From a paper written in 1968 as a guide for Ogilvy & Mather managers worldwide:
I have been managing Ogilvy & Mather for twenty years. I have learned from my own mistakes, from the counsel of my partners, from the literature, from George Gallup, Raymond Rubicam and Marvin Bower.
Now I want to share with you what I know about managing Ogilvy & Mather.
I have no desire to impose my personal style on the rest of you. Nor do I seek to freeze the style of Ogilvy & Mather after I retire. I hope that future generations will improve upon the Principles I enunciate in this paper.
Ogilvy & Mather is not a mere holding company for a group of independent agencies in different countries. It is one agency indivisible.
Our clients must see no basic differences of style between any of our offices. Ogilvy & Mather must never become a company of incompetent amateurs in one country, superb professionals in a second, waffling bumblers in a third.
In this paper, I will set down the principles of management which, in my judgment, are most likely to make our company prosper.
If you endorse these principles, promulgate them, apply them, add to them and revise them during the years to come, our offices will be inspired by unanimity of purpose. This will give Ogilvy & Mather a competitive edge over international agencies which lack such unanimity.
Ogilvy & Mather is dedicated to seven purposes:
1. To serve our clients more effectively than any other agency.
2. To earn an increased profit every year.
3. To maintain high ethical standards.
4. To run the agency with a sense of competitive urgency.
5. To keep our services up-to-date.
6. To make Ogilvy & Mather the most exciting agency to work in.
7. To earn the respect of the community.
Ogilvy & Mather is in business to earn a profit through superior service to clients.
The Board of Directors agrees on the profit objectives of each office. The governing consideration is the forward thrust of the entire agency.
Profit is not always synonymous with billing. We pursue profit – not billing. The chief opportunities for increasing our profit lie in:
1. Increasing income from present clients.
2. Getting new clients.
3. Separating passengers without delay.
4. Discontinuing boondoggles and obsolete services:
To keep your ship moving through the water at maximum efficiency, you have to keep scraping the barnacles off its bottom. It is rare for a department head to recommend the abolition of a job, or even the elimination of a man; the pressure from below is always for adding. If the initiative for barnacle-scraping does not come from Management, barnacles will never be scraped.
5. Avoiding duplication of function – two men doing a job which one can do.
6. Increasing productivity.
7. Reducing wheel-spinning in the creative area.
8. Putting idle capital to work.
Advertising agencies are fertile ground for office politics. You should work hard to minimize them, because they take up energy which can better be devoted to our clients; some agencies have been destroyed by internal politics. Here are some ways to minimize them:
1. Always be fair and honest in your own dealings; unfairness and dishonesty at the top can demoralize an agency.
2. Never hire relatives or friends.
3. Sack incurable politicians.
4. Crusade against paper warfare. Encourage your people to air their disagreements face-to-face.
5. Discourage secrecy.
6. Discourage poaching.
7. Compose sibling rivalries.
I want all our people to believe that they are working in the best agency in the world. A sense of pride works wonders.
The best way to “install a generator” in a man is to give him the greatest possible responsibility. Treat your subordinates as grown-ups – and they will grow up. Help them when they are in difficulty. Be affectionate and human, not cold and impersonal.
It is vitally important to encourage free communication upward. Encourage your people to be candid with you. Ask their advice – and listen to it.
At a question-and-answer session after a recent talk, David was asked to comment, from the vantage point of his decades in the business, on the future of advertising.
“I have a diminishing interest in the future,” he replied.
Senior men and women have no monopoly on great ideas. Nor do Creative people. Some of the best ideas come from account executives, researchers and others. Encourage this; you need all the ideas you can get.
Encourage innovation. Change is our lifeblood, stagnation our death knell.
Do not summon people to your office – it frightens them. Instead, go to see them in their offices. This makes you visible throughout the agency. An office head who never wanders about the agency becomes a hermit, out of touch with the staff.
The physical appearance of our offices is important, because it says so much about Ogilvy & Mather. If they are decorated in bad taste, we are yahoos. If they look old-fashioned, we are fuddy-duddies. If they are too pretentious, we are stuffed shirts. If they are untidy, we are inefficient.
