Ogilvy on Advertising
by David Ogilvy
Rating: 6 out of 10

David Ogilvy was an advertising pioneer. His company, Ogilvy and Mather, has been one of the largest advertising companies in the world since he started it several decades ago. Published in 1982, Ogilvy on Advertising is considered the seminal text on advertising. Even over 20 years after its original publication, the book remains relevant.

Since my background was not originally in advertising or design, I thought it would be very important for me to read this, as well as his 1965 book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, in which he details his own rise to the top of the advertising world.

Ogilvy on Advertising is a fascinating read, considering:

• Ogilvy was over 70 when he wrote it.
• He resists the urge (for the most part) to toot his own horn and pulls examples of what work and what doesn’t work from agencies all over the world.
• As I said above, much of his writing is still very relevant today.

The reason I say most is because I think that Ogilvy often had a grand design for the industry that is advertising. The final chapter in the book is titled: “I predict 13 changes”, and in it, he lists the 13 things that he thinks will happen to advertising in the future (now).

The thing is…all of those changes were things that he outlined in the previous chapter “What’s wrong with advertising” and so I think that they were more wishful thinking than actual predictions. My favorite of the 13 changes was this:

8 Candidates for political office will stop using dishonest advertising.

Now we all know that isn’t true, at least it hasn’t been true in the 20 years since Ogilvy’s book came out. He also predicts that highway “billboards will be abolished” and “the clutter of commercials on television and radio will be brought under control.”

Ogilvy’s self-aggrandizing predictions are really not much more than pipe dreams. It’s likely that during the late 80′s and early 90′s that Ogilvy’s book would have been like the Bible for advertising, but times have really changed considerably since the heyday of Ogilvy + Mather. For that reason, the book is very out of touch.

That’s not to say that all of it is out of touch, just about 60% of it. Ogilvy focuses on many different types of advertising in his book, but most of his focus is print. And while he is still is the foremost authority on print advertising, he admittedly knows his shortcomings when it comes to other areas (although he was a pioneer in direct response marketing).

When he started in advertising, he was a researcher and a copywriter, so his experience certainly leans toward the print side. Now, I like print advertising a lot. It’s fun to design and write, but I don’t think that it is the primary advertising medium anymore. And unfortunately, Ogilvy’s scorn for television (or, at least, his misunderstanding of television), makes the book tough in a lot of ways. Not only that, but I really would like to know what Ogilvy thought about the Internet and its implications on advertising. I imagine that he would have had a lot to say on the subject. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1999 at the age of 88.
Honestly, the most fascinating thing about the book is the author himself. His writing style is conversational and extremely funny. He is pompous, but not in a way that comes across as too arrogant. And while his views on society could be called somewhat dated, so is the book, so I’ll give him a pass on that one.

One of the last chapters in the book is called “Six giants who invented modern advertising”. In this chapter, Ogilvy writes love letters to his deceased mentors…the men who taught him his craft at different times during his career. All of them eventually competed with him when he started his own agency, but you can sense that there was a mutual respect between them; that despite their competition for clients, employees, etc., they might even go on a vacation together and smoke their pipes and reminisce about the golden age of advertising.

I’ve never worked in an agency. I would like to…I think that I’d be good at it because, according to Ogilvy, true “ad men” draw from a wide range of experience (he himself was originally a chef in a restaurant in France, originally). That’s really what I’m all about. I’ve always maintained that I was born in the wrong Era…I would have been a great Renaissance Man.

I really enjoyed the book for the most part, but just had a hard time ultimately finishing it. I sped through certain chapters, while others droned on and were difficult to stomach either because they were about research (a favorite of Ogilvy’s…something I’m not very familiar with) or because they were out of date. I am glad I finally read it though. Many of the concepts that Ogilvy presents were before their time then and could even be argued are ahead of the curve even in the current atmosphere for advertising.