#169 David Ogilvy (The King of Madison Avenue)

Podcast: Founders
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 5286s
URL: https://afp-922710-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb/episodes/476ef8e8-78ed-460e-9160-f86db659bde7/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb&awEpisodeId=476ef8e8-78ed-460e-9160-f86db659bde7&feed=3hnxp7yk
Fetched: 2026-03-03 08:44:02

He was 52 and famous. I was 33 and a junior account executive. Early on he wrote a letter to one of my clients. After listing eight reasons why some ads prepared by their company's design department would not be effective, he delivered his ultimate argument. The only thing that can be said in favor of the layouts is that they are different. You could make a cow look different by removing the utter, but that cow would not produce results. So began my David file. Almost everyone who worked at the agency kept one. Almost everyone who brushed up against the man has a David story. Over my next 26 years there were more such lessons, countless meetings with him around the world, and many more memos and letters. Eventually when I became his third successor as chairman, I no longer reported to him technically, but he was always a formidable presence. We all thought of the agency as his company. While Ogovy disclosed much about his life in three books and several hundred interviews, what he could not do is assess his own legacy and its relevance today. This biography, the first, aims to provide that perspective and impart a sense of his quotable brilliance. Ogovy's insights go beyond advertising to leadership and apply to almost any professional organization. I also will try to bring alive his idiosyncratic and vivid personality. World War II had been over for only three years, when 39-year-old David Ogovy, an English immigrant with almost no experience in advertising, opened up shop in 1948. Although his offices were on Madison Avenue, the rulers of the realm, at that time, had no reason to take notice of him. Within a few years, Ogovy was counted as one of them. That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is the King of Madison Avenue, David Ogovy and the Making of Modern Advertising by Kenneth Roman. This is the third podcast I've done on David Ogovy. Since I started this project for years ago, he is by far one of my favorite people that I didn't know anything about him before I started Founders. He's one of my favorite people that I've come to know. If you want to go back and listen to this podcast, I think it's Founders No. 82 and Founders No. 89. This is the first book on him that wasn't written by him. I have a ton of highlights. Let's go ahead and jump right into the book. There's some interesting things from his early life that I want to pull out. I found a couple of sections on this personality that I think telling you up front in case this is your first introduction to the legend and the genius that is David Ogovy, that will give you a good idea of why he's such an interesting person and somebody that we should all learn from. Last week, or I guess in the bonus episode last week, we talked about, there's this phrase from that book, Freedom's Forge, that talks about Henry Kaiser. They called him a suction cup because he would constantly just milk everybody around him for any useful information that they had. David is very much like that, Sam Walton was also the same way. This section talks a little bit about that personality at the aspect of David Ogovy's personality. He says, one characteristic of geniuses set Einstein is that they are passionately curious. Ogovy's great secret was an inquiring mind. In conversation, he never pontificated. He interrogated. At dinner with a copywriter in her husband who worked in the oil business, Ogovy quizzed the man at length about the oil situation in the Middle East. A woman who sat next to him at dinner said that by dessert, he knew more about her than her mother. He would pump people for information. So not only would he do this in conversation, but he also understood the value of reading and that nothing can actually substitute for it. So it says a zealous student of the business, Ogovy claimed that he had read every book about advertising and this is an important part and disdained others who felt they didn't need this knowledge. So in other books, he doesn't mince words about this. He says, if you're failing to study the history of your profession, if you're not reading as much as possible, he calls you an ignorant amateur. There were piles of books all over his house. This is really interesting. What is he reading though, right? Most about successful leaders in business and government. He was interested in how they used their leadership, how they made their money. He was interested in people. People who had accomplished remarkable things. So what are they telling us? He read a lot of biographies. He's not very different than you and I that's the entire thesis behind founders, right? This is really fascinating. I didn't know. I don't know how I missed this and I'm going to have to tone for my sins, but he actually wrote an autobiography. I don't know. Again, I'm shocked that I just discovered this book by reading The King of Mass and Avenue. So this is actually his autobiography and he wrote it all the way back in 1978. So it says in 1978, he wrote an autobiography, Blood, Brains