Founders - #169 David Ogilvy (The King of Madison Avenue)

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

What I learned from reading The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising by Kenneth Roman. ----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----One characteristic of geniuses, said Einstein, is they are passionately curious. Ogilvy’s great secret was an inquiring mind.In conversation, he never pontificated; he interrogated.There were piles of books all over his house, most about successful leaders in business and government. He was interested in how they used their leadership. How they made their money. He was interested in people — people who had accomplished remarkable things.Reading Ogilvy’s short autobiography is like having dinner with a charming raconteur.His Scottish grandfather is portrayed as cold — hearted, formidable, and successful — and his hero. When you write a book about advertising, you’re competing with midgets. When you write an autobiography, you’re competing with giants.He took the occasion to remind everyone that he was not a big shot at school. I wasn’t a scholar. I detested the philistines who ruled the roost. I was an irreconcilable rebel — a misfit. In short, I was a dud. Fellow duds, take heart! There is no correlation between success at school and success in life.If you can’t advertise yourself, what hope do you have of being able to advertise anything else?Although he entered advertising to make money, Ogilvy had become interested — obsessively interested — in the business itself. He said he had read every book that had been written on the subject, and, as a young man, had reason to believe he would be good at it and would enjoy it. Since American advertising was years ahead of advertising anywhere else, he decided to study the trade where it was done best.Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times (Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins). Every time I see a bad advertisement, I say to myself, “The man who wrote this copy has never read Claude Hopkins.”In print, it should lead with a headline that offers a consumer benefit. Often it should rely on long text packed with facts. “The more you tell, the more you sell,” as he would later preach.David also learned something about writing from his time in the intelligence service. Stephenson was a master of the terse note. Memos to him were returned swiftly to the sender with one of three words written at the top of the page: YES, NO, or SPEAK, meaning to come see him.Here Ogilvy describes himself as of the day he started the agency: “He is 38 and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He has been a cook, a salesman and a diplomat. He knows nothing about marketing and has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will hire him.Like De Gaulle, he felt that praise should be a rare commodity lest you devalue the currency.He had a near psychopathic hatred of laziness in all its forms. He was the least lazy person I have ever encountered. His advertising philosophy was shot through with intolerance of sloth. Lazy people accept mediocrity, which he hated.You cannot bore people into buying. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they cannot create them. Compromise has no place in advertising. Whatever you do, go the whole hog. You can’t save souls in an empty church.American Express built its business in part with an effective direct mail letter that started: “Quite frankly, the American Express Card is not for everyone.”I am a lousy copywriter. But a good editor.My crusade is in favor of advertising which sells. My war cry is: “We Sell. Or Else.” This has been my philosophy for 50 years, and I have never wavered from it, no matter what the temptations have been.Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

He was 52 and famous. I was 33 and a junior account executive. Early on, he wrote a letter to one of my clients. After listing eight reasons why some ads prepared by their company's design department would not be effective, he delivered his ultimate argument. The only thing that can be said in favor of the layouts is that they are different. You could make a cow look different by removing the udder, but that cow would not produce results. So began my David file. Almost everyone who worked at the agency kept one. Almost everyone who brushed up against the man has a David story. Over my next 26 years, there were more such lessons, countless meetings with him around the world, and many more

memos and letters. Eventually, when I became his third successor as chairman, I no longer reported to him technically, but he was always a formidable presence. We all thought of the agency as his company. While Ogilvy disclosed much about his life in three books and several hundred interviews, what he could not do is assess his own legacy and its relevance today. This biography, the first, aims to provide that perspective and impart a sense of his quotable brilliance. Ogilvy's insights go beyond advertising to leadership and apply to almost any professional organization. I also will try to bring alive his idiosyncratic and vivid personality. World War II had been over for only three years when 39-year-old David Ogilvy, an English immigrant with almost no experience in advertising opened up shop in 1948. Although his

offices were on Madison Avenue, the rulers of the realm at that time had no reason to take notice of him. Within a few years, Ogilvy was counted as one of them. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The King of Madison Avenue, David Ogilvie and the Making of Modern Advertising by Kenneth Roman. And this is the third podcast I've done on David Ogilvie. Since I started this project four years ago, he is by far one of my favorite people that I've, I didn't know anything about him before I started Founders. And he's one of my favorite people I've come to know. If you want to go back and listen to this podcast, I think it's Founders number 82 and Founders number 89. And this is the first book on him that wasn't written by him. So I have a ton of highlights. Let's go ahead and jump right into the book. I wanted before there's some interesting

things from his early life that I want to pull out. But I found a couple sections on his personality that I think telling you up front in case this is your first introduction to the legend and the genius that is David Ogilvie, that'll give you a good idea of why he's such an interesting person and somebody that we should all learn from. So last week, or I guess in the bonus episode last week, we talked about, there's this phrase from that book, Freedom's Forge, that talks about Henry Kaiser, and they called him a suction cup because he would constantly, he would just milk everybody around him for any useful information that they had. David is very much like that. Sam Walton was also the same way.

And so this section talks a little bit about that personality, the aspect of David Ogilvie's personality. So it says, one characteristic of geniuses, said Einstein, is that they are passionately curious. Ogilvie's great secret was an inquiring mind. In conversation, he never pontificated. He interrogated. At dinner with a copywriter and her husband, who worked in the oil business, Ogilvy quizzed the man at length about the oil situation in the Middle East. A woman who sat next to him at dinner said that by dessert, he knew more about her than her mother. He would pump people for information so not only would he do this in conversation but he also understood that the value of reading and that

nothing can actually substitute for it so it says a zealous student of the business ogilvy claimed that he had read every book about advertising and this this is an important part and disdained others who felt they didn't need this knowledge so So in other books, he doesn't mince words about this. He says, if you're failing to study the history of your profession, if you're not reading as much as possible, he calls you an ignorant amateur. There were piles of books all over his house. This is really interesting. What is he reading though, right? Most about successful leaders in business and government. He was interested in how they use their leadership, how they made their money. He was interested in people,

people who had accomplished remarkable things. So what are they telling us? He read a lot of biographies. He's not very different than you and I. That's the entire thesis behind founders, right? This is really fascinating. I didn't know. I don't know how I missed this. And I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to atone for my sins, but he actually wrote an autobiography. I don't know. Again, I'm shocked that I just discovered this book by reading The King of Madison Avenue. So this is actually his autobiography. And he wrote it all the way back in 1978. So it says in 1978, he wrote an autobiography, Blood, Brains, and Beer. And this is going to give you an insight into just the eclectic. He's a very eclectic person, obviously, but he also came from a very eclectic family. And so why did he name his autobiography Blood, Brains, and Beer? The title

came from his father's bizarre directive that when David was six years old to drink a glass of raw blood every day for strength and eat calves brains three times a week to expand mental faculties that's what his dad believed at least and all to be washed down with bottles of beer who's going to give that advice to their six-year-old uh and then this is kenneth the the author of this book talking about what it's like reading david's autobiography which is a fantastic fantastic description he says reading that short autobiography is like having dinner with a charming raconteur. The only thing I know of myself is reading autobiographies is like having a one-sided conversation with some of history's greatest people. I love the idea that he says it's like having dinner with a charming raconteur.

He describes, now back to the description of Ogilvy writing in his autobiography about his family. He describes his father as warm-hearted, affectionate, and a failure. His Scottish grandfather is portrayed as cold-hearted, formidable, and successful, and his hero. So his blueprint in life, as you'll come to learn today, is his grandfather, not his father. This is very interesting, that word. This is already the second time the book has used this word. If I had one word to describe, now having spent countless, not countless hours, maybe dozens, maybe 20 hours reading the writing of David Ogilvie and getting to know him, that is how I would describe him. Formidable.

That is a great word. I want to look up the definition real quick. And because I think what I need to tell you what I mean by that. So the definition on Google is inspiring fear or respect through being impressively large, powerful, intense and capable. So I'm going to give you my own definition of what I think formidable means for the life of David Olgrafi. Inspiring respect through being impressively intense or capable. He's not trying to get you to fear him. He's not collecting power. He is a capable, formidable individual. And the ideas that he learned through multiple decades of his career will make you more capable. That's the whole point of reading these books, right? This is David on why his autobiography did not sell very well,

especially it was published after Confessions of an Advertising Man, which I covered back on Founders No. 89. So it's interesting that the autobiography did not sell, considering that book sold like crazy. So it says, as successful as Ogilvy's other books would be, he admitted this one was a bust. He said he knew the reason. When you write a book about advertising, you're competing with midgets.

When you write an autobiography, you're competing with giants. And right there, that's one of the things I love the most about David Ogilvie, the amount of information he's able to convey in such short, those are two sentences, and it tells entire stories. Later in the book, I'm going to bring this to the front though. He was reading biographies when he was a young person but he kept that that uh that habit his entire life this is i think after he's probably 56 years old when he's reading another book and this book book might be interesting maybe i'll i'll cover in um in a future episode but it's really interesting he's talking about the lessons he learned so he says i don't know anything about finance, but I just read the biography of Lloyd, excuse me, Lord Roy Thompson, the Canadian who went to Britain when he was about 60 and proceeded to make a huge fortune. He did it by always borrowing every penny he could lay his hands on, buying newspapers and then managing them more profitably than previous owners.

