Advertising: How to Succeed, Trying

For self-assured David Mackenzie Ogilvy, the road to quick success on Madison Avenue was paved with good inventions. As chief of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, which he founded 15 years ago, he has used polished presentations to woo and win blue-chip clients such as Shell Oil, General Foods, and Sears, Roebuck, and he has turned out sophisticated campaigns spotlighting the man in the Hathaway shirt and the Rolls-Royce, where “At Sixty Miles an Hour the Loudest Noise Comes from the Electric Clock.” He was always ready to give an interviewer a phrase that would catch headlines, and to send progress reports on his agency to 600 business leaders who had never inquired about his progress in the first place. Now Ogilvy is 52, his reputation made, his agency secure with 19 clients and $55 million in annual billings. “I can only plead,” he writes, “that if I had behaved in a more professional way, it would have taken me 20 years to arrive. I had neither the time nor the money to wait.”

Ogilvy tells all—or at least much-in a book out last week, Confessions of an Advertising Man (172 pp.; Atheneum; $4.95). Confessions? Some agencies’, Scot-reared Ogilvy once told an interviewer, “are like churches where there is no dogma, where they make up their own prayers. Ours is like the Catholic Church.” For a man who is reputed to be one of Madison Avenue’s boldest commandment breakers, his theology is surprisingly orthodox. Celebrated for his audacity and British charm, he prefers to stress basic, old-fashioned disciplines, and to show how well he knows his Americans from his experience of having worked for George Gallup and his dedication to large-scale market research. Samples:

> Headlines: “The’ two most powerful words you can use in a headline are FREE and NEW. You can seldom use FREE, but you can almost always use NEW.”

> Copy: “If you are advertising a product which has a great many qualities to recommend it, write long copy: the more you tell, the more you sell.”

> Campaigns: “Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency, largely because their sponsors got sick of seeing them. The Sherwin Cody School of English ran the same advertisement (“Do You Make These Mistakes in English?”) for 42 years, changing only the type face and the color of Mr. Cody’s beard … If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops pulling.”

Ogilvy is still dread Scot enough to voice some stubborn convictions about the wrongs of his craft. He believes that billboard advertising should be abolished. And on the question of commercial television, Ogilvy is candid: “As a practitioner I know that television is the most potent advertising medium ever devised, and I make most of my living from it. But as a private person I would gladly pay for the privilege of watching it without commercial interruptions.”