A big account walks in. (From White Collar Zoo by Clare Barnes Jr.)
Here I go, boasting again. There are better copywriters than I am, and scores of better administrators, but I doubt if many people have matched my record as a new business collector.
In my Confessions, I told how I started by making a list of the clients I most wanted – General Foods, Lever Brothers, Bristol Myers, Campbell Soup Company and Shell. It took time, but in due course I got them all, plus American Express, Sears Roebuck, IBM, Morgan Guaranty, Merrill Lynch and a few others, including three governments. While some of these clients have since defected, their total billings with Ogilvy & Mather add up to more than three billion dollars – so far.
My policy has always been that of J.P. Morgan – ‘only first-class business, and that in a first-class way’ – but at first I had to take anything I could get, to pay the rent. A patent hairbrush, a tortoise, an English motorbike.
But I also had the good fortune to get four small accounts which gave me a chance to produce the kind of sophisticated advertising which attracts attention to an agency: Guinness, Hathaway shirts, Schweppes and Rolls-Royce.
The easiest way to get new clients is to do good advertising. During one period of seven years, we never failed to win an account for which we competed, and all I did was to show the campaigns we had created. Sometimes, I did not even have to do that. One afternoon, a man walked into my office without an appointment and gave me the IBM account; he knew our work.
This unparalleled run of success gave me a swelled head. When Dr. Anton Rupert told me that he had it in mind to market Rothmans cigarettes in the United States and asked me to do the advertising, I declined with such hubris that he said, ‘Mr. Ogilvy, I hope to meet you again – when you are on your way down.’ We did not meet again for 25 years, when we were both on the Executive Committee of the World Wildlife Fund. He is a great man.
In recent years, manufacturers have complicated the process of selecting agencies beyond reason. They start by sending long questionnaires to a dozen or more agencies. Idiotic questions like: ‘How many persons are employed in your print production department?’ To which I answered, ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea. I haven’t been in the department for seven years. Why do you think it matters?’
If you are more polite and give enough right answers, you get on the short list, and a delegation comes to inspect you. They want to know what commission you will charge. I answer, ‘If you are going to choose your agency on the basis of price, you are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. What you should worry about is not the price you pay for your agency’s services, but the selling power of your advertising.’
The selectors show scant interest in the campaigns you have produced for other manufacturers. They want to know what you could do for them, so they invite you to analyse their problems and make finished commercials. They then have your commercials tested. If you get a higher score than your competitors, you win the account.
Some agencies now spend as much as $500,000 on new business presentations. They figure that if they win and keep the account for 20 years, they may come out ahead. Agencies which don’t have the money to make such bets are at a disadvantage.
This long and expensive process does not necessarily result in the selection of the best agency. The agency which would create the best advertising over a period of years may not have the luck to come up with the best campaign in the few weeks allotted to the contest. In the next chapter I will suggest a better way to go about choosing an agency.
At the meeting when you make your presentation, don’t sit the client’s team on one side of the table and your team opposite, like adversaries. Mix everybody up.
Rehearse before the meeting, but never speak from a prepared text; it locks you into a position which may become irrelevant during the meeting.
Above all, listen. The more you get the prospective client to talk, the easier it will be to decide whether you really want his account. A former head of Magnavox treated me to a two-hour lecture on advertising, about which he knew nothing. I gave him a cup of tea and showed him out.
Tell your prospective client what your weak points are, before he notices them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points.
Don’t get bogged down in case histories or research numbers. They put prospects to sleep. No manufacturer ever hired an agency because it increased market-share for somebody else.
The day after a new business presentation, send the prospect a three-page letter summarizing the reasons why he should pick your agency. This will help him make the right decision.
If you are too feeble to get accounts under your own steam, you can buy them – by buying agencies. But this practice has a way of backfiring. Adolph Toigo used it to quintuple the billings of Lennen & Newell, but he was unable to weld his acquisitions into a cohesive body. The result was a quarrelsome confederation which ended in bankruptcy.