This is a classic way to get rich. Of course, a lot of people who play this game go broke. It is frightfully dangerous. I doubt if we should take such risks with our stockholders' money, but if we did, we might get rich. So he's obviously joking a little bit there, but he's also telling you what he learned. And this is after his company went public. So there's two things, or actually three things I want to bring that up. one, his, his love of reading biographies and setting history. You can definitely tell through his writing that he's extremely well-read, right? Two, how he started that entire paragraph. This is going to be one of his downfalls. I don't know anything about finance.

He needed to learn. He's extremely bad with money, even after he makes a ton of money, right? And then three, it talks about, don't know if we should do this with stockholders' money. He wanted to get rich. He saw going public as a way to do that and then regretted that decision later on because Ogilvy and Mather, it's actually pronounced Mather, but I always default to Mather. So if you hear me mispronounce it, it's just, I'm so used to, I read it as Mather and so it's kind of stuck in my brain. Anyways, that there's a hostile takeover and they wind up being purchased against their will for almost a billion dollars, like eight hundred and sixty two million. And I think that happened in 1989. So just gives you an insight at how powerful that thing about how crazy it is.

So it was sold for almost a billion dollars in the 80s. Right. And he didn't start his company till he was 38. And I think he had a total of $5,000 in savings. That's his life savings at that point. It's just remarkable how, and a lot of what I'll talk to you about today is how he used his wide variety of life experiences before he was a founder to accelerate the success. Because he rattles off, you know, in a decade, decade and a half, one of the best records in advertising history. So it's remarkable. So let me go back to his early life, though, because I want to talk about his grandfather. It's very interesting because this informs

the life of David Ogilvie. Remember, I call him his blueprint, right? So it says Ogilvie admired, Ogilvie's admired grandfather was a sheep farmer by trade, but an adventurer at heart. Born in Scotland, he moved to London, and at 24, he emigrated to South America, where he led a swashbuckling life and also fought in the Argentine War. He managed a farm for a group of Scottish investors. When the farm failed, Grandfather Ogilvie, out of work with a large family to support, tried prospecting for gold in New Zealand. So that's what they mean about he's an adventurer. When that failed, he returned to London, where he got a job as a secretary in the English bank of Rio de Janeiro. Four years, this is now Ogilvy talking about his grandfather.

Four years later, this uneducated sheep farmer became manager of Brown Shipley, where he trained the future governor of the Bank of England. He was able to send all seven of his children to private schools and universities and live like an aristocrat. That's definitely something David emulates later in life. He buys a castle. He cannot afford a castle. He bought a castle in France and that's where he spends the last two decades of his life. Oh, I love this guy. The banking experience led him to advise his grandson to study the firm of J.P. Morgan, pointing to the Morgan criteria for partners, which is we know. Well, let me finish reading this and then I won't run over my point. So this is what his grandfather is telling David, right?

Study the form J.P. Morgan. And he says, pointing to Morgan's criteria for partners, gentlemen with brains and clients, only first class business and that in a first class way. Both later became part of olga v's agency agency's credo so he took those two his grandfather said hey study jp morgan really we know because uh there was what two they have done two podcasts on jp morgan one was the hour of fate which is his his the beef he has with uh teddy roosevelt and then one was the house of morgan which is like the most famous biography of the Morgan family. Anyways, we know that didn't come from J.P. Morgan. That actually came from his father, Junius. I actually, I think I said on that podcast, but I think studying Junius, I couldn't

find any other biographies on him. I found him to be more impressive, the father, than the son, J.P. Morgan. So it says both later became part of Ogilvy's agency credo. I've already talked about that. So he took the ideas, his grandfather said, hey, study J.P. Morgan. Ogilvy listened, and then he took those two ideas and applied it to his business. Very smart man. Now, why is his grandfather his hero and not his father? His father loses all his money in the stock market. So they were a rather financially successful family. His father was not as financially successful as his grandfather, but he was a speculator. He was a stockbroker, but he wound up losing all his money. And so this is where David compares his father and his grandfather.

It's going to tell us a lot about what he values. OK, but from then on, they lived in genteel poverty. We were a poor family, said Ogilvy. My father's total income was less than a thousand dollars a year. His grandfather turned down an appeal $1,000 a year. His grandfather turned down an appeal from his father for a loan. This is a crazy sentence. And his father tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat. Although Ogilvy adored his father and thought of him a great gentleman, he recognized he was a scholar and not a businessman. He saw his grandfather as the exact

opposite. Now remember, he's already told us my grandfather is my hero. That's who I'm powdering myself after. So this description of his grandfather is very important. He was as hard as nails and a very successful businessman. I couldn't make out whether I was going to be like my father or my grandfather. When fathers fail, their children are often driven to be successful. The son would always be motivated to achieve and obsessed with That's another thing to understand. Ogilvy, he's very upfront about this. That once he tasted his first bit of tiny bit of the ability to make money and make large amounts very rapidly, he was obsessed. We're not there yet.

We're still in his early life. So his father doesn't have a lot of money. He goes to these private schools, but he goes there on scholarships for people that can't afford the tuition, right? And he has some very early experience that he recalls the rest of his life. It was extremely embarrassing to him. It's not very different. I just was reading my highlights from Sam Bronfman. I think it might be Founders 115 somewhere back there. But he's the founder of Seagram's. And he would have to go to school with holes in his pants. And his daughter tells a story where her father's like 50, 55 years old and sitting in the living room or something

like that. And he's just shivering thinking about how embarrassing poverty was. And that just gave him this fanatical desire to achieve success so this is a very similar example in the life of ogivey ogivey remembered the day that mrs wilkes who's like the headmaster at the school refused to let him buy a peach reminding him that he was poor and attending on scholarship how dare you she shouted loud enough for the whole school to hear your father is so poor that we are obliged to keep you here for almost nothing what right has the son of a pauper to spend money on luxuries like peaches oh that's no way to talk to children um now this is funny though this is remember david he's a very he builds himself into a very

formidable person okay i'm a kid i don't have control of this i'm poor he comes back and gives a speech at his former this i'm sorry, he's in high school at this point. I don't know if I said that or not. So then he comes back, I think it's like 20, 30 years later, probably 40, maybe 40 years later. And he gives a speech at his former high school. He says he took the occasion to remind everyone that he was not a big shot at school. I wasn't a scholar. I detested the Philistines who ruled the roost. I was an irreconcilable rebel. I was a misfit. I love that he used that word.

In short, I was a dud. Fellow duds take heart. There is no correlation between success at school and success at life. He's saying I was a really crappy school student. I ended up dropping out of college. Same thing. But then he develops his personal curriculum, and that he truly excels. He cannot get enough information about things that he truly excels he just he

cannot get enough information about things that he's truly interested in but i'm not finished with this speech this is classic david so he goes back to his school to give a speech only to tell them that they did it wrong so he says olgavy has also proposed revamping the entire theory and practice of instruction the masters have to cram you full of facts so that you pass those odious examinations that is like cramming full of facts so that you pass those odious examinations. That is like cramming corn down the throat of a goose to enlarge its liver. It may produce excellent foie gras, but it does the goose no permanent good. The mission of a great school is to not cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them a few

weeks later in an exam, even though they still do this today, right? It is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship, which will last you all your life. So what he's saying is to teach you to love learning. It's really funny. Edwin Land does the same thing, founder of Polaroid. I've read, what, five books on him for the podcast? In almost every single book, he talks about he goes back to, I think, MIT. I can't remember the school off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure it's MIT. He's like, you guys are doing it wrong. He's like, you're not. Yeah, I think it was MIT. It doesn't matter. But he says by the time the undergraduates graduate college, right? He's like, they have no capacity for greatness anymore. It's been you've beaten out of them. Their desire, their belief, their self-belief that they can actually be great, that they can actually produce unique work is beat out of them um and then you know all the way back 50 years ago whatever 70 years ago he

talks about we should record the greatest it's really interesting what it's kind of like what podcasts are now right or any other learning i guess youtube is very similar where it's like why are we having teachers give up come come uh give the same lecture year in and year out? Why don't we take the very best lectures from the very best teachers in the world, record them? Then you can access them anytime you want and then go about and spend all your time actually doing work, which is really interesting. And I hope, again, you and I are developing our own personal curriculum. We're using podcasts. We're using books. We're using all these other things. I just I think formal schooling is so far behind in that manner. And I think Ogilvy was ahead of his time. Obviously, Edwin Land's ahead of his time. And hopefully the rest of us catch up. All right. This is what David was like in college. He was unsure of what to do in life. It's so important. I try to pull this out of all the biographies that we're studying here because a lot of people think, oh, you know, Bill Gates, whoever Steve Jobs, they just they were born. They knew exactly what to do or what they want to do. That is a lie. That does not happen. Everybody's unsure. They got to figure out the dark path that

lies ahead of them. He was sociable. He didn't work. He was young and full of blood and guts and stuff. He was restless. He was brilliant, but confused. And he couldn't use his brilliance in a conventional way. After two years, Ogilvy left Oxford. This is in 1931, in the depths of the depression, without a degree, describing himself as unteachable in any subject. That is insane. Now I'm rereading that because this guy, he's I didn't maybe I don't know if it was. It was definitely implied, but never explicit in the other books I read on him. His life is essentially reading, writing and work. And the first two inform the latter, right? And so the idea that in college, he, you know, he's failing exams, which I guess I'll read to you,

I'll read that sentence to you in a minute. He says he's unteachable. He's lacking motivation. He is not the same person later in life. He, again, he builds himself into a very formidable individual, which I think is one of the most inspiring things about his life story. Perhaps it was impatience with academia and the itch to start earning a living. Perhaps I was intellectually out of my depth. Whatever the reason, I failed every examination. More in college, David. The picture is rather one of an uncertain young man changing directions, beset by financial and health problems. He's got asthma and he's just, in general, physically weak and yearning for something more, something invigorating and eventful.

