their predecessors are dealing them to oblivion. Sooner or later they discover that they cannot deal brands which nobody has heard of. May the Lord have mercy on them.
Brands are the seed corn they have inherited. They are eating their seed corn.
These rascals who sell their product by cutting the price, expect me to sell my product at a cut price. Clients who haggle over agency compensation are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of trying to shave a few measly dollars off the agencies’ 15 percent, they should concentrate on getting more sales results from the 85 percent they invest in time and space. That is where the leverage is. No manufacturer ever got rich by underpaying his agency. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.
Sound an alarm! Advertising, not deals, builds brands.
Outside his study at Touffou – conducting his worldwide orchestra.
