Episode Details

What I learned from reading The Unpublished David Ogilvy by David Ogilvy. 

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[0:01] Will Any Agency Hire This Man? He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college.

He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing, and has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year.

I doubt if any American agency will hire him.

However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.

The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.

[2:39] Words were what made him. Reading this collection, one is struck, piece after piece by how David's words surprise and seduce, tease and provoke.

[2:58] His writing is opinionated, forceful, and urgent.

[4:24] David was building his first-class business in a first-class way.

[5:37] Every advertisement must tell the whole sales story.

[5:41] The copy must be human and very simple.Every word in the copy must count. Concrete figures must be substituted for atmospheric claims; clichés must give way to facts, and empty exhortations to alluring offers.

[6:08] Permanent success has rarely been built on frivolity. People do not buy from clowns.

[7:38] The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore.

[11:49] I have a new metaphor. Great hospitals do two things: They look after patients, and they teach young doctors. Ogilvy & Mather does two things: We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people. Ogilvy & Mather is the teaching hospital of the advertising world. And, as such, to be respected above all other agencies.

[12:44] I plead for charm, flair, showmanship, taste, distinction.

[16:42] Dear Ray: Nineteen years ago you wrote me the best job application letter I have ever received. I can still recite the first paragraph. The first paragraph read: "My father was in charge of the men's lavatory at the Ritz Hotel. My mother was a chambermaid at the same hotel. I was educated at the London School of Economics.

[18:04] I find extravagance esthetically repulsive. I find the New England Puritan tradition more attractive. And more profitable.

[21:14] So the time had come to give the pendulum a push in the other direction. If that push has puzzled you, caught you on the wrong foot and confused you, I can only quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds... Speak what you think today in words  as hard as cannonballs, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today."

[22:01] I prefer a posture of confident authority.

[22:19] You have a first-class mind. Stretch it.

[22:38] David on how he lasted so long: 

1. I have outlived all my competitors. 

2. My obsessive interest in advertising has not dimmed. 

3. My younger partners have tolerated my presence in their midst. 

4. I had the wisdom to give them a free run. As a result, Ogilvy & Mather has outgrown its founder.

[27:02] An account manager wrote to David wondering what he considered his worst shortcomings. The reply:

I am intolerant of mediocrity – and laziness.

I fritter away too much time on things which aren't important.

Like everyone of my age, I talk too much about the past.

I have always funked firing people who ne