#82 David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising)

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it creative. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. In my Confessions of an Advertising Man published in 1963, I told the story of how Ogovian Mathere came into existence and set forth the principles on which our early success had been based. Our principles seemed to work. But I am now so old that a French magazine lists me as the only survivor among a group of men who contributed to the industrial revolution, alongside Adam Smith, Edison, Karl Marx, Rockefeller, Ford and Cain. Does old age disqualify me from writing about advertising in today's world? Or could it be that that perspective helps a man to separate the internal varieties of advertising from its passing fads? List of the advertising techniques which worked when I wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man still worked today. Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money. Beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on. All over the world. In saying this, I run the risk of being denounced by the idiots who hold that any advertising technique which had been in use for more than two years is Ipso facto obsolete. That is from the introduction of the book that I read this week and the one I am going to be talking to you about today, which is Ogovian Advertising by David Ogovian. Let's jump into the book. This is a glimpse of his personality and he is explicitly tells us who this book is for. He focuses on advertising, like he just said. I don't look at as an art form, I am not trying to be creative for creative states, I am trying to convey information to you by product. That is why my agency will grow because I am effective at doing this for my clients and as their business grows they spend more money with me and therefore their rising tide lifts my boat. Then he talks about, I don't care about what campaigns, if I had favor cocktail parties in New York and San Francisco. He says, I come for myself with a reflection that I have sold more merchandise than all of them put together, meaning that people just win awards. I am sometimes attacked for imposing rules. Nothing could be further from the truth. I hate rules, he is very much a misfit. All I do is report on how consumers react to different stimuli. This is not a book for readers who think they already know all there is to know about advertising. It is for young hopefuls and veterans who are still in search of ways to improve their batting average at the cash register. I write only about aspects of advertising I know from my own experience. He is right off the ripy stallion. I am not here to win awards. I am not here to make my ads make the most beautiful visual representations. I am here to serve my clients in his entire business. We have been talking about how I am powered stern. We were talking about Henry Ford lately. In his whole theme, when you read the two books I read, the two ones he is written at least. The other books written about him is focused on service service service service service. There is no point in having a business that does not focus on service. That is literally why you exist. In David Ogreby's case, he feels the same way. I am here to service my clients. What they want me to do is help them sell more of their product. That is the prism in which I am going to look at advertising. I am only going to look at advertising based on its effectiveness, which I find refreshing. Here is a little bit about brevity, performance and lies. I actually do forgive me for oversimplifying some complicated subjects. For the dogmatism of my style, and so what is that dogmatism? It is the dogmatism of brevity. We are both in a hurry. I love this guy. The first thing I have to say is that you may not realize the magnitude of difference between one advertisement and another. I think he studied consumer behavior. He did a lot of professional research. In his industry, he sought out and learned from people that came before him. In fact, the end of the book, I am going to share with you where he goes over the six people that had been in the business before him, some of which he winds up knowing and they went up mentoring him. In this case, he is quoting another one of what he feels is one of the best direct response copywriters in this guy named John Capel's. He says, "I have seen one advertisement sell twice as much, not three times as much, but 19 times as much as another. Both advertisements occupy the same space, both around the same publication, both had photographic illustrations, both had carefully written copy. The difference was the one used the right appeal and the other one used the wrong appeal." He talks about, "Well, I guess I will get into that." Many people, too many companies, he was saying in too many advertising agencies, they advertise the product. Customers don't care about your product. They care about what change your product makes to them. That's what I'm talking about with the right appeal. This is very similar to when I keep saying, "Weed, there's no weed." When I covered the two books by Charlie Munger where he kept drilling in about study incentive, study incentive, study incentives, even when he was in his 80s, Mungers like this. I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort, my whole life, understanding how human behavior is shaped by incentives and every year that passes, even at this point where I'm later in my life, I still realize I have a lot more to learn. The incentives actually have a larger impact than I even thought before. He says, "Everyone involved has a vested interest in prolonging the myth that all advertising increases sales to some degree. It doesn't." This is another example. He has these little sections within chapters that have these headlines that I would say is basically giving us direct advice. This is something that I've talked about a lot, the importance of professional research, and he calls it doing your homework. He says, "You don't stand a tinker's chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework." Again, he's talking about people who want to work in advertising business. This applies to whatever craft that you're doing. I've always found this extremely tedious, but there is no substitute for it. Just study the product you're going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it. This is actually the idea that books are the original links. I found this paragraph particularly interesting because it ties into the book that I did last week, which is on Henry Royce, one of the founders of Rose Royce. Turns out, Olga V's connected to that because he wants to do his agency wants to do the advertising for Rose Royce for quite a long time. This is when I got the Rose Royce account. I spent three weeks reading about the car and came across a statement that at 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the lecture clock. This became the headline, and it was followed by 607 words of factual copy. He actually shows that beautiful advertisement that he has. He's talking about on the page next to us. Remember the 607 words? A lot of people. Well, he's going to talk a lot about the fact that it's a myth that when you're writing an advertisement or you're communicating with potential customers, longer is almost always better. And he's got some data on that. So just remember the fact that he wrote a 607 word advertisement in a magazine. Okay, or it could be a newspaper. I'm not actually sure where it was published. All right. Later, when I got the Mercedes account, I sent a team to the headquarters in Stugar. And they spent three weeks taping interviews with engineers. From this came a campaign of long factual advertisements, which increased Mercedes sales in the United States from 10,000 cars a year to 40,000 cars a year. Okay, so that's just an example of some