Watch out for credit risks. Your profit margin is too slim to survive a prospective client’s bankruptcy. When in doubt, I always ask the head of the incumbent agency.
Never pay a commission to an outsider who offers to introduce new business. No client who chooses his agency on the basis of such an introduction is worth having; and there is usually dirty work at the crossroads. Six weeks after I started my agency, I was so desperate for business that I offered a young man of my acquaintance 10 per cent of our stock if he brought in a vacuum-cleaner account which he had in his pocket. If he had accepted my offer, his stock in Ogilvy & Mather would now be worth $19,000,000. A lucky escape.
Some years later, when I was older and wiser, Ben Sonnenberg, the public-relations operator, asked me what percentage of our stock I would give him if he steered the Greyhound Bus account to us. When I said zero, he thought I was mad.
Avoid clients whose ethos is incompatible with yours. I refused Charles Revson of Revlon and Lew Rosenstiel of Schenley.
Beware of ventures which spend little or nothing today but might become major advertisers, if all goes well. Servicing such non-accounts can be expensive, and few of them make it. Yes, there are exceptions. I once made the mistake of turning down a small company which made office machinery, because I had never heard of it. The name was Xerox.
The differences between agencies are less than they like to believe. Most of them can show that they have produced advertising that increased sales for some of their clients. Most have competent media departments and research departments. Thanks to inflation, almost all of them have grown in billings. So what’s the difference between them?
Very often the decisive difference in new business contests is the personality of the head of the agency. Many clients went to Foote, Cone & Belding because they were impressed by Fax Cone’s style. Conversely, many failures to win accounts are caused by the fact that the prospective client finds the head of the agency obnoxious. My personality has lost some contests and won others.
Aside: I have resigned accounts five times as often as I have been fired, and always for the same reason: the client’s behavior was eroding the morale of the people working on his account. Erosion of morale does unacceptable damage to an agency.
If you get an account which also advertises in overseas markets, you stand a good chance of getting it around the world. I call this the domino system of new business acquisition. J. Walter Thompson, McCann-Erickson and Young & Rubicam built their overseas networks to meet the needs of such multinationals as General Motors, Coca Cola, Esso and General Foods. When I got the Shell account in the United States, Max Burns, the then President of Shell, asked me if I would also like to have the account in Canada. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but I don’t have an office in Canada.’ ‘Get one,’ said Max, and that is how I started the network which was to spread to 40 countries.
In these cases your competition will be the local agencies in the countries concerned. They have a habit of wrapping themselves in their national flag and appealing to their governments for protection against us foreign invaders. They accuse us of imposing an alien culture, particularly in countries which have little culture of their own, and in some cases their appeals have been heard. The Canadian Government employs only Canadian agencies. In Nigeria, the foreign agencies have been expelled.
The fact is that almost all the overseas offices of American agencies are managed by nationals who would not know how to project American culture, even if they were foolish enough to try.
Multinational accounts have propelled agencies into the international market. Shell was responsible for my building a worldwide network of agencies. This Shell ad is from Ogilvy & Mather’s Frankfurt office.
The old way to start a new agency was to defect from the agency which employed you and take some clients with you. Thus Ted Bates started his agency with accounts he had handled at Benton & Bowles. But this gambit has since been hampered by a legal decision. A man called Jones had a thriving agency, but he was an alcoholic and was always falling asleep during presentations. His associates begged him to retire. When the situation became intolerable, they crossed the street and set up their own agency – with some of Jones’s clients. He sued them for conspiracy and won; they had to pay such heavy damages that they were forced to close their agency.
In 1981 an agency in New Zealand took successful action against its former Managing Director and Creative Director who had walked out with 17 members of the staff and nine accounts. Gentle reader, you have been warned.
With any luck, you will get accounts which grow. When I got American Express in 1962, the advertising budget was $1,000,000. It is now $70,000,000.