So this is where he goes off and he starts to develop his own personal curriculum through reading and through life experiences. And he says, whatever Ogilvy achieved in his career does not appear to be the product of formal schooling. He felt his life at school had been a failure and he wanted to start fresh. His education was about to begin and this is where he has for the next, let's see, 17 years or so. There's these series of very odd jobs that all help. He takes all the lessons that he learns from these series of odd jobs. And then when he has the ability to build his own company, to build the culture of Ogilvy and Mather, he uses his lessons as a foundation for that. Okay uh so it says um many people who succeed in advertising lack college degrees instead of conventional conventional

credentials they learn from one or more eclectic life experiences that would be a pattern of olgavine's education starting with a seminal experience in a french kitchen so he's in paris says where he observed and was taught high standards of leadership so it's a very high end one of the like the best restaurants in Paris at the time. And the guy that's running the head chef is relentless. And it's Mansour Patard, maybe? I'm going to call him Patard. That's probably not how you pronounce his name, but whatever.

The imperious head chef. Patard fired one chef because he could not make his pastries rise straight. But Ogilvy came to realize that such extravagant standards made the other chefs feel they were working for the best kitchen in the world. This part right there, that they feel they're working for the best kitchen in the world. This would be part of the culture as his future company. And he says, he's like, I don't want to be the biggest agency. I want to be the best.

And the people there talk about they felt they were on a mission. They were not mercenaries. They were missionaries. It's very interesting. Working in a great French kitchen was a first step in Ogilvy's education. Petard's management style became his model for hard work, discipline, excellence. I remember my first day there. I was peeling potatoes and I was standing like this, lounging against the wall. Then this chap came by me and told and came by and told me, stand up straight. Everything you do here is important. Be proud of everything you have to do where we've heard this before. One of the most influential as far as technology entrepreneurs in modern day, one of the most influential books it's talked about over and over again is Bill Walsh's The Score Takes

Care of Itself. I think it was founders in 106, and it's that idea. Do all the little things right, and then the score will take care of itself. You don't have to worry about anything else, but everything you do from answering phones to carrying your helmet, everything to the organization of your locker, to how you write memos, everything Bill Walsh did, he made sure the little things were done right so the score would take care of itself. And they were saying the exact same idea in a french kitchen in the 1930s i made an impression what he learned about hot hot cuisine is less relevant than the standards he digested petard once confronted him my dear david what is not perfect is bad um so he's working really hard and what's very interesting he's not making a lot of money but he's getting a lot of non-monetary value from this work.

Right. Working in underground kitchens in the underground kitchen, 10 hours a day, six days a week. By early morning, Ogilvy would be soaking wet from head to foot. It was exhausting work for which young Ogilvy was paid seven dollars a week. But it got him out of academia, taught some lasting lessons and provided him with stories he never tired of relating. OK, so he's he um i'm obviously going to be fast forwarding the book goes into more detail i hope you do read it it's fantastic um so i'm going to go into he leaves he starts becoming a door-to-door salesman again this is all stuff he's going to use later on his life right so he's he's selling it's a scottish

company i think maybe he's not he's doing it in scotland i don't know if it's a company scottish but they're selling like these expensive ovens. So he says he was promoted to become the company's first sales representative in Scotland, selling stoves door to door. It's called the AGA. The AGA was the most expensive stove on the market. Making cold calls in the depths of the Depression could not have been easy. But Ogilvy made sales by showing cooks how to use the AGA, doing the cooking himself if necessary. So what is he doing? He's teaching. He offered to give free cooking lessons with each stove and found plenty

of takers. Ogilvy revealed his sales approach. He described how he'd always go around to the back of the house to talk to the cook about the aga, because if the cook was on his side, he would, if the cook was not on his side, he could never sell the lady of the house. When he sold more by offering six cooking lessons for three euros, but free lessons if they bought the stove, Ogilvy learned something about the power of the word free. The experience of door-to-door selling turned Ogilvy into a salesman. Otherwise, that might have been something quite different. It made me think always in terms of selling things, which is what he's known for in developing his advertising, right? One of the mottos of his eventual company is we sell or else. And he meant for his clients and for the firm he believes about uh excuse me his beliefs about the purpose of advertising were

shaped by his reception at the doors of scottish households no sale no commission no commission no eat that left a mark on me uh so he's he's becomes the the company's most successful uh sales representative so much that they ask him to write a manual. This is really interesting. Some notes from the sales manual he wrote. So effective was Ogilvy at selling stoves that the company asked him to write a guide for the enlightenment of his fellow salesmen. Published in 1935 when he was 24 years old, the theory and practice of selling the aga cooker became the company's sales bible. Fortune magazine called it probably the best sales manual ever written.

Its portrayal of a good salesman may derive from Ogilvy's view of himself. This is a quote from 24-year-old David Ogilvy. The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bulldog with the manners of a spaniel. If you have any charm, ooze it. He also talks about something some people are a little bashful about, that you should not be scared of self-promotion. He says, if you can't advertise yourself, what hope do you have of being able to advertise anything else? So he uses this instruction manual as a way to get his first job

in the advertising agency. He idolizes his older brother. It winds up being his best friend for the last like 30 years of his life. And his brother is working for a advertising company in London. So he says he sent the manual to his brother at Mather and Crowther as evidence of his aptitude for advertising and was hired as a trainee in London. The Aga experience provided him a foundation for his beliefs about advertising and instilled in the young man the habit of hard work. And as he would later recall, when Mather and Crowther doubled his salary, I tasted blood.

He was 24 years old. It was his first experience in advertising, and he spent time in every department. And so this is where the first time we see his fanatical desire to learn every single possible thing he can about his profession. This is how he was at the beginning of his career, and I would say he maintained this and only added on it later on. Finally, Ogilvy was ready to start his career. He subscribed to a Chicago clipping service so he could get all the new advertising campaigns from America and copied the best for his British clients. He studied the business feverishly, reading everything he could find. After just one year, the young man had learned enough to write a marketing plan, which he described many years later to his partners in New York. And so he's now, let's see, 52, and he's looking back at what he was writing. He says, in the section on

advertising, there's a passage which proves two things. A, at 25, I was brilliantly clever. And B, I have learned nothing new in the subsequent 27 years. So that's actually something that's going to be really, really interesting. One of Ogilvy's strengths was that he played the same tune all of his life. He'd be prepared to repeat yourself for years. He develops his, and he obviously learned more than at 25. But even in the first years of his advertising agency he found what works and he stuck to it so the idea that you need to repeat yourself for many years because essentially he's

teaching his philosophy to all the new people his new clients his new his new customers everybody around him right but this the main lesson is to stick to the fundamentals i always thought it was really interesting and people the reason i think it's important to bring up is because we have a tendency humans have a tendency to overcomplicate things. And so I was just watching this interview with Kobe Bryant right before he died. And he was talking about, he's like, you know, my 12 year old plays basketball and they're always trying to teach them all these new tips and tricks. And he's just like, he, and you know, he was an expert at basketball. He's like, this just seems unnecessary. So he called Michael Jordan and he was telling Michael Jordan this.

He's like, listen, man, I'm having a hard time remembering what I was doing at 12 years old, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't doing all this fancy stuff. And he he goes, he says, and then he goes, Michael, what were you doing? He goes and Michael says, man, at 12, I was playing baseball. And so Kobe says to the people interviewing him, I think he was like, I think it might've been A-Rod that was interviewing him. He was thinking about that. And what was his point?

The greatest basketball player to ever live didn't even pick up a basketball when he was 12 years old. So what's the chance that you need to teach these 12-year-olds all the stuff you're teaching them? Just stick to the fundamentals. I thought it was a very powerful, full lesson, just one sentence by Kobe Reinter. Okay, so he's working for as a trainee in London.

Eventually, he has this idea. He's like, I need to go to America because that's where I'm going to make all my money, right? And that's where he eventually opens up his firm in New York. It's going to be in connection with the firm he's working for in London. But let me read this part, and then it hit me. As stupid as I am, now I now two and a half books in at this point about David Ogilvie and just hit me. So it says David persuaded his brother descendants,

the United States to study American advertising techniques during the sabbatical and subsequent stints abroad. The brother stayed in touch with staggering volume of correspondence. They wrote each other several times a week, sometimes twice a day, single spaced typewritten letters, two or three pages, occasionally as many as many as seven pages. This is typewritten letters two or three pages occasionally as many as many as seven pages

this is typewritten i'm pretty sure it's handwritten because it says later on that david wouldn't even use a typewriter he was very anti-technology as we'll see when he goes to live with the amish um so anyways whether he typed them up and maybe there's some stake or he hand wrote them um it's just an amazing amount of writing and it hit me and because i always talk about David's one of the best writers I've ever come across. Like I envy his ability to communicate in so few words, right? I was like, you idiot. The note I left myself. He might be such a great writer because he wrote so much.

