Investor's Business Daily, September 20th, 2007
David Ogilvy had a simple formula for attracting new clients: Do good work for old ones.
"The easiest way to get new clients is to do good advertising," Ogilvy wrote in his seminal work, "Ogilvy on Advertising."
"During one period of seven years, we never failed to win an account for which we competed, and all I did was show the campaigns we had created. Sometimes I did not even have to do that. One afternoon, a man walked into my office without an appointment and gave me the IBM account; he knew our work."
Client by client, Ogilvy built up his ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather. Even when he became successful -- Advertising Age magazine called him "one of the most widely known creative gods in advertising history" -- he didn't take anything for granted.
He made promoting his agency one of his most important duties. He scheduled at least two major speeches a year, "each carefully staged and crafted for maximum impact," according to Ad Age.
Ogilvy was born in West Horsley, England, and sought from a young age to climb his way up the ladder. He attended Christ Church College at Oxford University and was eager to try his hand in the business world. He left Oxford and went to Paris, where he worked in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic. Feeling like he had some experience under his belt, he returned to England and went to work for Aga Cookers selling stoves door to door.
One of the lessons learned during this period: Making a large number of sales calls alone isn't enough.
"The more prospects you talk to, the more sales you expose yourself to, the more orders you will get," he wrote. "But never mistake quantity of calls for quality of salesmanship."
To help others learn, Ogilvy wrote a guide for Aga salesmen that Fortune magazine called "probably the best sales manual ever written."
Wanting to build his sales skills, Ogilvy worked briefly for Aga's ad agency, Mather & Crowther. Yet he wanted more. Seeing more opportunity in the U.S., he moved here in 1938. He went to work for George Gallup's Audience Research Institute, where he learned the importance of research to find out what your customers want.
"If you cannot afford the service of professionals to do this research, do it yourself. Informal conversations with half a dozen housewives can sometimes help ... more than formal surveys," Ogilvy wrote.
Ogilvy considered it crucial to know the product. "First study the product you are going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a bid idea for selling it," he said.
When Ogilvy landed the Rolls-Royce account, he spent three weeks reading about the car and came across a statement that "at 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from an electric clock." That became the headline of one of Ogilvy's most famous ads.
He thought it important to know what the competition does regarding similar products. "Imagine what a client would feel if he found out his brand-new campaign has a twin sister," he wrote.
During World War II, Ogilvy worked for the British Secret Service, writing reports and analyzing data on matters of diplomacy and security. After the Allies' triumph, he bought a farm in Pennsylvania, but it took just a few years to recognize that farming was not his forte.
So he returned to what he did well: selling. But what agency would hire an unemployed college dropout who knew nothing about marketing? To make it worse, he'd never written an ad in his life.
Time to strike out on his own, Ogilvy figured. He persuaded his former employers at Mather & Crowther to back him. In 1948 he founded Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, which eventually became O&M.
As the agency grew and opened offices around the world, Ogilvy always sent a gift to anyone appointed to head an office. It was a Russian doll that had smaller dolls inside each one. In the smallest, Ogilvy placed a note and hiring advice:
"If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people bigger than we are, Ogilvy & Mather will become a company of giants."
Ogilvy prized individuality and confidence in his employees. People who needed the support of committees weren't likely to be hired. "A lot of advertisements and television commercials look like minutes of a committee meeting, and that is what they are," Ogilvy said. "Advertising seems to sell most when it is written by a solitary individual. He must study the product, the research and the precedents. Then he must shut the door of his office and write the advertisements."
As he wrote in "Confessions of an Advertising Man": "Search all your parks in all your cities. You'll find no statues of committees."
Ogilvy pushed for ads that were written in everyday language. At the time the campaign was introduced, a minor controversy raged over the slogan "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." Grammatically, that should have read, "Winston tastes good, as a cigarette should."
Ogilvy dismissed the critics as "insufferable pedants," and, according to Advertising Age, added: "If you're trying to persuade people to do something or buy something, it seems to me you should use ... the language they use every day."
This story originally ran Jan. 3, 2002, on Leaders & Success.