and Beer. And this is going to give you an insight to just the eclectic person. Obviously, we also came from a very eclectic family. And so why did he name his autobiography Blood, Brains and Beer? The title came from his father's bizarre directive that when David was six years old to drink a glass of raw blood every day for strength and eat cabs, Brains three times a week to expand mental faculties. That's what his dad believed at least. And all to be washed down with bottles of beer, who's going to give that advice to their six-year-old. And then this is Kenneth, the author of this book, talking about what it's like reading David's autobiography, which is a fantastic, fantastic description. He says reading that short autobiography is like having dinner with a charming racontour. The other one myself is reading autobiographies, it's like having a one-sided conversation with some of history's greatest people. I love the idea that he says it's like having dinner with a charming racontour. He describes now back to the description of Ogreby writing in his autobiography about his family. He describes his father as warm-hearted, affectionate and a failure. His Scottish grandfather is portrayed as cold-hearted, formidable and successful and his hero. So his blueprint in life, as you'll come to learn today, is his grandfather, not his father. This is very interesting that word, this is already the second time the book has used this word. If I had one word to describe, now having spent countless, not countless others, maybe dozens, maybe 20 hours reading the writing of David Ogreby and getting to know him, that is how I would describe him, formidable. That is a great word. I want to look up the definition real quick, and because I think what I need to tell you what I mean by that. So the definition on Google is, inspiring fear or respect through being impressively large, powerful, intense and capable. So I'm going to give you my own definition of what I think formidable means for the life of David Ogreby, inspiring respect through being impressively intense or capable. He's not trying to get you to fear him, he's not collecting power. He is a capable, formidable individual. And the idea is that he learned through multiple decades of his career will make you more capable. That's the whole point of reading these books, right? This is David on why his autobiography did not sell very well, especially it was published after confessions of an advertising man, which I covered back on Founders Number 89. So it was interesting that the autobiography did not sell, considering that book sold like crazy. So it says, as successful as Ogreby's other books would be, he admitted this one was a bust. He said he knew the reason. When you write a book about advertising, you're competing with midgets. When you write an autobiography, you're competing with giants. And right there, that's one of the things I love the most about David Ogreby, the amount of information he's able to convey in such short, those are two sentences, and it tells entire stories. Later in the book, I'm going to bring this to the front though, he's reading biographies when he's a young person, but he kept that habit his entire life. This is I think after, he's probably 56 years old when he's reading another book, and this book might be interesting, maybe I'll cover it in a future episode, but it's really interesting. He's talking about the lessons he learned. He says, I don't know anything about finance, but I just read the biography of Lloyd, excuse me, Lord Roy Thompson, the Canadian who went to Britain when he was about 60 and proceeded to make a huge fortune. He did it by always barring every penny he could lay his hands on, buying newspapers, and then managing them more profitably than previous owners. This is a classic way to get rich. Of course, a lot of people who play this game go broke. It is frightfully dangerous. I doubt if we should take shots of risks with our stockholders' money, but if we did, we might get rich. It's obviously joking a little bit there, but he's also telling what he learned. This is after his company went public. There's two things of reason, actually three things I want to bring that up. It's one, his love of reading biographies and setting history. You can definitely tell through his writing that he's extremely well read, right? Two, how he started that entire paragraph. This is going to be one of his downfalls. I don't know anything about finance. He needed to learn. He's extremely bad with money, even after he makes a ton of money, right? And then three, it talks about, don't know if we should do this with stockholders' money. He wanted to get rich. He saw it going public as a way to do that, and then regretted that decision later on, because Ogovy and Mather, it's actually pronounced Mather, but I always default to Mather. If you hear me mispronounce it, I'm so used to, I read it as Mather, so it's stuck in my brain as well. There's a hostile takeover, and they wind up being purchased against their will for almost a billion dollars, like $862 million, and I think that happened in 1989, so it just gives you an insight at how powerful. Take about how crazy it is. It was sold for almost a billion dollars in the 80s, right? And he didn't start his company till he was 38, and I think he had a total of $5,000 in savings. That's his life savings