Our offices must look efficient, contemporary, cheerful and functional.
I believe in the Scottish proverb: Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict and disease. They do not die of hard work. The harder your people work, the happier and healthier they will be.
Try to make working at Ogilvy & Mather fun. When people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good advertising. Kill grimness with laughter. Maintain an atmosphere of informality. Encourage exuberance. Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom.
But good morale also requires our top people to be eternally vigilant as to the discipline in their offices. The staff must be made to arrive on time. Telephones must be answered promptly and politely. Filing must be kept up-to-date. Due dates must be kept.
Security must be policed. Indiscretion in elevators and restaurants, premature use of typesetters and Photostat houses, premature display of new campaigns on bulletin boards and indiscreet gossip can do serious damage to our clients and even lose accounts.
It is also the duty of our top people to sustain unremitting pressure on the professional standards of their staffs. They must not tolerate sloppy plans or mediocre creative work. In our competitive business, it is suicide to settle for second-rate performance.
Training should not be confined to trainees. It should be a continuous process, and should include the entire professional staff of the agency. The more our people learn, the more useful they can be to our clients.
One of the most priceless assets Ogilvy & Mather can have is the respect of our clients and of the whole business community.
This comes from the following:
1. Our offices must always be headed by the kind of people who command respect. Not phonies, zeros or bastards.
2. Always be honest in your dealings with clients. Tell them what you would do if you were in their shoes.
3. If we do a good job for our clients, that will become known. We will smell of success, and that will bring us respect.
4. If we treat our employees well, they will speak well of Ogilvy & Mather to their friends. Assuming that each employee has 100 friends, 250,000 people now have friends who work for Ogilvy & Mather. Among them are present and prospective clients.
5. In meeting with clients, do not assume the posture of servants. They need you as much as you need them.
6. While you are responsible to your clients for sales results, you are also responsible to consumers for the kind of advertising you bring into their homes. Your aim should be to create advertising that is in good taste. I abhor advertising that is blatant, dull, or dishonest. Agencies which transgress this principle are not widely respected.
7. We must pull our weight as good citizens.
The paramount problem you face is this: advertising is one of the most difficult functions in industry, and too few brilliant people want careers in advertising.
The challenge is to recruit people who are able enough to do the difficult work our clients require from us.
1. Make a conscious effort to avoid recruiting dull, pedestrian hacks.
2. Create an atmosphere of ferment, innovation and freedom. This will attract brilliant recruits.
If you ever find a man who is better than you are – hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself.
In recruitment and promotion we are fanatical in our hatred for all forms of prejudice. We have no prejudice for or against Roman Catholics, Protestants, Negroes, Aristocracy, Jews, Agnostics or foreigners.
Each Ogilvy & Mather office is a partnership of individual practitioners. Our growth depends on our ability to develop a large cadre of able partners.
Each of our offices has a managing partner. The total responsibility for the office rests on his shoulders. However, if he is wise, he will treat his lieutenants as equals.
If he treats them as subordinates, they will be less effective in their jobs; they will come to resent their subordination – and leave. Only second-raters accept permanent subordination.
For this reason our Top Management in each country should function like a round table, presided over by a managing partner who is big enough to be effective in the role of primus inter pares, without having to rely on the overt discipline of a military hierarchy – with its demeaning pecking order.
This egalitarian structure encourages independence, responsibility and loyalty. It reduces the agency’s dependence on ONE MAN, who is often fallible, sometimes absent and always mortal. It ensures continuity of style from generation to generation.
No office in the Ogilvy & Mather group has a monopoly on brains. The more we bring the resources of our offices to bear on each other’s problems, the better. This requires close liaison at many levels; it also requires that each of our agencies conquer their chauvinism.
If we help each other, the sum of our individual parts will give us a competitive advantage over international agencies which allow iron curtains to separate their offices from each other.
