Who Was David Ogilvy?
When Ogilvy was 20 years old he wrote a document on door-to-door sales instruction manual. 30 years later Fortune magazine called it the best sales instruction manual ever written, and 30 years after that he sold his firm for nearly $1 billion and was the first advertising firm to go IPO.
- Born in 1911
- Attended a prestigious private school in Scotland, dropped out
- Left to Paris to work in a kitchen at a hotel. Returned to Scotland to sell stoves door-to-door
- Wrote a manual on how to sell them, emerged a direct response marketing behavioral psychology prodigy
- Traveled to the US when he was 27, worked for American pioneer Statistician George Gallup
- At Gallup, Ogivly was introduced to how to execute a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring human behavior
- Ogivly then started his own practice, and when he was 78 sold it for nearly $1 billion in a hostile takeover, making Ogivly’s company the first marketing company to ever go IPO
- Commonly called “Father of Advertising”
Without advertising, marketing is in itself ineffective for reaching prospects. Marketing is a set of principles and frameworks, whereas advertising is the tangible and tactical set of actions taken to acquire a response from the prospect, and achieve compliance.
Advertising then is the vector where success or failure is achieved. If you have a product to sell, communicating the worth and benefit of that product to another human is necessary for the exchange of value to be made. You only have a window measured in seconds to interrupt and say the precise words which, like the tumblers of a lock, match and unlock compliance.
David Ogivly was the keymaster of an entire era of marketing and advertising, commonly called the Image Era, which replaced the era advertising legends of Eugene Schwartz and Clyde C. Hopkins.
The top three best marketing and advertising books commonly recommended to aspiring direct response marketers are:
- Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwarz
- Scientific Advertising by Clyde C. Hopkins
- Ogivly on Advertising by David Ogivly
I believe that if you’re even remotely interested in marketing at all to read all three. They quite easy reads and you’ll understand more about behavioral psychology than you ever thought possible. Advertising then is the application of it all, and to get a sense for how he approached all of this stuff, here’s a few insights from Ogivly’s various books:
“In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.”
“Laser focus and target a very narrow segment.”
“Advertise with facts.”
“The priceless ingredient of every product is the honor & integrity of it’s maker.”
“Every advertisement is a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand.”
“A prospect determines wether or not to buy based on the content of your advertising. Your most important job is to decide what you are going to say about your product, what key benefit(s) you’re going to deliver on.”
“He who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.”
“Don’t be fancy, and don’t play with words. It alienates people.”
“Represent a consistent style. Find the one that connects with the needs of your prospect very directly, and run it consistently if successful.”
“Sales are a function of product-value & advertising. Yet promotions cannot produce more than a temporary spike in the sales curve.”
“The visual aspect of an ad often occupies more space than the copy, and it should work justas hard to sell the product. Its hold draw a straight line to the promise that is already in the mind of your prospect.”
“If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data — it doesn’t mean the ad is written. Then you’ve got to close the door and write something — that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.”
“Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.”
“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”
Here’s a great David Ogilvy advertisement called How to create advertising that sells