After he retired, this is how crazy it was. So he's living in his castle in France, right? Which I'll talk to you about in a little bit. But I was reading his Wikipedia page. It was funny.ipedia page it was funny says why no longer involved in the agency's day-to-day operations he stayed in touch with his company his correspondence so dramatically increased the volume of mail handled in the nearby town that the post office had had that the post office was reclassified reclassified at a higher status and the postmaster's salary raised. He was good at writing because he wrote all the time. How do humans get good at things? We have to do it over

and over again. All right. Sorry it took me two and a half books to figure that out. One of his motivations for wanting to move to America was because he thought, OK, there's big money over there, right? So he says, I figured the same effort would produce three times as much. Okay, this is the word he uses for money. It is from the word Latin. Let me make sure. I read it and I say lucre. That's not how you pronounce it.

It is lucre, according to Google Translate. So lucre. Okay, so hopefully I get this right for you. Let me read this sentence again. I figured that the same amount would produce three times as much lucre. Lucre just sounds cooler to me. As much money in America as in Little England. Money was never far from the service with Olgovie, and he could be startling direct.

His first question to the head of a major advertising group was, how much money do you make? How much money are you worth? That's hilarious. Though he entered advertising to make money, Olgovie had become interested, obsessively interested in the business itself. He said that he had read every book that had ever been written on the subject and as a young man had reason to believe he would be good at it and would enjoy it. Since American advertising was years ahead of advertising anywhere else, he decided to study the trade where it was done best. So remember that a couple of weeks ago, it was, um, uh, Jackie Cochran always shoot for the top is what she would say. Uh, this is very similar to Ogilvy's modus operandi, always study

for the best, always learn from the best. Uh, and then I just want to bring up a quote that he said in one of his previous books I read about him that never forgot. And we just saw, uh, he's demonstrating that, that talent with that with that paragraph I just read you. The good ones know more. That's just a fact. So read, learn as much as you can. The best basketball players know the most about basketball. The best advertisers know the most about advertising.

The best entrepreneurs know the most about their company. It's just the good ones know more. And again, it's very few words. He's telling entire stories with just a few words. Let me go back to this idea of shooting for the top, studying where the best now he's in America. And so now he's going to go out and he sought out people that were good at what they did and then copied them. Right. This is not we do not need to have a ton of original thought if we just copy the best ideas from history. It doesn't have to be complicated. And so he starts collecting these mentors in the back of the book that I think everybody

should buy no matter what, Ogilvy and Advertising. The last chapter is on the six people that he sought out. He calls them giants, the people that built the actual trade that he's going to practice his whole life. And this is one of the guys right here. So it says says one crucial introduction was rosser reeves who became the first of a series of mentors to ogivee ogivee this is this is kenneth's description of ogivee a seeker of father figures and a self-acknowledged hero worshiper along with reeves ogivee the letter named later named claude hopkins and john capels as the main influences on his ideas about advertising. Views that remain substantially unchanged throughout his career. There's that sentence again.

I learned the very best. I learned the fundamentals. And then I hammered those fundamentals for multiple decades. So this is Ogilvy talking about the importance of his mentor, Ross Reeves. When I came to work in the United States 58 years ago, I was typical British advertising man of my generation. I was a pretentious highbrow. A few days later, I met Ross Reeves. We acquired the habit of lunching together once a week.

During those lunches, Ross talked without stopping and I listened. I have two ears and one mouth. I should use them in that ratio, right? Now, he's talking about I had lunch and I just shut up and absorbed all this guy's knowledge. That's not very different than how Kenneth described reading Ogilvy's autobiography. It's like having dinner with a raconteur, right? Just this guy's downloading all the insights from his career into your brain. This is why the greatest entrepreneurs that have ever lived have this access and learn from the same things that you and I have access.

They pick up a book. Well, Rosser said changed my life. He taught me the purpose of advertising to sell the product and taught me how to sell. Some people will tell you that Rosser and I were rivals, even enemies. I was his disciple. Now we need to go. I'm skipping ahead, but he continues on this this idea of like listen these people are geniuses and i sought out and i copied their ideas and i left my note

stumbling here stuttering rather and then i left a note for myself i need to read this book in fact i already started reading this book i think it's the one no i'm going to do this book next week because of what ogilvy has said ogilvy would go on to credit more than one person with changing the course of his life. Reeves introduced him. So he met. Remember, he met Reeves, right? Reeves is getting all his ideas. And Reeves is like, no, no, you don't understand where I got my ideas from.

Books are the original links, right? He says Reeves introduced him to the thinking of Claude Hopkins, lending him the manuscript of Hopkins Scientific Advertising, which had not yet been published. Now, this is crazy. This guy writes a book. It's so valuable. His boss or his partner, technically his boss, but becomes his partner, won't let him publish it.

Hopkins, Ogilvy later proclaimed, Hopkins is to advertising what Escoffier is to cooking. The most successful copywriter of his time, Hopkins was so valued for his ability to build sales for his clients at Lord & Thomas, the agency he worked for, that the agency's owner, Albert Lasker, paid him a salary that would be equivalent in today's money. This book was published, I think, in 2008. Of $4 million, businesses will always pay you to give them more customers this guy's writing was so good it brought in so many more customers right for their clients that the owner of the firm paid imagine having a job and this guy didn't really have a job he was a savage claude

hopkins was a savage uh like he was extremely dedicated to what he did i mean you don't become the best in the world or something by by accident right? But that, you can get a job and you make $4 million a year. Lasker considered scientific advertising too valuable to publish and locked the manuscript in a safe for 20 years. Ogilvy's introduction to the 1966 reissued edition, long since released from the safe,

made clear his debt. This is what he talks about. And this is why I bought the book. And actually, there's gonna be two books on next week's podcast it's it's claude hopkins autobiography which is uh my life in advertising and then that book scientific advertising which is what ogilvy is teaching us about right now so he says nobody at any level should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times so warren buffett tells me david ogilvie is a genius. Warren Buffett has studied more businesses and more entrepreneurs than almost anybody alive.

So no brainer for me. I'm going to go study David Ogilvie. Then David Ogilvie, I find, oh, shit, Warren Buffett's right. This guy is a genius. And now he's telling us, read this book seven times. This is very simple. Then we're going to have to do that. Let's do this.

Every time I see a bad advertisement, I say to myself, the man who wrote this copy has never read Claude Hopkins. If you read this book of his, you will never write another bad advertisement and you'll never approve one either. His point is like, even if you're not writing your own advertising, you hire somebody to write the advertising for your company, you're not going to approve. So it has value to you, even if you're not writing it, because you're not going to approve. You read the book and you're not going to approve a bad ad either it's very interesting what will be so admired was clear in uh hopkins opening paragraph so it talks about this is summary of that uh of the book uh he writes about the importance of offering service and ads headlines that sell

being specific telling the full story and especially lessons from mail order advertising where false theories melt away like snowflakes in the sun. That's just really pretty writing. Skipping ahead, this is the philosophy that Ogilvy learned from his mentors and made his own. Advertising had to be judged on its ability to sell rather than entertain. It should be based on research about what consumers want. In print, it should lead with a headline that offers that can that offers a consumer benefit often it should rely on long text packed text mean writing packed with facts the more you tell the more you sell as he would later preach okay so he's still not ready to open his own advertising agency he still has to have a series of now he's

got like at least three more jobs he's going to do before he opens his agency and they all inform how he builds his company and one of them is working with you heard of gallup poll well he worked with the actual founder of gallup and he says it's the most important thing that ever happened to him so he says ogilvy forever described his work with gallup as the luckiest break of his life if you ever decide to seek your fortune in a foreign country the best thing you could do is get a job with the local gallop poll this is all going to be writing it will teach you what the natives want out of life what they think about them and what they think about the main issues of the day you will quickly get to know more about the country of your adoption than most of its inhabitants

so they're hired but there's stories in this book about the motion picture industry hires gallup to study essentially they're trying to study human behavior what consumers want and to expand and make their their mood their films their movies more profitable so i'm going to skip over that and this is the main point of why he talks about gallup over and over again he considers himself a researcher and why he says a lot of the people he competed with didn't put any value in research, so he'd be able to kick their ass. Probably the only other man, this is actually Gallup talking about Ogilvy, probably the only other man I would put in the same category as Ogilvy was Raymond Rubicon, who was the founder of Young and Rubicon and also one of the six people that Ogilvy profiled

in Ogilvy on Advertising. These two people made better use of research than any other people I've known. The research gave them a lot of ideas. So it's very, very practical. The research had a very practical utility to them and to their careers, right? Now, this is very, very weird. Well, it's not even weird. I guess it's predictable at this point, but reading biographies is a reminder that success is not a straight line okay so it says if okavi came to america for money he found other things including a family and a fully formed view of advertising so he gets married while he's like during this time period world war ii is going to derail him again though but if advertising the money uh but if advertising and the money it might provide were his goals in moving to america he would get there.