at that point. It's just remarkable how, and a lot of what I'll talk to you about today is how he used his wide variety of life experiences before he was a founder to accelerate the success, because he rattles off in a decade, decade and a half, one of the best records in advertising history. It's remarkable. Let me go back to his early life, because I want to talk about his grandfather. It's very interesting, because this informs the life of David Ogovy. Remember, I call him his blueprint, right? So it says, Ogovy admired grandfather, was a sheep farmer by trade, but an adventurer at heart. Born in Scotland, he moved to London, and at 24, he emigrated to South America, where he led a swashbuckling life and also fought in the Argentine War. He managed a farm for a group of Scottish investors. When the farm failed, grandfather Ogovy out of work, with a large family to support, tried prospecting for gold in New Zealand, so that's what they mean about his adventure. When that failed, he returned to London, where he got a job as a secretary in the English Bank of Rio de Janeiro. Four years later, this uneducated sheep farmer became manager of Brown Shipley, where he trained the future governor of the Bank of England. He was able to send all seven of his children to private schools and universities and live like an aristocrat. That's definitely something David emulates later in life. He buys a castle. He cannot afford a castle. He bought a castle in France, and that's where he spends it like the last two decades of life. Oh, I love this guy. The banking experience led him to a vice as a grandson to study the firm of JP Morgan, pointing to the Morgan criteria for partners, which is we know, well, let me finish reading this, and then I won't remember my point. So this is what his grandfather is telling David, right? Study just formed JP Morgan, and he says pointing to the Morgan's criteria for partners. Gentlemen with brains and clients, only first class business, and that in a first class way. Later became part of Olga B's agency, agency's credo. So he took those two, his grandfather said, hey, study JP Morgan. Really, we know, because there was what, two, they had done two podcasts on JP Morgan. One was the hour of fate, which is his, the beef he has with Teddy Roosevelt, and then one was the house of Morgan, which is like the most famous biography of the Morgan family. Anyways, we know that didn't come from JP Morgan. That actually came from his father, Junius. I actually, I think I said on that podcast, but I think studying Junius. I don't, I couldn't find any of the biographies on him. I found him to be more impressive, the father, than the son JP Morgan. So it says both later became part of Olga B's agency credo, have already talked about that. So he took the ideas, his grandfather said, hey, study JP Morgan, Olga B listened, and then he took those two ideas and applied it to his business, very smart man. Now why is his grandfather, his hero, and not his father? His father loses all his money in the stock market. So they were, they were rather financially successful family. You know, his father was not as financially successful as grandfather, but he was a speculator. He was stockbroker, but he wound up losing all his money. And so this is where David compares his father and his grandfather. And he's going to tell us a lot about what he values, okay? But from then on, they lived in Gentile poverty. We were a poor family, said Olga B. My father's total income was less than $1,000 a year. His grandfather turned down an appeal from his father for a loan. This is a crazy sentence. And his father tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat, although Olga B. adored his father and thought of him a great gentleman. He recognized he was a scholar and not a businessman. He saw his grandfather as the exact opposite. Now remember, he's already told us, my grandfather's my hero, this who I'm powdering myself after. So this description of his grandfather is very important. He was as hard as nails and a very successful businessman. I couldn't make out whether I was going to be like my father or my grandfather. And father's fail, their children are often driven to be successful. The son would always be motivated to achieve and obsess with money. That's another thing to understand. Olga B. He's very upfront about this, that once he tasted his first bit of tiny bit of the ability to make money and make large amounts very rapidly, he was obsessed. We're not there yet, we're still in his early life. So his father doesn't have a lot of money. He goes to these private schools, but he goes there on scholarships for people that can't afford the tuition, right? And he has some very early experience that he recalls the rest of his life, it was extremely embarrassing to him. It's not very different. I just was reading my highlights from Sam Bronfman. I think it might be Founders 115 somewhere back there. But he's the founder of Seagrams and he would have to go to school with holes in his pants and his daughter tells a story. For her father's like 50s, 55 years old and sitting in the living room or something like that and he's just shivering, thinking about how embarrassing poverty was and that just gave him this fanatical desire to achieve success. So this is a very similar example in the life of Olga. Olga, we remember the day that