It is as difficult to sustain happy partnerships as to sustain happy marriages. The challenge can be met if those concerned practice these restraints:
1. Have clear-cut divisions of responsibility.
2. Don’t poach on the other fellow’s preserves.
3. Live and let live; nobody is perfect.
4. “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
It is impossible for our office heads to carry the whole load of leadership single-handed. Their partners and department heads must be islands of leadership – inspiring, explaining, disciplining and counseling.
It is not enough for people at this level to concern themselves only with their professional function; they must also be leaders.
In selecting heads of service departments, it is not always wise to select those whose professional qualifications are the best; outstanding professionals do not always turn out to be good leaders. It is often better to give management jobs on the basis of leadership ability, leaving the professionals to practice their profession.
This is particularly true in the creative area. Some of the best copywriters and art directors make poor Creative Directors. If you give them recognition in terms of salary and glory, you can persuade them to let others pass them on the administrative ladder, while they continue to create the campaigns on which the whole agency depends.
The management of manpower resources is one of the most important duties of our office heads. It is particularly important for them to spot people of unusual promise early in their careers, and to move them up the ladder as fast as they can handle increased responsibility.
There are five characteristics which suggest to me that a person has the potential for rapid promotion:
1. He is ambitious.
2. He works harder than his peers – and enjoys it.
3. He has a brilliant brain – inventive and unorthodox.
4. He has an engaging personality.
5. He demonstrates respect for the creative function.
If you fail to recognize, promote and reward young people of exceptional promise, they will leave you; the loss of an exceptional man can be as damaging as the loss of an account.
I think that the creative function is the most important of all. The heads of our offices should not relegate their key creative people to positions below the salt. They should pay them, house them and respect them as indispensable Stars.
I respect the value of Management Supervisors. At their best, they keep the agency out of turbulence; keep service costs under control; emancipate the office heads from perpetual fire-fighting; and stimulate our service departments to do good work for clients, thus winning new business of the most profitable kind.
Our Management Supervisors are equivalent to the partners in great law firms. They must be stable, courageous, persuasive, professional and imaginative. They must work in fruitful partnership with our creative people – neither bullying them nor knuckling under to them.
Above all, they must have the thrust of independent entrepreneurs. This is not a job for lazy, frightened mediocrities; nor is it a job for superficial “contact” men.
Intellectual snobbery towards clients is common – and dangerous. When a Management Supervisor comes to regard his client as a boob, he should be transferred to another account. While our clients may not always be good judges of advertising, their jobs are broader than ours; they have to encompass areas about which we are ignorant – research and development, production, logistics, sales management, labor relations, etc.
I respect the importance of our Treasurers. They must carry the guns to make their voices heard in our management councils. They must be tough and unafraid. They must be privy to all our secrets – and they must be discreet.
No agency has greater respect for the importance of the research function – particularly in the creative area. The most valuable quality in a Research Director is his scientific integrity. A dishonest Research Director can do appalling damage to any agency.
It is also important that a Research Director be able to work sympathetically with our creative people.
And he should be able to use research fast and cheaply.
The most difficult decisions which confront our managements are decisions as to which accounts to take and which to reject. The primary considerations should be:
1. Does anyone in Top Management really want the account? We should never take an account unless at least one key man can approach it with enthusiasm.
2. Can good advertising sell the product? It does not pay to take on terminal cases.
3. Would it be a happy marriage? Unhappy marriages do not fructify – and do not last.
4. Will the account contribute significantly to our profits? Has it significant potential for growth?
5. If we take this account will it risk losing us another account – anywhere?
6. Will the account involve heavy risks? An account that bills more than 30 percent of the total billing in an office places the whole office at risk, and this is irresponsible. (In the early days of a new office, it makes sense to accept this risk.)
Try to avoid new business contests when the prospective client is going to publish the names of the contenders. Only one agency can win; the others will be publicly branded as failures. We like to succeed in public, to fail in private.
The best way to get new accounts is to create for our present clients the kind of advertising that will attract prospective clients.
We do not have New Business departments in our offices. No first-class man will take the job; no second-class man can do it effectively.