of the results of his research. It's excessive. I mean, that's the best way possible. Professional research. He talks about consumer research and positioning a lot in this book. Here's some examples. Now comes research among consumers. Read out how they think about your kind of product, what language they use when they discuss the subject, what attributes are important to them and what promises, excuse me, and what promise would be most likely, and what promise would be most likely to make them buy your brand. So the whole idea that an ad or anything, the first thing that customers should know about your product, which you're trying to sell them is what do you promise that it's going to do for them? A lot of things, a lot of ads that he uses examples of is like, we're the best. Look how great we are. Consumers don't care about that. Everybody is in some degree selfish. So they care about them. So don't talk about yourself. Talk about them. And he says the positioning. Now consider how you want to position your product. This curious verb is in great favor among marketing experts, but no two of them agree what it means. My own definition is what the product does and who is it for. So he talks about the importance of brand image. This is some of the tests he does on consumer behavior. And he's doing, there is some kind of liquor. I don't know what kind. It's called old crow. Okay, so I guess that's not important. It's alcohol that he's advertising. So he says, give people a taste of old crow and tell them it's old crow. Then give them another taste of old crow, but tell them it's Jack Daniel. So they're drinking the exact same thing. They're just lying to them, right? And he's doing this in like a consumer research study. Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images. That's such an interesting idea. So this is again tying into the importance of brand image. I have always been hypnotized by Jack Daniels. The label and the advertising convey an image of home spun honesty. And the high price makes me assume that Jack Daniels must be superior. This is another hidden secret about human nature that people determine the quality of the shortcut for determining the quality of a product is by looking at the price. So you remember when I did that book on the two founders of Banana Republic, Mel and Patricia, and I found it fascinating when they first started the first Banana Republic store, which is really interesting because it's completely different brand than what exists today. They would have-- Patricia would set up the store. And when an item wasn't selling, in fact, this is one of the reasons the founder of Gap wind up buying the company. Most retail sellers at the time say, oh, this is this price-- or this item of clothing and selling. Here, 50% off. Now it will sell. Patricia did the opposite. She raised the price and it wind up selling. Because the same scarf or same blouse or same shirt, same whatever that was $25 is viewed one way. Now it's $100. And suddenly it's, oh, it's a luxury item. Oh, this must be really nice. And again, the world is extremely complex. Humans, all of us, myself included, look for shortcuts to try to convey information rapidly. And price is one of those. OK, so oh, I love this quote. He says, have humility in the presence of a good idea. He says, when asked what the best asset a man could have, Albert Lasker-- this is a huge influence on him and we'll cover more about Albert later-- the most astute of all. Avertizing men replied, humility in the presence of a good idea. It is horribly difficult to recognize a good idea. I shudder to think how many I have rejected. Research can't help you much because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea. And no idea is big unless it will work for 30 years. That's another idea of his that is kind of contrarian in the advertising industry, at least it was, at the time he wrote the book, was that if you find an advert-- an ad that works, don't change it. In some cases, they've run the same ad for 30 years and it's still selling. And now he's got some explicit advice for us. Make the product a hero and make it different. So he says, whenever you can, make the product itself the hero of your advertising. If you think the products too dull, I have news for you. There are no dull products, only dull writers. Every time I have written a bad campaign, it is because the product did not interest me. Now why wouldn't a product interest you? And keep in mind, I had agency see tons of products. So he says, a problem which confronts agencies is that so many products are no different from their competitors. This is why I guess I do believe in the axiom that you don't have to be better. You just have to be different. And I like this idea too. The idea of a positively good product. And this is a quote from his partner, Joel. So he says, in the past, just about every advertiser has assumed that in order to sell his goods, he has to convince consumers that his product is superior to his competitors. That's why I was referencing earlier how you would be to a lot of ads like, we're the best in the world. Or this is the Northeast best car dealership. Or this is Europe's best coffee, whatever the case is. This may not be necessary. It may be sufficient to convince consumers that your product is positively good. If the consumer feels certain that your product is good and feels uncertain about your competitors, he will buy yours. Remember that has nothing to do with the quality, right? If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don't try to imply that your product is better. Just say what's good about your product and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it that word clear is really important. And we'll talk about that later. Because remember, he told you from the beginning, advertising is conveying information. Don't confuse your customer. If this theory is right, sales will swing to the marketer who does the best job of creating confidence that his product is positively good. And now this is all-go-v with advice on down with committees. Most campaigns are too complicated. Use the word products as well for campaigns. They reflect a long list of objectives and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing. This is also why I prefer founder-led companies. Many commercials and many advertisements look like the minutes of a committee. In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create. And then this is his advice on this constant pursuit of knowledge. And he comes to the conclusion that the good ones just know more. They just know more. He says, it is the same with advertising agents. The good ones know more. I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any that he preferred to rely on his own intuition, or his own intuition, excuse me. Suppose I asked, your goal bladder has to be removed this evening. We choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where to find your goal bladder, or a surgeon who relies on his intuition. Why should our clients be expected to bet millions of dollars on your intuition? This willful refusal to learn the rudiments of the craft is all too common. That's one of the most important sentences in the book. Let me read that again. So this is lessons of direct response. He's a really big proponent of direct response advertising. And he feels like at least when he's writing in the '80s, it's kind of like the ugly stepchild. Because a lot of people just want to advertise their brand and make you aware of it. And he's like, well, the best people at advertising are actually people that know the effectiveness of their advertising. And at that time, it was only direct response. So we're going to talk a little bit about that here. He says, the advertising community has turned its back on such research. Agencies, which pioneered the search for knowledge, now excel in violating the principles their predecessors had discovered. So they're ignoring the past, all the lessons that people were doing that job before had discovered. And so now they're going to make the same mistakes. Over and over again, they didn't have to. If you choose to ignore these factors, good luck to you. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles. But it helps to know that they are found in oak forests. Direct response advertisers know to a dollar how much each advertisement sells. So watch the kind of advertising they do. That's smart, really smart. Watch what they do, now what they say. You will notice important differences between their techniques and the techniques of general advertisers. And so he says, for example, now this is where he comes up with some of his ideas. Again, so he relies on professional research. He doesn't really pay attention to what people say. Watches what they do, which is really smart for human. Because humans were much more truthful with our actions than we were with our words. So now he's going to go and contrast what direct advertisers do with what other people in advertising that don't do professional research recommend you do. See the difference there? These are the people actually are effective with their doing. Meanwhile, there's this intelligence if you want to say, or these people are trying to win awards and not necessarily sell products. And this is what they tell you to do. This is general advertisers use 30 second commercials. But the direct response fraternity has learned that it is more profitable to use two-minute commercials. And then this is David asking us, who do you suppose is more likely to be right? General advertisers broadcast their commercials in expensive prime time when the audience is at its peak. But direct response advertisers have learned that they make more sales late at night. Who do you suppose is more likely to be right? In their magazine advertisements, general advertisers use short copy. But the direct response people invariably use long copy. This is such a really important point that he's making here. I am convinced that if all advertisers were to follow the example of their direct response brethren, they would get more sales per dollar. So this is what I meant by he's funny. If you choose to ignore these factors, good luck to you, a blind pick, and sometimes find truffles. So this is something he learned from William Maynard, somebody that was at a different agency. And this idea of being, if you're a killer plus a poet, you will get rich. So he says, most good copywriters fall into two categories-- poets and killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end. If you are both killer and poet, you get rich. And now I guess the modern equivalent in the age of the internet. If you're a builder, if you can build things yourself and you can sell them yourself, you'll get rich. I think that quote is from the founder of Angel List of all Robocont. This is just good advice for life. Set yourself to becoming the best informed person in the agency on the account into which you are assigned. If, for example, it is in a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products, read the trade journals in the field, spend Saturday mornings and service stations talking to motorists, visit your clients or find a reason research laboratories. At the end of your first year, you will know more about the oil business than your boss. And again, this is another example of professional research, something that Bill Gurley talks about, Danny Meyer talks about, a lot of people talk about. And how many people-- I would just ask you this question. First, I think this is a great idea. Go as deep as you can. How many people-- if you assume that the advertising agency is a zero sum game, We're lucky, I think most of us, we don't have to, most of the world now, at least in the internet world, is not zero sum. But you could argue that the world that David and Habitat was zero sum, either your agency gets this or they don't, that account's going somewhere. So it's highly competitive. How many people that you're competing with are actually going to do these things that he's talking about? Like, that's tiny, probably zero. So who are you actually competing with? You're actually really not competing with anybody. Because so few people are willing to do, you know, what he's saying. It's like, if I'm going to advertise oil, I'm going to go into that meeting. And this is why I recommend reading books. And of course, if you, by listening to this podcast, not only are you picking up ideas and tips and habits and unique perspectives about work, but they make you more interesting person to talk to. So when they're in these, and a lot of, he talks about like the, the process in which a company, a large, mostly large corporations, pick at agencies. And it's almost, you know, it's just like a series of job interviews, essentially. Now, imagine how, like the response that the person you're trying to solicit their business from would get when they, when you can mention, oh yeah, I read on books on oil geology and production of petroleum products. I went to your refinery and went to your research laboratory. Like, they're just going to be blown away. I love this. So I know I left myself as only the auto-diet acts are free. 87 American universities offer undergraduate courses in advertising and even give degrees in it. Okay, so it's 87 American universities at the time. They, some of them give degrees in advertising, right? With a few conspicuous exceptions, the teachers lack the practical experience to be relevant. So he's saying they're selling you stuff that's worthless. All of them are handicapped by the poor quality of their textbooks and very few do research on their own. How many times were, were, were, not even, what, 20, 30 minutes into this podcast, how many times is the word research come up over and over again? And you see, it's very much a theme of David's life. Very few do research on their own. Most of their graduates get jobs with small agencies. The big agencies preferring to recruit people who have furnished their minds by studying history, language, economics, and so forth. So he's very widely read. And when I do cover his, what's interesting about his life, he talks about it a little bit in this book, but I'm sure more in Confessions of an advertising man is that he didn't start in the advertising business, he was like 38. He was like an unemployed former chef, farmer, researcher, and then he went into advertising. So he had a wide, like a broader set of life experiences that I think was useful when he started doing advertising and then eventually we set up his own agency. He's telling us in this section to talk and write like a human. He says, be personal, direct, and natural. You are human being, writing to another human being. Neither of you is an institution. You should be business like and courteous, but never stiff and impersonal. I think this is also like as time goes by, more of my own media consumption has skewed heavily towards podcasts and YouTube and away from like scripted shows. I just like another human, like it just feels more natural and authentic for one human to be talking to another. And to be like a person, not necessarily like a company. Or like even, I always talk about my favorite TV show, probably all the time is Game of Thrones. I definitely enjoyed it. Now most TV shows are not like that, but think about like the production. It took like one person to write, you know, 25 years of five, seven books, however many there's been. And then you have like literally hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of people working on that. Now you can come up with something beautiful and epic as what I feel Game of Thrones was. Last season, notwithstanding. But there's also something extremely gratifying, like of consuming something that's, you