He would only get there after a couple of detours that sent him far from Madison Avenue for some years. So he stops working with Gallup to help with British military intelligence. Again, the wide range of experience he's having before setting up his company is very beneficial. So they're hired. He had been moonlighting. Let me read this part to you, actually. Ogilvy had been moonlighting since 1939 as an advisor to the British government on American public opinion. So he was doing that at the same time he was working at Gallup. In 1942, with the United States now embroiled in World War Two, Ogilvy resigned

from Gallup and went to work full time in British military intelligence. He called it the Hitler War and was very prescient in recognizing what was at stake. So this is very interesting. His boss was one of Ian Fleming's inspiration for James Bond. Right. And this gives it's funny when Ogilvy retells these stories. It almost he almost like he's like portraying himself as more of like a secret agent. He's not really secret agent. They're studying. He's using what he learned to gallop to help the British military study American opinion about getting involved in this war. OK, so it says his new boss in the spy business was Sir William Stevenson. He was the head of the British security coordination. That's the department that Ogilvy is working for. And the central figure in covert operations involving Britain and the United States in the years

leading up to World War II. In Britain, short of arms and supplies and facing certain invasion, this is going to, this is kind of relates to Freedom's Forge, the bonus episode you said, right? A desperate Winston Churchill said there was only one possible solution. I shall drag the United States in. In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Stevenson led Britain's covert operations in the United States as Churchill's secret weapon. So Churchill, Stevenson's working for Churchill, Ogilvy's working for Stevenson. See that connection? A successful Canadian businessman and inventor, Stevenson was alarmed to discover on one of his buying trips during the 1930s that virtually all German steel production was being diverted to armaments.

Churchill, the only one to listen to Stevenson's campaign to alert the British government, gave Stevenson the job of coordinating an unofficial pre-war relationship between British and American intelligence. So that's basically the main point. That's what Ogilvy is doing. Ogilvy describes Stevenson as strong-willed, quiet, ruthless, and loyal. David, now this is, he's, again, he's a suction cup, right? He's going to learn, go to school and everybody. David also learned something about writing from his time in the intelligence service. Stevenson was a master of the terse note. Memos to him were returned swiftly to the sender with one of three words written at the top of the page. Yes, no, or speak. And if he wrote speak, that means come see him. This is what Stevenson thought of David. Stevenson put on record his high regard for Ogilvy's abilities. He had literary skill,

a very keen analytical powers, initiative, and special aptitude for handling problems of extreme delicacy. David not only made a good intelligence officer, but a brilliant one. And that was Stevenson's opinion. Now, after the war, this is where we see, this is the most surprising detour that Ogilvy takes. He goes to live with the Amish in Pennsylvania. Ogilvy became a farmer. Remember his grandfather's as his blueprint, right? Ogilvy became a farmer. Well, not exactly.

Ogilvy was not a farmer, but a man who lived on a farm. He was a local mystery. He was then 35 with no career and no very clear prospects. So why is Ogilvy doing this? He admired certain things about the Amish lifestyle. The contrast between the flamboyant Ogilvy and the understated Amish could not have been much greater. There was a double paradox, his unstinting admiration of the sect and their views on modern living while conducting himself in a style that was anything but plain and simple. Ogilvy claimed that he had become disenchanted with city life and preferred the Amish lifestyle. No razors, no telephones, no automobiles, no electric lights.

I love these people and their way of life. Like them, I prefer driving behind a team of horses, reading by candlelight, eating what you grow and communicating by note he's going to last about a year and a half there and then he's deciding okay i'm gonna go i'm it's time i'm going to work in advertising and what was very interesting about this section that i'm about to read to you is no one would predict that he could do it that he could start an advertising firm, except himself. That's extremely important. Of all his ideas, the biggest was the notion that he could run an advertising agency in America. Here, Ogilvy describes himself on the day he

started his agency. Now he's writing about himself. He's 38 and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He had been a cook, a salesman and a diplomat. He knows nothing about marketing and has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising his career and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will hire him. So he winds up starting an agency. He's the American outpost for the British agency that his brother worked for, the one that he was a trainee maybe a decade and a half earlier. They did not think he was ready, so they thought he was a number two. They did not think he was capable of running the company.

So he has to find a president to work that has experience before they let him open. And then very soon after, they realize, okay, Olgavy forces a confrontation. That guy winds up getting kicked out, and Olgavy runs it. But this is a little bit about the very beginning. It was David against Goliath, a startup British outpost against dozens of major agencies with established pedigrees. A handful of tiny overseas accounts with unfamiliar names. They have almost no business. Minimal funding, an unproven president, and a brash research director,

that's Ogilvy, with lots of theories but no practical experience in advertising. This was not exactly a sure bet. Ogilvy understood it would be a tough struggle to carve out a niche in the United States, but he put up a brave front and outlined his goals in a bold memo. This is what he said. This is what he wrote. This is a new agency struggling for its life. For some time, we shall all be overworked and underpaid. Our main object is to provide a pleasant living for the people who work with us. Next comes profit. In hiring, the emphasis will be on youth. We are looking for young Turks. We've seen that before, right? Or we heard that before from his grandfather. it a great agency before 1960. Ogilvy often talked about a list he set down from the outset of the five clients he wanted most. This is before he had an agency. Shell, Lever Brothers, Campbell Soup, General Foods, and Bristol Myers. It was a wildly ambitious roster.

He eventually won all five. So right right from the jump remember what he learned in the french uh high cuisine from the chef he knew he wanted high standards okay so he says he had no qualms about imposing his standards you have to hide you have to have the hide of a rhinoceros rhinoceros to survive a meeting with oligvy or have done your homework in depth and executed your strategy impeccably. This is one of his employees. And like de Gaulle, he felt that praise should be a rare commodity lest you devalue the currency. Now, remember what he learned from Stevenson, right? Later on, Ogilvy says he believed in the dogma of brevity, that we're all in a hurry. Okay, so he says, disarming presence, Ogilvy would pop into offices unannounced, sit

down, and commence his grilling. You became the focus of his attention. He'd look straight at you and ask direct questions. When he was done, he would get up and bolt as he had entered. Novices thought this meant that they had somehow angered him and brooded over it until they

discovered he behaved the same way with big shots. One aspect of his personality we see right from the beginning, he's extremely persistent. A large part of Ogilvy's success came from the energy he put into getting what he wanted. He would start by mentioning an idea, more or less casually, then follow up with a memo or a letter, clips of articles, more memos, a tsunami of communications. An ordinarily purposeful person might follow up an idea with a second note or a call. The more dogged might come back several times before moving on. Olgovie never gave up. And one of the reasons that I think people liked his communication style, one of the reasons why his writing is so readable,

is that he would use aphorisms as a way to help remember important ideas. He understood that modernity is very complex. We're getting inundated with information all the time, even more so now than in his time. And you've got to have a way to compress and distill these ideas down so you can carry them with you and retain them easily and so i'm going to read some of this kenneth the author of this book talks about well let me just read it says his ideas gain power from a terse compact writing style i believe in the dogmatism of brevity, Ogilvy explained. He collected and repeated, that's an important part, the repetition of this, he collected and repeated aphorisms to make his

points. On compensation, pay peanuts and you get monkeys. On leadership, search your parks and all your cities, you'll find no statues of committees. Points were made memorable by vivid metaphor discussing which of two commercials to show first a client all will be told the creative team when i was a boy i always saved the cherry on my pudding for last then one day my sister stole it from then on i always ate the cherry first what's he telling you let's play the best commercial first. More about his personality. He hated laziness. There's a great quote by Kobe Bryant that I keep on my phone in case I ever feel I'm not doing enough. He says, I can't relate to lazy people. We don't speak the same language. I don't understand you. I don't want to understand you. David Ogilvie would say the same thing.

He had a near psychopathic hatred of laziness in all its forms. He was the least lazy person I've ever encountered. His advertising philosophy was shot through with intolerance of sloth. Lazy people accept mediocrity, which he hated. No matter how good, everything had to be better. What did the chef say? Anything that's not perfect is bad. He took that exact same idea and is running his agency with this. So most of the days, early days of the firm, they're constantly out. They're taking anything they can get. They're constantly going out and trying to convince clients. Eventually, their ads become so successful that clients start. It goes from like an outbound process to an inbound process.

And they can be a lot more selective, right? So he had to work himself to get that. This is covered in both Confessions of an Advertising ogre beyond advertising and more at length but what blows your mind is how like there's several examples in this book and both those books how all ads do not perform equally and that he was looking for these unequal um performers and i'm just going to list i'm not going to go into too much detail because the other books cover it better than this one does but it's just it's a remarkable think, okay, I ran an ad. Maybe I can get an ad to do, you know, one, twice as good or three times as good.

And it's like, no, some of them do 20 times as good. It's really crazy. The same amount of money spent, 20 times more effective. So it says Rubenstein ad, this is cosmetics, revolutionizes the company's advertising approach, replacing small units with a news approach in large newspaper ads. So they're saying what the advertising agency before Ogilvy did and what he did. He put it in news. He's like, more news. When you have a development, you put in the newspaper as news.

You write a lot of copy on it. Within three weeks, a single advertisement brought in orders equal to sales estimates for the next 12 months. They could not run any more ads until the factory increased its production. So that gives you an idea. You have to be effective. Companies are hiring you to do a job. The more effective you are at the job, the more clients you're going to have, right? Another example was Hathaway.