The prime responsibility for new business must lie with heads of offices. They should not allow Management Supervisors to spend too much time in this area; their prime responsibility must always be to our present clients.
We do not handle political party accounts. Our reasons are:
1. They preempt too much of the time of our top men, thereby causing trouble with our permanent clients.
2. When an agency espouses one party, it is unfair to those of our people who are rooting for the other party.
3. By identifying the agency with one party, we would incur the enmity of important people in the other party; we cannot afford this.
However, good citizenship requires us to encourage our people to participate in political life – in their private capacity.
In the same way, we applaud when they make their special skills available to charitable causes.
It is reasonable for our office heads to involve their offices in helping non-political charities which are of special interest to them.
If you resign accounts every time you feel like doing so, you will empty your portfolio every year. However, there are two circumstances in which resignation is the wisest choice:
1. When the agency would be more profitable without the account; this is uncommon.
2. When the client bullies the agency to such an extent that the morale of your staff is seriously impaired and starts hurting their performance on other accounts.
In all countries where it is legal, we offer clients a choice of fee or commission. Fees offer five advantages over commissions:
1. The agency can be more objective in its recommendations; or so many clients believe.
2. The agency has adequate incentive to provide non-commissionable services if needed.
3. The agency’s income is stabilized. Unforeseen cuts in advertising expenditure do not result in red figures or temporary personnel layoffs.
4. The fee enables the agency to make a fair profit on services rendered. The advertiser, in turn, pays for what he gets – no more, no less.
5. Every fee account pays its own way. Unprofitable accounts do not ride on the coattails of profitable accounts.
Then there is the commission system, and some clients prefer it.
Both systems will continue for years to come. We should be open-minded about our use of them.
A dinner address to the Directors of The Ogilvy Group, and to the heads of a number of The Group’s agencies, in London at Fishmongers Hall, June 1985:
Three years ago Terrence Deal and Allen Kennedy wrote a book about corporate culture. They said:
“The people who built the companies for which America is famous, all worked obsessively to create strong cultures within their organizations.
“Companies that have cultivated their individual identities by shaping values, making heroes, spelling out rites and rituals, and acknowledging the cultural network have an edge.”
Now the concept of corporate culture has caught on in a big way, not only in the U.S.A., but also in England. In a recent article, Frances Cairncross of The Economist wrote, “The common characteristic of success is the deliberate creation of a corporate culture.”
I have been wondering if Ogilvy & Mather has a corporate culture. Apparently we do.
The head of one of the biggest agencies recently told us, “Yours is the only agency in the world with a real corporate culture.”
We seem to have an exceptionally strong culture. Indeed, it may be this, more than anything else, which differentiates us from our competitors.
It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to write it down. I have put it in the form of a letter to Bill Phillips. He has asked me to read it aloud to you. Here goes.
Dear Bill:
You have asked me to describe our corporate culture as I see it.
Corporate culture is a compound of many things – tradition, mythology, ritual, customs, habits, heroes, peculiarities, and values.
Here is how I see our culture.
Some of our people spend their entire working lives in our agency. We do our damnedest to make it a happy experience. I put this first, believing that superior service to our clients and profits for our stockholders depend on it.
We treat our people like human beings. We help them when they are in trouble – with their jobs, with illness, with alcoholism, and so on.
We help our people make the best of their talents. We invest an awful lot of time and money in training – perhaps more than any of our competitors.
Our system of management is singularly democratic.
RUSSIAN DOLLS
(from an interview)
OGILVY: When you hire people from outside, it’s very important how you do it. We had a board meeting some time ago, and every director had at his place one of those Russian dolls.
I said: “That’s you. Open it.”
So they opened the doll, and inside was a smaller one. And they opened it up and each doll got smaller and smaller. And finally, when they got to the very inside, in the smallest doll they found a tiny piece of paper on which I had written a motto.
When they unfolded it, it said: “If you always hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.”
We don’t like hierarchical bureaucracy or rigid pecking orders.
We abhor ruthlessness.
We give our executives an extraordinary degree of freedom and independence.