know, not necessarily scripted. I always talk about my favorite podcast in the world is Dan Carlin. And I think he's the best podcaster on the planet. And it's so crazy to me that, you know, his shows, he's just talking to you. And people are like, oh, is it scripted? He's like, no, I piece them together. So I don't sit down and record all at once is what Dan says. But, you know, I just, he basically talks to you as if you're sitting across from him. And obviously he's one of the best storytellers I've ever heard. So he says, this is more good advice for life. If you take my advice, don't get a job in advertising unless it interests you more than anything in the world. And now he's going to give us advice on how important discipline is to your life. He says, discipline works. And now he's going to quote from history. He says, "Saint Augustine had this to say about pressure. To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world. War, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures. And, and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendor. But there's another sort of man who's under the same pressure, but does not complain. For it is the friction which polishes him. It is pressure which refines and makes him noble." And now back to David's takeaway on this. He says, "I have to admit that I have sometimes found the pressure unbearable. My own thought for fritting away so much time on things which lead nowhere. It is a good idea to start the year by writing down exactly what you want to accomplish and end the year by measuring how much you have accomplished. So have clear set of goals or ideas where you where you want it, your year to be. And then have the discipline to go after that goal. And I like that idea of not complaining. That understanding that pressure is just part of life because it's everywhere. And it's intended to stress you a little bit to make you stronger. A few pages later he kind of extends this theme. He believes you should write down your principles. So he says this is written principles and this is somebody else who we learn from, which is, I don't know if it's a founder of McKinsey, but let me go there. Marvin Bauer, who made McKinsey, the consulting firm, the huge consulting firm, who made him McKinsey what it is today believes that every company should have a written set of principles and purposes. So I drafted mine and sent them to Marvin for comments. On the first page I had listed seven purposes, starting with earn and increased profit every year. Marvin gave me holy hell. He said that any service business which gave higher priority to profits than to serving its clients, he's echoing Henry Ford here, serving its clients deserve to fail. So I relegated profit to seven place on my list. Do you think it's childish to use a set of written principles to guide the management of an advertising agency? I can only tell you that mine has improved, that I can only tell you that mine writing it down have proved invaluable in keeping a complicated enterprise on course. And I like this writing technique David has. There's a lot of times where he's asking directly, direct quotes to you. Like he'll direct questions rather. He'll state his case or case that he learned from somebody else. He's like do you think this is stupid? Do you, like we just, when he was comparing contrasting what general advertisers do compared to direct response? It's very, it's very actually helpful because when you're reading you take a second you're like well, I don't know, do I believe that? Like let me think about what you're actually telling me. It's smart. I wish more writers use that. So this is why he feels he's qualified to give advice on sales. And this again, this is more of his personality, more like he, this book, I think I said earlier, I'm very happy this book came into my life. So whoever recommended it to me, thank you very much. Like I'm a smile. I don't know if you can hear that, but I'm smiling. Just he's funny. So he says, here I go boasting again. There are better copywriters than I am and scores of better administrators. But I doubt if many people have matched my record as a new business collector. So he's saying, listen, I'm just, I'm really good at sales and that's and that can give you an advantage in life above almost every other like aspect. If you get really good at sales, you're, you're going to be successful in business. So this is his tips on sales meetings. Oh, so what I should refer here. So this section we're in is how to how to get clients for your business. And so that's what he's talking about. Like not only does it add his ad sell, but he's really good at getting clients for his business. This is some tips which which he used in his own experience, which were helpful in closing clients. So he says they want to they meaning the average the the corporation that wants to add or wants to hire you. He says they want to know what commission you will charge. I answer, if you're going to choose your agency on the basis of price, you are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. What you should worry about is not the price you pay for your agency services, but the selling power of your advertising. So what is he telling you there? You're focused on price. You need to to focus on value. This is really hard for humans to do. Really hard, but he's, he's completely right. Now he's got a better selling proposition for himself, but better for the company. Like, no, don't worry about the price. worry about the selling power of your advertising. Uh, rehearse before the meeting, but never speak from a prepared text. It locks you into position, which may become a relevant during the meeting. So it's more conversational on how he would do this above all. Listen, the more you get the prospective client to talk, the easier will be to decide whether you really want his account. A former head of magnavox treated me to a to our lecture on advertising about which he knew nothing. I gave him a cup of I gave him a cup of tea and showed him out. Tell your prospective client what your weak points are. This is smart move to before he notices them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points. So this is the important part. importance of headlines, and this is based on a lot of research he did. On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money. The headlines which work best are those which promise to read or benefit, this is what we talked about earlier. Like a wider wash, more miles per gallon, freedom from pimples, fewer cavities, rifle through a magazine and count the number of ads whose headlines promise a benefit of any kind. If you are lucky enough to have some news to tell, don't bury it in your body copy, which nine out of ten people will not read, state it loud and clear in your headline, and don't scorn, tried and true words like amazing, introducing now and suddenly. So he talks a little bit about in the book about like there's these words like he just described that they're so common people doubt their effectiveness, not realizing that they're common because they're effective. And so a lot of advertisers are like, oh, I'm not going to use those words, I want to be more creative while he's saying, in that case, you're choosing creativity over effectiveness. And therefore you're not servicing your customer. That's like a beautiful thought, the way he, the beautiful, like the beautiful logic he has there. And again, that comes from writing, what he just said, write down your principles. His main goal was to sell more products for his customers. So he can, he has his written principles, he can refer back to him, he's like, is this behavior or this action I'm doing in line with my stated goal? Let me read my stated goal, is this going to sell more for my customers? No, then I'm not doing it. This is advice on good copy. Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you're writing each of them on a letter on behalf of your client, one human to another. This isn't as easy as you may think. Aldres Huxley, who is once a copywriter, said, is easier to write 10 passively effective sonnets than one effective advertisement. You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it. It pays to write short sentences and short paragraphs and to avoid difficult words. So long copy, but short sentences, short paragraphs, what's easier to read. Copy should be written in a language people use in everyday conversation. Don't write essays. Tell your readers what your product will do for him or her and tell it with specifics. It's another thing. You lose the price. You should have pricing if you're selling something and you're advertising. This is something that you don't see commonly, but he's a real advocate for. Always try to include the price of your products. You may see a necklace in a droolers window, but you don't consider buying it because the price is not shown and you're too shy to go in and ask. It is the same way with advertisements. When the price of a product is left out, people have a way of turning the page. So people are scared to put the price. He's actually saying, no, it's a good idea. This is examples of long copy. He has got like, let's see, 10 examples here. I'm going to omit every single word in the description except for how many words, right? Because he's going to make this case. He says, all my experience says that for great many products, long copy sells more than short. Now, he's going to give 9 to 10 examples of advertisements he did. Ready? 6,450 words. Five pages of solid text. 700 words. 600 words. 800 words. 4700 words. 2500 words. 3200 words. And 800 words. And then he gives examples like, you know, from their company went from fifth in their industry to first. You know, they went from 10,000 cars to 40,000 cars, et cetera, et cetera. And then this is his opinion on why long copy. I could give you countless other examples of long copy, which has made the cash register ring. I believe without any research to support me that advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not. That's interesting. Advice in life. Keep it simple. It's interesting. I think humans crave simplicity, but we default to complexity. Copyright is specified that a commercial should be shot in, oh, this is funny. Okay, so copywriter specify that commercial should be shot in, and Bali when it could be equally, equally well be shot in a studio for half the price. They insert expensive animation into live action commercials. They insist that original music be composed for background purposes as if there were nothing suitable in the whole repertoire of existing music. Worst of all, they use expensive sub-loverities when an unknown actor would sell more of the product. Let me pause right there. He says he has research. This is interesting because it flies in the face of how a lot of brands advertise their products today and how they did back then. When you use an expensive celebrity in your ad, the consumers tend to remember celebrity not the brand, not the product. He's saying that I have data that it's much more effective to hire an unknown person to sell your product than a celebrity, which is funny because I've seen studies on this where like one, one, like they hire, the example I saw recently is they hired this famous model, like 15,000, 15 million a year for a jewelry company. And yet it's all brand advertising. It's not direct response advertising. So I'm like, wait a minute. I was like, how do they know the effectiveness of that $15 million? And the answer is they don't. They're just guessing. It's a hell of a guess to make. They're, yeah, okay, I want my brand, my product to be associated with you, but I can't actually track what the difference in my sales was. So it's a huge benefit for the person getting the 15 million and I say I would argue rather dubious for the company. But again, large companies do really stupid things constantly. I have no research to prove it, but I suspect there's a negative correlation. So he's kind of echoing this. I have no research to prove it, but I suspect there's a negative correlation between the money spent on producing commercials and their power to sell products. My partner was asked by a client to remake a $15,000 commercial for $100,000 and sales went down. So it's interesting. I heard this podcast one time I took notes on it where I think the brand was called Tough and Needle. It's one of those, you know, these direct consumer. They advertise on podcasts a lot for non-mistaken, these mattress companies, right? And they might have selling the company, I think for like, I don't, like the say 500 million. There's something like that. I don't remember the exact number, right? Maybe 450 million. And the founder was talking about this. He's like, the ads where we spent a lot of money did were some of the worst performing ads. And he said they did ads where like, we're like Blair Witch, Blair Witch Project style, that movie that was like real shaky and I think one awards because it's maybe we would record on like a camcorder back in the day. But he just says rough and dirty. He talked about tracking the ads on, if I remember correctly billboards and just like a black billboard with white text, like very simple like one sentence performed way better and I forgot what the sentence was or whatever the case was. Then like ones that had like were over produced. They had like images and you know, because billboards have to be like a poster. Interesting enough, David hates billboards. He thought he thinks the road would be much safer and he makes predictions at the end of the book that eventually billboards would be illegal. And I guess they're illegal in some countries because he references that in his writing as well. But anyways, enough about the billboards. What the person, I think his name is Jay T. Moreno. The founder of Tuftin, one of the founders of Tuftin, the point he was making was commercials doing rough and dirty and spending less money. They actually performed better. Okay. Oh, this is, I love how Olga V was saying earlier that he's a dogmatism of brevity. He's going to tell us exactly what the most important sentence of the book is. He says, "Avertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell yet the majority of campaigns contain no promise whatsoever. This is the most important sentence in the book, read it again." I'll do as he asks. Avertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell yet the majority of campaigns contains no promise whatsoever. And he continues a few paragraphs later. He says, "Try to find a promise which is not only persuasive but also unique." This is why David loves research. Few copy writers share my appetite for research. Many others thought that it inhibited creativity. My experience has been the opposite. Research has often led me to good ideas such as the eye patch in the halfway campaign. So this is a company that sells shirts and he had this weird idea that just putting a fake eye patch on the model that's modeling the shirts would actually increase sales because they would increase. People would, instead of glancing over the ad, they would go, "What is going on here?" And then they'd actually look at it. So he actually got more people to read the ad and then they've resulted in more sales. He says, "I've seen ideas so wild that nobody in his senses would dare to use them until research found that they worked." And this is another example. When I had the idea of writing headlines for French tourism in French, my partners told me I was nuts until research revealed that French headlines were more effective than English headlines. Isn't that bizarre? Researchers also saved me from making some horrendous mistakes. So what do you mean by French headline? The first sentence would be French. Then you'd