Confessions of an Advertising Man

Confessions of an Advertising Man

Ogilvy, David. Confessions of an Advertising Man. Sir Allen Parker (Forward).

London: Southbank, 2004.

David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man was first published in 1963, in a very different and less competitive media era. But despite its now-politically incorrect title (shouldn't it be directed to advertising people?) Ogilvy's observations and lessons about the industry remain fresh and relevant today, and a window into the world of how advertisers aspire to capture the minds, hearts, and pocketbooks of consumers. It is both an incisive memoir, chronicling the author's rise to the heights of the profession of advertising, as well as an advice book to those who aspire to become part of this cut-throat profession, where you are only as good as the agency's last campaign. The author was the founder of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, one of the largest and most respected advertising agencies in the United States and the agency is still alive and well today.

The book is a fascinating read, unlike many other dry business books about 'the bottom line' and maximizing value, because advertising is a particularly intuitive, creative discipline, demanding unquantifiable emotional understanding of what creates consumer interest as well as competitive drive and business acumen. According to Ogilvy, advertising is not merely a business process, but a creative process. It requires truly original thinking, campaign after campaign, in a way that transcends the implications of verbal copy. Ogilvy's great insight in the changing media age was that what you say is often less important than what you show, and above all the image, or a few striking words or statistics, must arrest the eye of the viewer.

To be great in the advertising field requires an individual to come up with new ideas constantly. An advertiser must be as innovative as the people who invented the product itself, and Ogilvy even states that the creation of a good advertising campaign is just as important to product success as the product itself -- an advertising man's campaign of several weeks is just as integral to the years of development of scientists to create the new consumer good.

The advertiser deals with unconscious mind of the consumer, and must also feel confident with his or her own unconscious understanding of the appeal of the product. To his readers, Ogilvy counsels, go with your gut instinct. He thinks marketers rely too much on research, when it is they who must tell the customer what the customer wants, before the customer knows his or her own desires. Interestingly much of what Ogilvy talks about, and knew before research was done born out, interestingly, in current research: "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 its Jack Daniel's. Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images." Recently, the New York Times supported this contention with science, regarding wine connoisseurs: "The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive" (Asimov 2008, p.1).

However, advertising copy should not be empty. Ogilvy does not patronize the consumer. Facts and figures create attention, not fancy words or creating an atmospheric advertisement (listen up, 'conceptual' advertisers, especially those who created those famous advertisements for start-ups with clever concepts, but without detailing what the product delivered.) in Ogilvy's own campaigns, concrete facts and figures were more important than creating a mood: the words 50% off mean more to the consumer than the words 'good value.' But keep things short, he says, to thirty seconds in a television commercial, and a headline must grab the attention immediately.