This is these like dress shirts. He had this idea. He was reading a book. Actually, I'm not going gonna run over my point so he he instead of all dress shirts at the time or any kind of clothing talks about the clothing in the ad he just put an eye patch on the model and so people were flipping through a magazine like what the hell is it like they stop now he's got your attention he's like why does this person have eye patch so it says the patch was there to imbue the advertisement with what with what olgavy called story appeal where do you get that idea? The

reader wonders how the arrogant aristocrat lost his eye. Olgovie said he discovered the concept of story appeal in a book by Harold Rudolph, a former agency research director who had analyzed attention and readership factors of illustrations. It was the first time shirt advertising focused as much on the man wearing the shirt as the shirt itself. Within a week, every Hathaway shirt in stock was sold out. Then they start. He has this idea is like, hey, the U.S. president for Schweppes. It's some kind of liquor brand. I don't know how to pronounce. I was like, he looks like an adventurer. Let's put him in the ad.

So it says sales leapt 600 percent in the first six months. Hotels and bars started stocking Schweppesps i don't know how to pronounce it in many it was the only choice if you asked for a gin and tonic it was the most successful campaign for a british product ever and again i just give you those quick uh examples just to hammer hammer the main point that there's wide variance between the effectiveness of advertising. And people that are really good at it are obviously going to, companies are going to flock to them. And that's what happens to his agency. This is a magazine quote.

This is insane. It says, his place among, talking about Ogilvy now, his place among the great advertising writers of all time is practically assured. This was about a man who had written his ad, his first ad only five years earlier so that's a lot to accomplish in five years but really as if paying attention to the story he didn't do it in five years he did the application of five years his whole life experiences added to that ability that's a very important part not to miss

now ogilvy is a genius but but we all make mistakes. And this is one of his. Xerox came to him with the first copier. Ogilvy was not interested in an invention he did not understand, even when they offered some of their stock. It's too small for us, he said. Go see my friend, Fred Papert. He's just starting an agency. Xerox was soon spending $10 million through Papert, and Fred Papert became wealthy with Xerox stock. He ought to share it with me, said Ogilvy. One of the accounts he wanted to, and he eventually gets his Rolls Royce, which this excerpt I'm going to read to you just really shows the benefit of reading and research. Something that's really simple, yet most people won't do it. Ogilvy preaches the need to do it over and over again in this book and every other book.

Ogilvy spent three weeks talking with the Rolls-Royce engineers and reading everything about the car. He wrote over 100 headlines and then freely admitted that he did not invent his actual choice, but pulled it out of an article that had appeared 20 years earlier. At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in the news rolls Royce comes from the electric clock. His long, meticulous text was packed with facts. The coach is given five coats of primer paint and hand rubbed between each coat. That's just really weird and funny. Before nine coats of finished paint go on. This example just goes on and on and on okay the ad ran in just two newspapers and two magazines but stimulated more praise than anything the ad agency had produced people in the business could recite whole paragraphs verbatim so this is a really funny story the personality this guy his personality jumps off the page

and i think that's really actually important part of studying his life. He treated, you know that Shakespeare quote, all the world's a stage? Ogilvy treated life like that. He was a very over-the-top, flamboyant personality. Almost like an actor playing a role, right? He's got main character energy. So he says,

The former Amish farmer now wanted a Rolls Royce. Page, this is the guy running finances at the firm, told him, we can't afford a damn Rolls Royce. And who's going to drive it? We'd have to pay a chauffeur. Page prevailed until he took a vacation. When I got back, there was a Rolls sitting in the front office with a chauffeur. This is hilarious. There's two funny things.

And this tells you the showmanship. And he cannot afford a Rolls Royce. The license plate was OBM2. So that's the initials of the firm at the time before it's Ogilvy and Mathers. I think it's like Ogilvy, Benson and Mathers, not important, but this is the poor part. The license plate was OBM2 to suggest there was another, there wasn't another one. A copywriter at the agency remembers walking down fifth Avenue on his way to the office on a hot, humid summer day. A Rolls Royce pulled up next to him and Ogilvy put his head out of the window.

If you work very hard and are very successful, one day you'll be able to go to work in a car like this. Don't be late. With that, he drove off. Oh, my God, this guy. Now, so he's funny. He's working really hard. But he also is terrified. This is very surprising.

He's worried that his success will not last. And this also, this fear, this irrational fear, or maybe it's irrational, causes him to do unwise things later on. Like sell all of his stock when he shouldn't have. Faced with lingering insecurities about himself and the prospects for his agency, Ogilvy started two years of psychoanalysis. Every day for years, I thought this agency was going to fail. I was scared sick. I remember saying one day, if this is a success, God deliver me from failure. The cure was not found on a psychiatrist's couch, but in work. Ogilvy redoubledbled his efforts working deep into the night and virtually full time on weekends creating campaigns hunting new business he seldom entertained clients telling

them that he worked his guts out trying to produce good advertising and couldn't do that and take them to the theater so let's go back to him building the term company culture didn't really exist at the time but that's that's essentially what he's doing. So this is some more lessons. And I have a lot of highlights, actually, because I found it interesting. And they're probably the most actionable parts of this book. Entire stories with only a few words is the only left myself. He exhorted his staff in memos.

Raise your sights. Compete with the immortals. Blaze new trails. Soak yourself in research. Never stop selling. Never content with just writing ads, Ogilvy's larger goal was to create an enduring institution. This sounds like a lot about if you read about Steve Jobs. That's what he was trying.

He wanted to be in the Pantheon. There's no price you could have offered Steve Jobs for Apple. There's just nothing. He's like, I want a historical, a long-lasting institution that's able to pump out great products. And part of that is not only holding your employees and your coworkers to high standards, but he also found other people to hold himself to high standards. So he would go, it says he would go to the smartest people and pick their brains. In the 1950s, four men were independently trying to build professional service firms

linking theory with practicality. So we have Ogilvy's being one of them. I'm going to skip over the names. I'm going to tell you the companies because you'll probably know the companies more than names. McKinsey, Arthur Anderson, and Goldman Sachs. The four, Ogilavy being amongst them would frequently compare notes on their common ambition

they shared philosophies spoke of each other's role models encouraged each other in breaking new ground and shared an unremitting drive to achieve excellence so they're having lunch and constantly meeting and pushing each other on the guy from McKinsey his name's Bauer actually became a real big influence

on Olgavy here's a little bit about that inside both McKinsey, his name's Bauer, actually became a real big influence on Ogilvy. Here's a little bit about that. Inside both McKinsey and Ogilvy, everybody from the boardroom to the mailroom knew and understood what the firm's values were, what the mission was, and the way things are done here. That is exact. I mean, that paragraph could be in Bill Walsh's book. The score takes care of itself. If you're looking for something interesting to read, and you haven't read it, pick it up. You'll like it.

Invite people... Oh, this is... I'm reading my own note instead of reading the page. Invite people into your life who will hold you to high standards. This is not popular, but we should run towards these people

instead of away from them. That's a note to myself. It is said that if you sent an engraved wedding invitation to my friend Marvin Bauer, he will return it to you with revisions. That's the guy from McKinsey, right? And one such opportunity arose when Ogilvy drafted his statement of purposes for the agency, starting with earn an increased profit every year.

And then he sent it to Bauer for comment. Marvin, that's his first name, gave me holy hell. He said that any service business that gave higher priorities to profits and serving its clients deserve to fail so in the beginning he's writing a lot of the advertising he says he was a near genius for 10 years and then his create creativity like fizzled out then he got uh it was much more in getting new business he was also a master salesman and so uh again use that that phrase or that motto from um ogilvy the agency ogilvy and mathur it's we sell or else he means for his advertising that they write for the clients it needs to sell or it doesn't work and the same thing he's like you

need to be making the ads and you need to be selling that's what you should be focused on getting new business right and so there's a lot of examples in the book where he's gifted at doing that. But I want to read this one because it's hilarious. And it reinforces a common thing that we've seen multiple biographies about people not liking committees and Ogilvy hated committees. So it says, with the Rayon Manufacturers Association, which had given each agency exactly 15 minutes to make its case before ringing a bell. Okay, so they're interviewing a bunch of potential agencies, saying you have 15 minutes, once the 15 minutes is up, ring the bell, and it's over, right?

It's a collection of manufacturers. This is hilarious. He asked, how many of the 12 people, so it's him giving a presentation to 12 people. These 12 people are part of the association, okay? He asked, how many of the 12 people present would be involved in the agency decision? 12, all of us part of the association. Okay. He asked how many of the 12 people present would be involved in the agency decision? 12.

All of us was the reply. And how many will be involved in approving the advertising? All of us, the 12 members of the committee. Ring the bell, Ogilvy said, and then walked out. There's no way he was subjected, especially at this point, his career. He didn't have to. He could turn down clients left and right. He's not. I'm not going to sit here and let a committee tell me approve my advertising or not like that's absurd i thought it was hilarious uh go back to his his ruthless

time management he kept this giant clock in his office a very unique clock it's called like a parliament clock what it looks like to me is if you took like a wristwatch and cut off like 60 of it then blew it up made it giant and hung it on the wall kind of what it looked like to me when i googled it but anyway says my biggest problem is finding time to do everything he said the clock in his office is to remind visitors that time is passing and they must pass along too and something this obsessive the book has a lot of examples of his obsessive personality, something that he carries on until he stops working. And he says, he continued to work very hard, taking home two stuffed briefcases.