have English translation under it. The next sentence is in French. The next sentence is in French and you'd have English under it and so on and so forth. So that's what you talk about. Researchers often misuse biogencies and their clients. They have, oh, this is important. They have a way of using it to prove they are right. But they use research as a drunk uses a lamp post, not for illumination, but for support. On the whole, however, research can be of incalculable help. I love this idea. Don't waste time on problem babies. Most marketers spend too much time worrying about how to revive products which are in trouble and too little time worrying about how to make successful products even more successful. It is the mark of a brave man to admit defeat, cut his loss and move on. Make your time, your brains and your advertising money on your successes. Back your winners and abandon your losers. And he says, "Don't dawdle." Most big corporations behave, if this is so good. Most big corporations behave as if profit were not a function of time. When Jerry Lambert scored his breakthrough with Listerine, he sped up the whole process of marketing by dividing time into months. He reviewed progress every 30 days with the result that he made a fortune in record time. So again, think of profit as a function of time. I think that's a really good advice. David has some thoughts on pricing. So he says, "Pricing is guesswork. It is usually assumed that marketers use scientific methods to determine the price of their products. In almost every case, the process of decision is one of guesswork. The higher you price your product, the more desirable it becomes in the eyes of the consumer." So they talk about the study that happened in University Iowa. "Tried to relate the prices of 679 brands of food products to their quality. He found that the correlation between quality and price was almost zero." Then he has this idea of where you account for your advertising costs. He says it's a production cost, not a selling cost, even though advertising is thought of as written salesmanship and print as the word "quo" he uses. "I have come to regard advertising as part of the product to be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard, any more than you would stint any other essential ingredient for your product." Okay, so now we've gotten to my favorite. I love all parts of this book, but I really love the ending because this is where he profiles people, like specifically, people that were practices craft before he did and what he learned from them, which I think is the entire point of founders. So this is six giants who invented modern advertising. This is introduction. Paradoxes all six had other jobs before they went into advertising. At least five were guttons for work and uncompromising perfectionists. Four made their reputations as a copywriter and only three had university degrees. So I'm just going to tell you the person's name and then he gives like short biographies for them all. I'm just going to pull out like the quotes that I wanted to remember. I think Albert, so Albert Lasker's first, he might be the one I highlighted the most on two. Alright, so this is Albert Lasker made more money than anyone in the history of the advertising business. One of his one of Albert Lasker's copywriters came up with what he feels is the best description of advertising. He says, he says advertising was salesmanship and prints, a definition that has never been improved. Lasker held that if an agency could write copy which sold the product, nothing else was needed. Isn't that it? It's beautiful when you can have a business where it's that simple. It doesn't mean it's easy, but it's very simple. Like if we can write copy and sell more products, then that's it. Anything else matters, we will be successful. Now what happens is that means he's also kept Albert Lasker the reason he made, this is an interesting point, right? A lot of advertising agencies have a lot of revenue, but Albert Lasker had, he made more money because he had, he could try to sell his costs. Something, something talked about ad nauseam on founders, right? What he meant is like he focused on copywriting. He didn't have like art directors and executives and all the other like fluff. Well, I just ran over my point here. So he said, by dispensing with marketers, art directors and researchers, Lasker saved so much money that he was able to make a profit of 7%. Probably the world's record for advertising agencies. If an agency makes more than 1% today, it is exceptional. His advertising agency was called Lord and Thomas. He says he ran Lord and Thomas as a dictatorship. As you all know, he told his staff, I'm the owner of this business and therefore I decide the policies. He owned 95% of the shares. So there's this idea of control that comes up all the time. After he retired, he said he had never attended a director's meeting and did not think that one had ever been held. He low talking on the telephone and abominated committees. He never belonged to an advertising club and avoided his competitors. That's actually might be interesting where you avoid like industry news so you can, which we have the tendency to copy those around us. If you avoid that, you come up with your own unique ideas. It might be more differentiation for your product. He was not shy about conspicuous consumption. His weekend of state outside Chicago had a staff of 50. He wants to find an administrator as somebody without brains. He once said, I didn't want to make a great fortune. I wanted to show what I could do with my brains. He could be overbearing, intolerant and arrogant. He's a misfit. He could be bad tempered, demanding and inconsiderate. And he had three prolonged nervous breakdowns. And then check this out. This is how like, he's got a very, I looked for a biography on him. I couldn't find one. Or else I'd cover him because this guy's such a weirdo and an, you know, an affectionate way. This is how he just, he dominates an industry and then one day he's like, all right, I'm out. One afternoon late in 1942, he suddenly said to her, his wife, Mary, I've decided to get out of the advertising business. Two days later, he gave Lord and Thomas to three of his bright young men for a token payment of $100,000. He lived for another 10 years. That's really interesting. All right, so now this guy's name is Stanley Reser. Reser, so now he's comparing, trusting. Reser was never overbearing like last year. He managed by consensus. So this guy did success in almost the opposite way, right? He managed by consensus, distressing what he called individual opinion and thought that brilliance was dangerous. His agency was structured in the loose as possible way. He detested hierarchies. There were no department heads and no job descriptions. He used to say that his agency was a University of advertising. So he, he was a very, he spent a lot of time in, in training his employees. He was a fervent believer in research. A man of rigid principles, he threw away an opportunity to get to a huge camel cigarette account because he would not show speculative advertisements. Reser made one mistake. He stayed too long. By the time he was in his 80s, his ideas for advertising campaigns had become an anachrystic, I don't know how to pronounce that word. And partners who, who would have made good successors retired before he did. All right, so this guy's probably the most important person in, on a personal level, to David, his name is Raymond Rubikam. He was my conscience for 40 years, teaching me that advertising has a responsibility to behave. Raymond Rubikam assembled the best team of copywriters and art directors in the history of advertising. Under Rubikam's inspiration, they created advertisements which were read by more people than any other agency. In one of his last letters before he died, Rubikam wrote to David, "We knew you before