5 principles from Ogilvy
63 years later + still working just as well as they did back then
We’re back for part 2 of my unpacking the marketing, copywriting, + offers rabbithole I’ve gone down recently. (Here’s part 1 from last week in case you missed it)
As part of this rabbithole tour, I’ve been going through the classics: Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert, John Caples, etc. and have been filling up my notebook faster than ever before. Principles validated that we’ve been doing, foundational things I’ve found we’re drifting away from + need to come back to, and tactics that we hadn’t been using at all + put into our mix as soon as I finished reading the section.
After re-reading my highlights, I wanted to create some form of a lesson/takeaway that I could come back to as time goes on from each of these books. So today we have the second of these as I unpack my learnings + interpretations from “Confessions of an Advertising Man” by David Ogilvy.
Sponsor: Affect
Affect is the framework for how I think about marketing accountability. The playbooks I’ve built from 15 years of seeing what works + what doesn’t and recognizing that the purpose of marketing isn’t to hit vanity metrics like MQLs, but to move the business.
Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated surpassing its MQL targets while the business missed revenue. It’s for the marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself. It’s for the marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.
August is the last month to grab the founding member rate at $99/mo, locked in for life. A ton of enhancements are coming out in Aug, Sept, and beyond, so be sure to grab this before pricing goes up to $399/mo. Or, as one of the first users said:
“It’s $99 and cancelable after 30 days, it’s pretty risk-free. I pay more for an Uber to the airport.”
Culture
“Here is how I see our culture:
Some of our people spend their entire working lives in our agency. We do our damnedest to make it a nice place to work.
We treat our people like human beings. We help them when they are in trouble-with their jobs, with illness, with alcoholism, and so on.
We help them make the best of their talents, investing an awful lot of time and money in training-like a teaching hospital.
We give our executives an extraordinary degree of freedom and independence.
We like people with gentle manners.
We like people who are honest in argument, honest with clients and, above all, honest with consumers.
We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough.
We detest office politicians, toadies, bullies, and pompous asses. We abhor ruthlessness.
The way up our ladder is open to everybody. We are free from prejudice of any kind - religious prejudice, racial prejudice, or sexual prejudice.
We detest nepotism and every other form of favouritism. In promoting people to top jobs, we are influenced as much by their character as anything else.
The recommendations we make to our clients are the recommendations we would make if we owned their companies, without regard to our own interest.”
Real talk: it’s crazy to see how much things have changed in the 63 years since this was published.
How many companies actually help their employees when they’re sick or have health issues?
Have actual internal training programs to level up team members, not just a “learning stipend” to buy books or attend a conference once per year?
Operate with integrity in the sense of making recommendations that are what’s best for the client/customer, not necessarily for the company?
There are some out there that do exist, just one of those moments of reflection where seeing this on paper has you mentally going through the checklist of your current/former employers.
Clients/Customers
“I have never wanted to get an account so big that I could not afford to lose it. The day you do that, you commit yourself to living with fear.
Frightened agencies lose the courage to give candid advice; once you lose that you become a lackey.
…I also resign accounts when I lose confidence in the product. It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.”
A couple of interesting points made in here by Ogilvy + speak to the conviction he held when it came to their clients.
I’m sure most everyone reading this has at some point had a client or customer they couldn’t stand working with, but would justify the stress of them because of the income they provided.
The 1 huge client that paid so much they effectively controlled the product roadmap…
The 1 huge client that paid the same amount 2 clients combined did…but was actually the work of 3 to manage…
These are the things we need to evaluate when it comes to clients/customers. It’s not always a function of dollars to determine if they’re worth engaging/keeping, but how that also expands out to the mental bandwidth they occupy, the second-order decisions made because they overweigh business discussions, etc.
Then as a cherry on top, I loved that last part of the quote about resigning accounts when confidence is lost in the product. Goes back to integrity here + not being willing to market something you actively wouldn’t use or recommend to others.
Consumers
"The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her. Competing brands are becoming more and more alike.
When faced with the inconvenient fact that their brand is about the same as several others, most copywriters conclude that there is no point in telling the consumer what is common to all brands; so they confine themselves to some trivial point of difference. I hope that they will continue to make this mistake, because it enables us to pre-empt the truth for our clients."
Most of you have probably read/heard the first sentence of this quote somewhere before as it’s one of Ogilvy’s most famous. But it’s the second sentence that I think is the most important here as it’s something that still runs rampant today.
So many companies + brands lean on slogans and generalities and superlatives like “#1 in [category]” without ever providing any context or justification for those statements. It’s lazy marketing to do those + is why so many companies become commodities competing in a race to the bottom.
Consistency
“But never give up a campaign just because you have grown tired of it; housewives don’t see your advertisements as often as you do. The best thing is to get a great campaign, and then continue it for several years. The problem is to find a great campaign.
…You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who get married next year.”
If there’s one thing you remember from today’s newsletter, have it be this section. (and I say this because it’s what I need to continuously remind myself of)
Yes, frequency + ad fatigue are real, but I think we overindex on what the ad platforms recommend as “best practice” to the detriment of what’s actually working. For example, say you’ve got an ad that is absolutely KILLING it. I’ve seen marketers stop running it because it’s hit their frequency number that triggers a new ad/campaign to start running instead.
The unfortunate part of this is that the next ad/campaign are often for an entirely different product/feature, or is a different message/offer, so every bit of momentum gained from what was running WELL before is stripped out from underneath it.
And that’s why I love the simplicity + visual Ogilvy gives in the second part of the quote when he said, “You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.” That mental model is one that once I read it, have told myself I will come back to every month so I never forget it.
Congruence
“There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers. You might think that the public would resent this trick, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do.
…Always design your layout for the publication in which it will appear, and never approve it until you have seen how it looks when pasted into that publication. A layout must relate to the graphic climate of the newspaper or magazine which is to carry it.”
Since my Refine Labs days, I’ve always said the message NEEDS to match the medium it’s being placed on.
This is often the cause of so many “[channel] doesn’t work for us” claims we’d hear. Then when looking into why that channel wasn’t working, I’d see it was because they were taking something that was clearly formatted for a channel like LinkedIn and would take that exact same ad/content + push it over to a place like Reddit or YouTube.
Those channels operate ENTIRELY differently from one another in terms of how users consume + engage content, so it’s zero percent surprising that the “channel” didn’t work for them, when the reality was they were using the wrong medium/format within the channel.
Conclusion
Like I said last week, these principles work because they’re built on understanding human nature, not chasing the newest/shiniest trend. Ogilvy wrote this in 1963 (63 years ago!) and they’re still relevant. The mediums since then have changed (i.e. social ads vs. print), but the underlying fundamentals haven’t.
So that’s why I think going back to the classics matters. A lot of marketers are chasing silver bullets + trends that’ll only last for a few weeks/months, then it’s back to the drawing board to find the next one. There’s no consistency being built in how they’ll attract their market. The fundamentals in these classics prove there are other ways. If something’s been working for 63+ years, I’d be willing to bet it’ll probably continue to work for a few more years 😉
See you next Saturday,
Sam
P.S. cool new feature in Substack that detects AI writing in publications. Here’s what this newsletter scored on the “AI slop” scale 😜