He was very short-tempered, very focused, and totally obsessed with one thing, the advertising agency. Was he doing it for recognition, fame, a sense of accomplishment? And this is his response. Many of the greatest creations of man have been inspired by the desire to make money, Ogilvy said. If Oxford undergraduates were paid for their work, I would have performed miracles of scholarship. It wasn't until I tasted lucre on Madison Avenue that I began to work in earnest. So he's up front he's like i like advertising but i want to be rich and i'm doing this for money um this whole idea of taking home

to stuff briefcase briefcases uh well let me not run on my point the note of myself he's getting his enzo ferrari on and so was ferrari had a very similar search uh schedule i work from nine in the morning until midnight seven days a week, Ogilvy said. So this is going to be great for work. Not good for much of anything else. He winds up being married and divorced. He's got like three different marriages and none of them work out. He's married, you know, 15 years at one time, 16 years, I think another, like 20 years in the other. So, but he was just, you know, he, he read, he wrote and he worked. And that's as far as I can tell, you know, the vast majority of how he spent his time. And, you know, obviously doing he wrote and he worked and that's as far as i can tell you know the vast majority of how he spent his time and you know obviously doing that making that choice you're

you're going to to over optimize in that one domain at the expense of almost all others he says his regret later in life was not having he wanted like 10 kids he wound up only having one so i thought that was interesting uh a little bit about confessions of an advertising man which again i highly recommend it says ogre v's best little bit about Confessions of an Advertising Man, which, again, I highly recommend. It says Ogilvy's bestselling book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, was published in 1962. It was described as the only civilized, literate and entertaining book ever written about advertising. A magic distillation of learning and wisdom. That's a great way to put it. Founders number 89. If you have not listened to it, I cover that book as another good way to put it founders number 89 if you have not listened to it i cover that book that's another good way to put it in one review ogilvy emerges as one of the most lovable rascals in literature what makes the book endure is ogilvy's ability to distill experience into principles and state these in pungent and memorable aphorisms you cannot bore people into buying committees can criticize advertisements but they cannot create them. Compromise has no place in advertising.

Whatever you do, go the whole hog. You can't save souls in an empty church. And those are just some examples. There's obviously more in that book. There's a picture or quote I keep on my phone to think about all the time. And it says, never dismiss an effective movement simply because it seems too simple. There's a sentence in this book that reminded me of that quote. Ogilvy prefers to stress

basic old-fashioned disciplines. One of Ogilvy's favorite forms of advertising is direct mail. He thought direct mail advertisers were the best advertisers in the world. And he uses that to help build American Express. The founder of american express i think it's the founder i'm pretty sure it's the founder might be the ceo but um he comes to ogivee at the time and it's a tiny account i mean they're doing uh not a lot like a couple million revenue at the time it's a very

small company so anyways the the ceo of american, says, hey, why don't you call Ogilvy? And their last name is Clark. So Clark called Ogilvy at his wife's urging, who said Ogilvy said he didn't think he was interested. In those days, the account was too small. The Clarks persevered, however, and Ogilvy went to their house for an informal talk. We're sitting in the library. He puts all this stuff on the floor and lies down and starts to describe the things he would do. Can't get a much better sales presentation than this, right?

You could not help but get excited about what his ideas were. And then Kenneth, the author of this book, makes a point. Ideas prepared for a client he said he wasn't interested in serving. Very interesting, right? By the 1980s, many years after this meeting was taking place, American Express had replaced General Foods as the agency's largest client. American Express built its business in part with an effective Ogilvy direct mail letter that stated, quite frankly, the American Express card is not for everyone. Direct mail, Ogilvy's first love, was a legacy from his days of door-to-door selling.

So this is something I learned when I was reading every single one of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters for what I think is Founders No. 88. I was doing it for that podcast. So Buffett winds up avoiding the mistake Ogilvy made. And this is also why I think entrepreneurs and people in general would benefit from studying investors. I consider investors entrepreneurs. Some people don't. I think it and people in general would benefit from studying investors. I consider investors entrepreneurs. Some people don't. I think it's the same thing. But even if you don't, study investors because their ideas transfer well.

Buffett came to New York once a year to meet with the management team and ask a lot of questions. He bought a lot of stock once Ogilvy went public. This is really fascinating. He debated the wisdom of acquiring other agencies, which was a very popular thing to do at the time for one agency to buy another. He says, why don't you buy the best agency? Buy your own shares. After Ogilvy had sold much of his stock, he would introduce Buffett as the fellow who has made more money out of Ogilvy and Mather than I have. So that's one of the things.

He got older. A mistake he made is he lacked some control over the company and they go off and every other agency is doing this so you know everybody thinks they have to copy that they they're trying to just get bigger but through acquisition and ogilvy says ogilvy disliked the concept he insisted his company should be one agency indivisible it's hardly surprising that he would direct other agencies with different philosophies being invited into his sacred domain. He fought the acquisition at board meetings and by memos. There can only be one true church, he wrote. Ogilvy's position was that his principles

had been shown to work. They had provided a solid foundation for growth. Why must we welcome diversions in the name of growth, itself a debatable philosophy, in a company dedicated to placing clients first? My ambition for Ogilvy and Mather is that it should be the best agency, not necessarily the biggest. So he not only does he write ads, but he writes a lot of material for internal company communication. He wrote this thing that they call principles of management. And he says, what followed in principles of management conveyed a unity of purpose to O&M offices around the world. The principles apply equally to almost any business. And we go back to this like aphorism way he had in writing, right?

On minimizing office politics. Sack incurable politicians. Crusade against paper warfare. On morale. When people aren't having any fun, they seldom produce good advertising. Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom. On professional standards. Top men must not tolerate sloppy plans or mediocre creative work. And one employee who had worked at several different agencies noted the difference between Ogilvy's culture and other ones. He says, people I knew who worked at other agencies had a job. We had a mission and it was different. No place I've ever worked at had anything remotely like it. The agency was developing a personality. Olgovie

spelled out the high standards and humane attitude toward those who worked there that he expected from his people. We're looking for gentlemen with ideas in their heads and fire in their bellies. If you join Olgovie and Mather, we shall teach you everything we know about advertising. We shall pay you well and do our damnedest to make you succeed. If you show promise, we shall load responsibility on you fast. Life in our agency can be very exciting. You will never be bored. It's tough, but it's fun. Okay, so I want to go back to this idea that Ogilavy always considered himself an advertising writer never more just i'm just an advertising writer which i think that's very it's a if you you obviously this guy had a giant ego but he if he just stuck to the fundamentals if i write good ads if my agent then i'm running the

agency and it writes good ads everything will take care of itself i really like that idea so it says olgavy was above all a writer and his agency had a writing culture he wrote like an angel even his memos were worth saving there's actually a book another book that i'm going to read you know i'm not i'm going to mention the book i have i think i have other notes on it so let me not run over this just remember this this idea that his memos were like writing of an angel he was capable of organizing his thoughts into brilliant prose this is how he wrote ads he started by looking at every advertisement for competing products for the past 20 years. That's a lot of work.

And how many people are actually going to do that? Very, very few. So when people are like, oh, you have competitors, other ad agencies, do I? Do I really? Who's going to look at every single ad that their competitors have placed for the last 20 years?

I don't really have competitors. I mean, maybe out of a thousand companies that want that account, how many are going to do this? A couple, three, four, five? That's a lot more manageable competition than just by doing more work, right? The higher you go, the less crowds you'll see. Study the precedents, he said. Then he'd go to work on a headline.

Finally, when he could no longer postpone the actual copy, he would start writing, usually throwing away the first 20 attempts if all else fails i drink a half a bottle of rum and i play uh classical music i don't know how to pronounce this guy's name this generally produces a gush of copy the next born the next morning he would get up early and edit the gush i'm a lousy copywriter he would say but a good editor and this is a very fascinating to me his writing looked different the actual the way the words on the page so um for years and years and years and i should slap myself for this for years and years and years people that i respect people i think are great writers to talk about the genius of corm the writer cormac McCarthy, right? I'm talking about for a decade, people

have recommended the book to me, people that I like their writing talk about he's one of the writers they idolize. And for some reason, it took me a decade to pick up one of his books. And this happened, I don't know, a few weeks, maybe a few months ago, something like that. I picked up the book, The Road by Corm mccarthy his writing looks different too and if i ever write a book it's going to look like cormac i love the way the actual like what the words it's the most readable writing i've ever read um i remember like i i can't remember i want to say two days i can't remember how long it took me to write the book or not write the book read that book if you're looking for fiction.