you started your agency. How come we missed you?" By the time we had become great friends, friends is not the right word. He was my patron, my inspiration, my counselor, my critic, and my conscience. I was his hero worshipping disciple. Rubikam was the most outspoken man I've ever known. He blurted out what it was ever on his mind without considering what effect it might have. The youngest of eight children in a poor family, he left school when he was 15 and spent the next nine years bumming around the country as a shipping clerk, a bellhop, a shaperone of cattle, a movie projectionist, a door to door salesman, an automobile salesman, and a newspaper reporter. When he was 24, he applied for a job as a copywriter at the now defunct Wallace Armstrong Agency in Philadelphia. Now check this out. The reason I included this is how he gets a job. He's very resourceful and tenacious to what I'm looking for. Persistent, maybe it's the better word. And this is a direct quote from Raymond. "I sat in the lobby, meaning of the agency, on a bench so hard that I can still fill it," he later recalled. At the end of the ninth day, I exploded. So he's sitting in the lobby at nine days straight. I wrote the boss a letter, calculated to produce an immediate interview or a couple of black eyes. So he knows the value of being polarizing. The boss stormed into the lobby, waving the letter and said, "Those ads you wrote didn't amount to much, but this letter has some stuff in it." He wants to get in the job. More on Raymond. "An old age he told me advertising has a responsibility to behave properly. I prove that you can sell products without being booze in the American public." While he had no monopoly on this virtue, he had more right than anyone to boast about. So this is actually interesting because I didn't know that. I learned this in Breeding Anthony Bourdain's book, "Lumb." I don't even know, maybe a decade ago called Kitchen Confidential. He talks about, at the time when he got, and I guess Danny Meyer talked about that a little bit in his book, "Setting Table." How when they got involved in the restaurant? industry was it was like an island for misfits like your family would look down on you for working in the industry and now it's like the opposite right they have TV shows about chefs and they become individual personalities and all that stuff so David talks about this in the book what they were talking about what Raymond taught him is that people looked at advertisers like scum they thought they were like scam artists and stuff and so that's why Raymond was like listen yeah advertising you're gonna have a small percentage that that are just trying to trick people into buying useless products but for us it's our obligation to make sure that it behaves properly that we're advertising and selling effective products and then we're not like tricking or lying to customers so that that's interesting because I don't maybe I don't know enough about the the like the ad agency business now but I'm I mean they have TV shows like madmen about it like it seems to be somewhat prestigious in that sense at least from like a culture perspective I could be wrong though so he says he taught me to resign accounts when they were spoiling the morale of the staff he resigned the huge American tobacco account because he dislike being bullied by the by the notorious George Washington Hill where I guess was the head of that his letter is before me so this is what Raymond he's like Raymond sends the George Washington Hill about we're gonna part ways this is hilarious and his his his agencies called young and Rubicon so it says young this is this is now Raymond writing to Hill young and Rubicon and American tobacco were both successful companies for some time before our association began I trust both will continue to be successful companies after our association ceases which it is doing as of now so I love that he has some kind of principles and he's willing to turn down money he's like listen to your bully your ruining my the morale my staff and be gone he says I knew this is David I knew Rubicon for 40 years longer than any other giant and I loved him more while it's that's beautiful he did leave behind an aphorism I love this to resist the usual in advertising the beginning of greatness is to be different and the beginning of failure is to be the same so hell of a quote in here man Leo Burnett is the next guy it wasn't now this kind of piercest myth that that you know like entrepreneurship or success only comes early in life where the not only is that like empirically not true the data states like the at least from like I think the data I've seen is like and this is not the best metric for success in entrepreneurship you remind but like I want to say like IPOs usually started by people when they're like average age of like 42 is old or something this guy Leo he says it wasn't until he was 60 that Leo hit his stride it was as if he had suddenly turned on his afterburners by the time he died 20 years later his agency had become the biggest in the world outside in New York that's bananas so he has Leo has his set of principles and he wrote them down maybe that's where David got that idea from his attitude to the creative process can be summed up in three things he said number one there is an inherent drama in every product our number one job is to dig for it and capitalize on it number two when you reach for the stars you may not quite get one get one but you won't come up with a handful of mud either and number three steep yourself in your subject work like hell and love and honor and obey your hunches never heard that before love and honor and obey your hunches at the end of his life he wrote looking back over our greatest achievements I recall that that few of them were generated in an atmosphere of sweetness light and enthusiasm but rather one of dynamic tension complicated by off-stage muttering and this is my own personal view that we need stressors not chronic stressors but definitely acute stressors in our life for for the best like for the best outcomes instead of assigning a project to one creative oh this is another good idea too check this out instead of one sending a project to one creative group he had a habit of putting several groups in competition it was enough he once said to send strong men staggering to buy a goat farm so you get more out of people this kind of known in human nature you get more out of people in their in direct competition I do this this from time to time I use the Apple Watch to track like I don't use it for anything else but the track fitness and I don't even know if it's the best for that but it's it's the one with the biggest network of people I know so friends will challenge you to like let's have a you know a week long or you know three day long or week long competition let's see who can burn the most calories or who works out for the longest and I don't know if I'll do that anymore I've done it a few times where I've almost destroyed myself so this actually this is not proving the point that I was trying to make but to the point where I was just like I can't do anymore this is this is insane but you definitely at least in my my case like I definitely burned way more calories than I normally would because you know I had that direct competition and I could see what the other person was doing Leo deployed the tendency of mega agencies to put their own and a grand disment ahead of service to their clients there's that word service again not long before he died he told his staff oh I love this somewhere along somewhere along the line after I'm off the finally off the premises you may want to take my name off the premises too but let me tell you let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door that will be the day when you spend more time trying to make money and less time making advertising when