Thank Goodness It's Monday #400

LIFE & LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM

A MAD MAN

He put the eye-patched man in a Hathaway shirt …

 … Gave the world Commander Whitehead of the Schweppes ads and the quality of “Schweppervesence"…

… And told us that “at 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise you’ll hear in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

One of his greatest successes noted, "Only Dove is one-quarter moisturizing cream". This campaign helped Dove become the top selling soap in the U.S.

If you understand any or all of these perhaps-dated references, then you may know that “he” is advertising mastermind –

David Mackenzie Ogilvy 1911 - 1999

David Ogilvy

A not-so-mad Mad Man. In many ways he was the quintessential post World War II, big Manhattan ad agency character recreated and depicted with some accuracy lately in the popular TV series, Mad Men.

Although not quite the series fictional “Dan Draper” leading man, Ogilvy did report, “Many people - and I think I am one of them - are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write.”

Elsewhere he commented, “If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.”

But I’m not sure those are his best suggestions for TGIM purposes.

David Ogilvy’s come back to “top of mind” for me in part as a result of the abundance of “wizard” references in TGIM #399. It reminded me that --

In his heyday (and perhaps its heyday) Time magazine called Ogilvy “the most sought-after wizard in the advertising business.”

And while his namesake agency still survives and thrives, perhaps his greatest legacy was an approach to advertising and management that we can all learn and profit from.

TGIM Takeaway: Ogilvy’s approach assumed the intelligence of the people he was dealing with. “In the modern world of business,” he said, “it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.”

But this lesson was slow in coming for him.

David Ogilvy was not an obvious candidate for business success. He flunked out of Oxford University, worked in the kitchen of a Paris hotel, sold door-to-door, and tried his hand at farming.

He was 37 years old when, in 1948, he started the now world-renowned Ogilvy & Mather with two staffers and no clients. The firm has become an international advertising, marketing and public relations agency which currently operates 450 offices in 120 countries with approximately 18,000 employees.

In the “How to Run an Advertising Agency” chapter of his book Ogilvy on Advertising (one of several he penned, any or all of which I recommend you add to your business/personal library) he gives four tips that would benefit “leaders” anywhere. Here they are --

#1: Never allow two people to do a job which only one could do. George Washington observed, “Whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty by close application thereto, it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done if three or more are employed therein.”

#2: Never summon people to your office. It frightens them. Instead, go to see them in their offices, unannounced. A boss who never wanders about the agency becomes an invisible hermit.

#3: If you want to get action, communicate verbally. If you want the voting to go your way at a meeting, go to the meeting. Remember the French saying: “He who is absent is always in the wrong.”

#4: It is bad manners to use products which compete with your clients’’ products. When I got the Sears Roebuck account, I started buying all my clothes at Sears. This bugged my wife, but the following year a convention of clothing manufacturers voted me the best-dressed man in America.

Ogilvy also notes:

An early (1892) set of Russian nested dolls
attributed to carver Vasily Zvyozdochkin 
from a design by Sergey Malyutin,
who was a folk crafts painter.

When someone is made head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send a matroishka doll from Gorky (Russia). If he (or she) has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message:

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 who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

Dwarves and giants and wizards, oh my.

Geoff Steck
Chief Catalyst
Alexander Publishing & Marketing

8 Depot Square

Englewood, NJ 07631
201-569-5373
tgimguy@gmail.com

P.S.  “If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.” David Ogilvy (1911 – 1999) said that, too.