I did highly recommend picking it up. And it's post-apocalyptic, which I'm a sucker for anyways. But anyways, all I remember, I think it took me two days to read, is those two days I could almost do nothing else. I remember we were going to have dinner with family. And I showed up like an hour late because I could not. Like my entire rest of my family left and i showed up an hour away guys like i can't i have to know what happens in this book

i'm sorry it's taken a hold of me i can't do anything else it was that fantastic anyways i'm trying to compare that idea i didn't mean to go off on that weird tangent but ogilvy's writing looked different not that it read different which it did too it looked different i'm gonna tell you more about that just like cormacac McCarthy's In the Road. I have picked up his masterpiece. They say, everybody says the Blood Meridian. I'm scared to start reading it because I don't think I'll be able to do anything else till I finish it. And it's not that short of a book. So anyways, he was meticulous in making it attractive and easy to read. It was double spaced, short paragraphs, key phrases underlined, sections indented for further emphasis,

sections separated by a row of spaced asterisks it's not only is the writing readable even if you put in paragraphs he's like no i'm going to separate it it's going to be easier to read he'd with a look what he does here the flat his more flamboyance pops up with an occasional flourish after a letter had been typed he would sign his name in red. Oh, so it says everything was handwritten, never typed. So he, okay, so now I think I understood what they mean there. He writes it, somebody else types it. And then once they type it, he signs it. All right, so more on this writing. Ogilvy would go through a document and take out adjectives and

adverbs, leaving nouns and verbs to make it clear and readable. Short sentences, short paragraphs, never using more words when fewer would do. When you read them, you think this must have been like Mozart's music. It came straight out of his brain, says a writer who worked with him. But no, I couldn't believe how much trouble he had he had to get the sentence he wanted so it goes back to i'm a crappy writer a good editor it's very interesting the widow of a friend said his was the best condolence note when her husband died it's three words he was golden okay real quick i i don't i Obviously, I love this guy. I'm not impartial by any means,

but I don't want to give you the impression that he never makes mistakes. I don't understand why he did this when he got older, other than when you're fearful, you make bad decisions. Why would he sell ownership in something that you created and loved and believed in? I don't understand this. So the note of myself is don't understand this. So the note of myself is don't do this. Why did Ogilvy not hold on to his shares? I was always terrified

the thing would go bust. In the middle of the takeover battle, I called his chateau to talk with Ogilvy. So this is now the author of this book going from biographer to participant in the story. Okay. And so he's the one, I think he's the chairman of the company when they're having to fight this takeover battle. Ogilvy's older. We've already fast forward in his life story. He's living in his castle in France that he can't afford

with his young third wife. Okay. So it says, in the middle of the takeover battle, I called the chateau to talk with Ogilvy. Herta, that's his French wife, answered the phone and said how upset he was about what was happening to his company.

I said, I certainly understood, but at least he had made money this time on the rising share price. He sold it all two weeks ago, she replied. The takeover destroyed a part of Olgavy. His secretary in France said she could mark the beginning of his decline to that period. He winds up suffering from asthma, emphysema, and Alzheimer's. So the last few years of his life was really rough. He lived to 88, but the last few years were not good years the agency was the most important thing in his life it was the nearest thing he could he could have to childbearing he felt he had brought olgavy and mother into into being and nurtured it and had and had been brutally taken away from him so that's why he he says he didn't want to go public because the fact of the public the company's public

allowed for this hostile takeover. And they went up, you know, the guy that bought it winds up going into like deep debt to do it. And like I said before, it's almost $862 million, I think, something like that. A lot, a lot of money for it. But Ogilvy did not want that happening. And so then he winds up becoming chairman of the larger company that buys his firm but he hated the guy at the beginning he called him an odious little shit and then a year later he said he wished he knew the guy he apologized to him he's never apologized to anybody in his adult life but he's like i wish i

knew you 40 years earlier because he actually thought he was relatively smart but he did not like him at the time the hostile takeover was happening um but so my question to myself was like why are you accepting being a chairman of a company whose purpose you you abhor because he's like this guy's just going around buying all these advertising agencies for the sake of bigness remember he wants to be best not big and so this is what he says ogilvy believed he had no other choice he hadn't managed his money well avoid this as he often admitted there were expenses he continually worried about money. I'm supposed to be terribly rich. I'm not because I screwed up my financial affairs all my life.

A visitor at the castle told Ogilvy to stop complaining about money. You're in excellent health. You have this glorious chateau. You have a devoted wife and everyone's admiration. Stop grousing. He did for 15 minutes. And again, I was like, you're living in a castle. That might be part of your problem, man. Okay, so now when he's 75 years old, he's still beloved to the day he dies. He's like a large part of his life. He's writing memos and he's like on company culture and ideas and going around giving speeches. And obviously, you know, he's very gifted at that.

And so what people do in the company, they do something very fascinating. They take all these internal memos that, you know, this guy's writing so many of them that the post office by him gets reclassified, right? And the postmaster gets a raise. It's hilarious. So they put together a book

and it's called The Unpublished David Ogilvie. And this will be a future episode. But they don't tell him they're doing this. And they give it to him as a birthday gift for his 75th birthday. After two weeks of nervous waiting for reaction to a book published under his name without his permission, the verdict was delivered. My best birthday present ever. Okay, so there's a lot of quotes from speeches and writings he's doing at an advanced age. And this is regrets and reminiscences from a 70-year-old David. This is gold from anyone towards the end of their life

because they're further down the path than you and I are. I want to know what they thought was the most important aspects of life, and I want to know what they they thought was the most important aspects of life and I want to know what they were what what they regretted the most so we can avoid that I hope you don't make as many mistakes as I have I've made some frightful mistakes like turning down an obscure little office machinery account company that never heard of before that was called Xerox I've always been a terrible coward about firing non-performers I fritter he's just gonna list off in very simple sentences regrets right I frittered away far too much time on things which were not really important. I failed to recognize some big ideas when they came along. May God forgive me. I made a mistake when I gave up creative work and concentrated on management. I regret that. I was always petrified of losing accounts.

Now, wait a second. In my heyday, I resigned five accounts, five times as many accounts as I was fired. So he's making a joke there. He's funny. Here at the castle, I've succeeded in forgetting all the disagreeable aspects of the agency business,

like losing accounts and losing good people, which is worse. I've forgotten the hellish pressures. 16-hour days, six days a week, three briefcases. But I've gotten a lot of happiness out of advertising. I've never been bored by my job. Above all, I've made some wonderful friends, friends with my partners and with our clients and with some of our competitors.

I would like to be remembered, but as what? As a copywriter who had some big ideas. That's what the advertising business is all about. Big ideas. So now here's a few quotes from a speech he was giving about recruiting new people to an advertising firm. He says, take care of any new terrific person who you've recruited. Make him read my books for crying out loud. And it says words of laughter. He's giving a speech, holding them up one at a time. Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvie. Olgovie on Advertising by David Olgovie. The unpublished David Olgovie.

I keep writing these books and they're widely read all over the world. They're absolutely stuffed with priceless information. And if you read them, you won't be so callow and ignorant. One, I love that he's self-promoting even to the very end. He's probably 75, almost 80 years old when he's given that speech. And two, the note of himself is big facts. He's right. They're absolutely stuffed with priceless information. So he's probably 75 almost 80 years old when he's given that speech and two the note of himself is big facts he's right they're absolutely stuffed with priceless information so he's actually telling them the truth another thing um that david would teach you or studying david would teach you is that you should be stealing from the best olgovey had long preached that all

copywriters should study the bible of direct marketing business tested advertising methods by john capels And he wrote an introduction for the book's fourth edition, quoting his favorite Capels fact. I have seen one advertisement sell 19 and a half times as much goods as another. He said an earlier edition of the book

taught him most of what he knew about writing ads. He meant that literally. What does he mean by he meant that literally? He mean he plagiarized it and he admits plagiarizing. When Capels died in 1990, Ogilvy was asked to deliver the eulogy. After extolling Capels as the nicest man he had ever known,

Ogilvy declared he was very simply the best. And for that reason, he had plagiarized his work unashamedly. And then this is how he ended that part of the eulogy. Why steal from anyone but the best? And even with his big ego he has and obviously colorful personality and vivid writing, he didn't think he was an all-purpose genius. He said, I dedicated my career to the one thing I could be good at. I'm good at one thing.

In the beginning of Confessions of Advertising i'm i'm i'm a genius at one thing advertising he's like i can't ski i can't cook i can't do all this other stuff but i can advertise so he says asked why he chose advertising when he could have done and done well at anything he responded you're quite wrong advertising is the only thing i could have done well um at 80 years old he's still giving a speech about his philosophy, teaching these ideas until the very end. He says, my crusade is in the favor of advertising, which sells. My war cry is we sell or else. This has been my philosophy for 50 years and I've never wavered from it, no matter what the temptations have been.

He allowed good ideas to compound, and he did that for multiple decades. That's a very important lesson for us. And finally, I'll close on this because this is fantastic. I've never heard the Scottish saying before, but it's one I'll never forget now. A reporter once asked Ogilvy what he would like as his epitaph. Turning back to an old Scottish saying, he said, Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead. Assessments of David Ogilvy's happiness may vary, but no one will disagree with the conclusion by an American friend of his from his Oxford days.

He has done rather well for an immigrant, don't you think? And that is where I'll leave it. I can't recommend this book enough. I can't remember, recommend any of, just pick one. It doesn't matter which one it is. I promise you, you're going to love reading it. His writing is fantastic. So if you want to buy the book, if you use the link that's in your show notes on your podcast player, you'll be supporting, you be supporting the podcast at the same time. A lot of new listeners are discovering this podcast because other misfits are buying gift subscriptions for friends and coworkers. If you want to do that, there's a handy link below. It feels good to do something nice for someone else. And it also helps the podcast at the same

time. That is 169 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.