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| David Ogilvy
A well-run restaurant is like a winning baseball team. It makes the most of every crew member's talent and takes advantage of every split-second opportunity to speed up service. A well-run restaurant is like a winning baseball team. It makes the most of every crew member's talent and takes advantage of every split-second opportunity to speed up service.Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. Claude Hopkins... maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock. Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark. Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark. Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image. First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround youself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them go get on with it. Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it's Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it's Jack Daniel's. Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images. Good copy can't be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You've got to believe in the product. I always said that mega-mergers were for megalomaniacs.I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix. They have an awkward tendency to raid their advertising appropriations whenever they need cash for other purposes. I did not feel 'evil' when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years. I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive. I know of a brewer who sells more of his beer to the people who never see his advertising than to the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell a product. I never tell one client that I cannot attend his sales convention because I have a previous engagement with another client; successful polygamy depends upon pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach. I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination. I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word INEFFABLE, only to discover that I didn't know what it meant myself. If each of us hires people smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If each of us hires people smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs.If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out - either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time.In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy. It is important to admit your mistakes, and to do so before you are charged with them. Many clients are surrounded by buckpassers who make a fine art of blaming the agency for their own failures. I seize the earliest opportunity to assume the blame. It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea. Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns. Make sure you have a Vice President in charge of Revolution, to engender ferment among your more conventional colleagues. Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped. Many people - and I think I am one of them - are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write.Most agencies run scared, most of the time... Frightened people are powerless to produce good advertising...If I were a client, I would do everything in my power to emancipate my agencies from fear, even to the extent of giving them long-term contracts. Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom. 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. Talent ... is most likely to be found among non-conformists, dissenters, and rebels.The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife.The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account. The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.To advertisers: Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself? What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it. |
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