We like people with gentle manners. Our New York office goes so far as to give an annual award for “professionalism combined with civility.” The Jules Fine Award, named after the first winner.
We like people who are honest. Honest in argument, honest with clients, honest with suppliers, honest with the company – and above all, honest with consumers.
We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough.
We do not admire superficial people.
We despise office politicians, toadies, bullies and pompous asses.
We discourage paper warfare. The way up the ladder is open to everybody. We are free from prejudice of any kind – religious prejudice, racial prejudice or sexual prejudice.
We detest nepotism and every other form of favouritism.
In promoting people to top jobs, we are influenced as much by their character as anything else.
Like all companies with a strong culture, we have our heroes – the Old Guard who have woven our culture. By no means have all of them been members of top management. They include people like Borgie, our immortal Danish typographer. Shelby Page, who was our Treasurer and Chief Iconoclast in New York for 34 years. Arthur Wilson, the roving English art director who is the funniest man in our history. Paul Biklen, who has shepherded thousands of us through training programs. And Joel Raphaelson, editor of Viewpoint, veteran copywriter, lanternist, and ghostwriter extraordinary.
The recommendations we make to clients are the recommendations we would make if we owned their companies, without regard to our own short-term interest. This earns their respect, which is the greatest asset an agency can have.
What most clients want from agencies is superior creative work. We put the creative function at the top of our priorities.
A MATTER OF UNIMPORTANCE
One Vice President, ambitious to become a Senior Vice President, had a meeting with David on a number of matters. He brought along a typed agenda. The last item was Senior Vice Presidency.
With a couple of points still to go, something urgent came up and brought the meeting to an abrupt end. The Vice President left, forgetting his agenda, which David found later and returned to him with a handwritten note:
“I believe we covered all the important items.”
The line between pride in our work and neurotic obstinacy is a narrow one. We do not grudge clients the right to decide what advertising to run. It is their money.
Many of our clients employ us in several countries. It is important for them to know that they can expect the same standards of behavior in all our offices. That is one reason why we want our culture to be more or less the same everywhere.
We try to sell our clients’ products without offending the mores of the countries where we do business. And without cheating the consumer.
We attach importance to discretion. Clients don’t appreciate agencies which leak their secrets. Nor do they like it when an agency takes credit for their success. To get between a client and the footlights is bad manners.
We take new business very seriously, and have a passion for winning. But we play fair vis-à-vis our competitors.
We have a habit of divine discontent with our performance. It is an antidote to smugness.
Our far-flung enterprise is held together by a network of personal friendships. We all belong to the same club.
We like reports and correspondence to be well written, easy to read – and short.
We are revolted by pseudo-academic jargon, like attitudinal, paradigms, demassification, reconceptualise, suboptimal, symbiotic linkage, splinterisation, dimensionalisation.
Some of us write books.
We use the word partner in referring to each other. This says a mouthful.
We take our Christmas get-togethers seriously. On these elaborate occasions we take our entire staff into our confidence – and give them a rollicking good time.
When we opened the New York office in 1948, I had it painted battleship grey. The result was depressing, so I changed to white walls and red carpets. Most of our offices are still white and red.
Through maddening repetition, some of my obiter dicta have been woven into our culture. Here are ten of them:
1. “Ogilvy & Mather – one agency indivisible.”
2. “We sell – or else.”
3. “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.”
4. “Raise your sights! Blaze new trails” “Compete with the immortals!!!”
5. “I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles.”
6. “We hire gentlemen with brains.”
7. “The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Don’t insult her intelligence.”
8. “Unless your campaign contains a Big Idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”
9. “Only First Class business, and that in a First Class way.”
10. “Never run an advertisement you would not want your own family to see.”
This letter describes our culture as I see it. How do outsiders see it? A recent survey among advertisers and other agencies revealed that our New York office is seen as “sophisticated, imaginative, disciplined, objective and exciting.” This describes exactly the culture I have devoted 36 years to cultivating.
The head of another agency recently told us, “You are not only the leaders of our industry, you are gentlemen, you are teachers and you make us proud to be in the advertising business.”
David
In Houston in 1980.