your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big rather than good hard wonderful work this is what I love I always talk about I favor small companies in general that I feel I get the best products and services for them because I actually give it damn they actually have some kind of skin in the game and a lot of a lot of literature and media and entrepreneurship is kind of we fetishize the big and I love that idea like you can get big as long as service is number one like Henry Ford seemed to have done but when this what Leo says when your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big rather than good hard wonderful work I love that he's like I'll make you take your name off it and then this is what David said I wish I had written that oh that's so good all right clawed Hopkins is the next person by exercising the pseudo-literatory pretensions endemic in British copywriters remember David definitely favored practice and research over theory and concentrating my thoughts on the obligation of advertising to sell clawed Hopkins book scientific advertising changed the course of my life so this would be the second or third time I've mentioned the podcast that books are the original links David believe that too because at the very end of the book he's like here's all these books you need to read that I influence what I just wrote I got the ideas from them read them really interesting uh which all books did that and that's why I also um I buy so I prefer to read and do the podcast and highlight and take notes in the paperback a hardcover versions of these books but almost always by the Kindle version too because one I can search the book and add notes but it also tells me in the Kindle version what other books are mentioned within that book so I find a bunch of other books like like what's this idea the Henry Ford said it's like the idea that we're ever going to automate our way to like where humans have nothing to do he's like that's not real like every new opportunity creates two new opportunities every new book creates two new books um when he was 41 he was hired by Albert Lasker so this guy didn't run his own firm right he was hired by the guy we talked about first the very first one Albert Lasker they've got him made the most money to write copy for Lord and Thomas Lasker paid him 185 thousand a year equivalent to two million dollars in today's money wow what does that tell you about his skill and again when when people are like what like I don't I want to start a business I don't know um like what I should do there's two things I normally say I use that example that Richard Branson says a business is just something that makes somebody's life better so if you look at it at that point you find tons of opportunity and the second thing is like try to businesses will always pay you to bring them more business so think about why is this guy getting as an employee making two million dollars a year because he's selling more business so he's going to get paid for that he stated Lord and Thomas for 18 years Hopkins was a prodigiously hard worker Sunday was his favorite day because he could work with an interruption he held that nobody with a college education should be allowed to write copy for the mass market David says I know what he meant he was an uncompromising practitioner of the experimental method forever testing new ideas and search of better results and then he wrote he wrote like like takeaways I guess you'd call it from his life and advertising I'm just going to read to him to you ad writers forget that they are salesmen and try to be performers instead of sales they seek applause it is not uncommon for a change in headline to multiply returns from five to ten times over that's interesting this is another one called bill bill burnache and this is actually the last guy will cover so he says he held his idea that quality of the idea and the excellence of its execution was the alpha and omega of successful advertising so quality of the idea excellence about execution he worshiped at the altar of originality and was never tired of denouncing research as the enemy of creativity remember a lot of these people are successful even though they're conflicting views that's why it's so important to collect as many ideas as you can because entrepreneurship like life is a complex adaptive system it does not act in a predictable way so there could be a good idea that you pick up that it applied in the wrong situation yields a bad result, that same idea and a different situation, getting a yield of a better result. That's very confusing. That's why so many people are entrepreneurs. It's really hard. This may have irritated some of his clients, but it made him the hero of the creative fraternity. He's spoken a quiet voice and looked modest, but he wasn't. When some of his stagia is an example of his non-modesty. When some of his stagia competitors started raiding his agency in search of swingers, I don't know. He was a philosopher. He lived without a situation and organized his time with a self-discipline that is rare among heads of agencies. Shortly before he died, Bill was asked, "Oh, this is where I'm going to close this podcast, and this is so important because it's a foundation of why we're going to history to learn." Shortly before he died, Bill was asked what changes he expected in advertising in the 80s, remember the 1980s. He replied, "Human nature hasn't changed for a billion years. It won't even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about a changing man. A communicator must be concerned with an unchanging man. What compulsions drive him? What instincts dominate his every action?" This is very similar to what Jeff Bezos says, like, "Find the things that are never going to change and then build your business around that." For Amazon's case, he's like, you know, or in ten years from now, people are going to be like, "I wish Amazon had less selection. No." Are they going to say, "I wish you delivered my product slower? No." I wish you had worse customer service? No. That's the things that we orient around because they're going to be true today and they will be true in the future. This is what a communicator must be concerned with, "Unchanging man." What compulsions drive him? What instincts dominate his every action? Even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him. Another trend we keep talking about, actions indicate our family, actions express priorities. Remember, language often camouflages what really motivates him. Watch actions. Remember, if you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being. Again, that's another way to say you know his incentives. This guy's really, there's a lot of knowledge in this one paragraph. One thing is unchangingly sure. The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed. Without them, he will fail. A gentleman with brains. I think now after hearing me talk about this for maybe an hour, you realize how much I love this book. I know you can't see me, but I've had smiles on my face a lot of the time reading this to you and talking about this. I think it's great. The book is beautiful. Like, you know, obviously a podcast you're not going to be able to see the ads. I'd buy it just for that, but this guy is just so smart. He's just so interesting. I cannot wait to read his biography. That'll undoubtedly be another founders episode in the future. But if you want to buy this podcast, if you want to buy this book and support me, the author and yourself at the same time, there's always a link in the show notes. That link is an Amazon affiliate link, which means if you click on that link and buy through that link, Amazon will suddenly be a small percentage of sale and no additional cost to you. You can also go another way to do that is Amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast. Other than that, I think I've spoken enough. I will talk to you next week.