When you are head of an agency, you know that your staff looks to you to bring in new business, more than anything else. If you fail to do so over an extended period, you sense that you are losing their confidence, and are tempted to grab any account you can get. Don’t. Above all, don’t join the melancholy procession of agencies which always accompanies a dying brand on its way to the cemetery. When Pan American fell on hard times, they moved their account from J. Walter Thompson, who had done an exceptionally good job for 29 years, to Carl Ally. Seven years later, when they continued to decline, they moved to N. W. Ayer. Three years later, they moved to Doyle Dane Bernbach. Six months later they moved to Wells, Rich, Greene. But this kind of instability is rare. The American Telephone Company, General Motors and Exxon have employed the same agencies for more than 70 years; DuPont, General Electric, Procter & Gamble and Scott Paper have employed the same agencies for more than 50 years.
It is important to know how your agency is regarded in the marketing community. Don’t trust your own ears; you will only hear favorable opinions. It is safer, if you can afford it, to have a research organization conduct an impartial survey. When they report weak spots in your reputation, you can probably correct them, but it will take longer than you expect. Opinion always lags behind reality.
If you aspire to building a portfolio of accounts in a wide variety of industries, you must be able to produce different kinds of advertising. An agency which can only play the package-goods tune disqualifies itself from corporate accounts. An agency which always produces emotional advertising is unlikely to be hired by a manufacturer of power tools. The broader your range, the broader the spectrum of accounts you will get.
It follows that you should recruit people with a wide range of talents. An agency should be like an orchestra, able to play anything from Palestrina to Jean-Michel Jarre with equal virtuosity.
It is very difficult for small agencies to get big accounts. They cannot afford the range of specialized departments which big accounts require – regional offices, research, sales promotion, direct mail, public relations, and so on. They cannot deploy enough bodies to match the bodies at the client end. And the risk of losing a big client scares them out of that independence of judgment which should be one of any agency’s principal values to its clients.
The other side of the coin is that the bigger an agency grows, the more bureaucratic it becomes. Personal leadership gives way to hierarchy. The head of the agency no longer recognizes his staff in the elevators. I found working at Ogilvy & Mather more agreeable when it was small, but as I aspired to handling big accounts, I had no choice but to build a big agency.
However, there will always be more small accounts than big ones, so small agencies are not an endangered species. Within the limits of their resources, they can often out-perform the big ones. Creativity is not a function of size. Small can be beautiful.
It puzzles me why so few agencies advertise themselves. Perhaps it is because the partners cannot agree on what to say. Some want to improve their agency’s reputation for ‘creativity.’ Some want to impress prospective clients with their agency’s marketing skills. Some want new business leads in a hurry. Make up your mind which you want – before you start writing house ads.
Direct mail is probably the most efficient medium for your house campaign. If you can scrape up the money, use space advertising as well, but don’t start it unless you mean to do it consistently. Young & Rubicam advertised in every issue of Fortune for 40 years.
Advertising agencies seldom take their own medicine, but Young & Rubicam advertised in every issue of Fortune for 40 years. This was the fifth ad in the series and the best ever run for an agency. Raymond Rubicam wrote it and Vaughn Flannery was the art director.
With these house ads, Ogilvy & Mather tell potential clients about the agency’s wide-ranging expertise.
Left alone, copywriters write house ads to impress other copywriters, and art directors make layouts to impress other art directors. But trendy layouts and fancy copy don’t impress prospective clients who have come up through finance, production or sales. Writing house ads is a job for copywriters who can think like top-level businessmen. They should also be endowed with patience; it took me 22 years to get my first house ads approved by my partners.
The purpose of my ads was to project the agency as knowing more about advertising. You may argue that this strategy was ill-advised, knowledge being no guarantee of ‘creativity.’ But at least it was unique, because no other agency could have run such advertisements – they lacked the required knowledge. My ads not only promised useful information, they provided it. And they worked – in many countries.
But watch out: your clients will read your house advertisements. If you boast about your genius for brilliant ideas, you run the risk that they will ask you why you don’t give them brilliant ideas.