Mrs. Wilkes, who's like the headmaster at the school, refused to let him buy a peach, reminding him that he was poor and attending on scholarship. How dare you, she shouted, loud enough for the whole school to hear. Your father is so poor that we are obliged to keep you here for almost nothing. What right has the son of a pauper to spend money on luxuries like peaches? Oh, that's no way to talk to children. Now this is funny though, this is, remember David, he built himself into a very formidable person. Okay, I'm a kid. I don't have control of this. I'm poor. He comes back and gives a speech at his former, I'm sorry, he's in high school at this point. I don't know if I said that or not. So then he comes back, I think it's like 20, 30 years later, probably maybe 40 years later. And he gives a speech at his former high school. He says, he took the occasion to remind everyone that he was not a big shot at school. I wasn't a scholar. I detested the Philistines who ruled the roost. I was an irreconcilable rebel. I was a misfit. I love that he used that word. In short, I was a dud. Fellow duds take heart. There is no correlation between success at school and success at life. He's saying, I was a really crappy school student who ends up dropping on a college same thing. That, but then he develops his personal curriculum and that he truly excels. He just, he cannot get enough information about things that he's truly interested in. But I'm not finished with this speech. This is classic David. So he goes back to his school to give a speech only to tell them that they did it wrong. So he says, Ogreby also proposed revamping the entire theory and practice of instruction. The masters have to cram you full of facts so that you pass those odious examinations. That is like cramming corn down the throat of a goose to enlarge its liver. It may produce excellent forgraw, but it does the goose no permanent good. The mission of a great school is to not cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them a few weeks later in an exam even though they still did this today, right? It is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship, which will last you all your life. So what he's saying is to teach you to love learning. It's really funny. Edwin Land is the same thing. Founder of Polaroid. I've read what, five books on him for the podcast and almost every single book he talks about. He goes back to I think MIT. I can't remember the squalts on my head. I'm pretty sure it's on my tea. He's like, you guys are doing it wrong. He's like, you're not, yeah, I think it was on my tea. It doesn't matter. But he says by the time the undergraduates graduate college, right? He's like, they have no capacity for greatness anymore. It's been, you've beaten out of them. They're desired that their belief, their self-belief that they can actually be great, that they can actually produce unique work is beat out of them. And then all the way back 50 years ago, whatever, 70 years ago, he talks about we should record the greatest. It's really interesting what it's kind of like what podcasts are now, right? Or any other learning, I guess YouTube is very similar where it's like, why are we having teachers give up, give the same lecture a year and a year out? Why don't we take the very best lectures from the very best teachers in the world? Record them. Then you can access any time you want and then go about and spend all your time actually doing work, which was just really interesting. And I hope, again, you and I are developing our own personal curriculum. We're using podcasts, we're using books, we're using all these other things. I just, I think, formal schooling so far behind in that, in that manner. And I think Ogreby was at his time, obviously, everyone lands ahead of his time and hopefully the rest of us catch up. All right. This is what David was like in college. He was unsure of what to do in life. It's so important. I try to pull this out of all the biographies that we were studying here because a lot of people were like, oh, Bill Gates, whoever, Steve Jobs, they were born and knew exactly what to do or what they wanted to do. That is a lie. That does not happen. Everybody's unsure. They got to figure out the dark path that lies ahead of them. He was sociable. He didn't work. He was young. He had full of blood and guts and stuff. He was restless. He was brilliant but confused and he couldn't use his brilliance in a conventional way. After two years, Ogreby left Oxford. This is in 1931. In the depths of the Depression, without a degree, describing himself as unteachable in any subject. That is insane. Now that I'm rereading that because this guy, I don't know if it was definitely implied but never explicit in the other books I read on him. His life was essentially reading, writing and work and the first two informed the latter. The idea that in college, he's failing exams, which I'll read to, that's in a minute. He says he's unteachable. He's lacking motivation. He is not the same person later in life. He, again, he builds himself into a very formidable individual, which I think is one of the most inspiring things about his life story. Perhaps it was impatience with academia and the itch to start earning a living. Perhaps it was intellectually out of my depth. Whatever the reason, I failed every examination. More on college, David. The picture is rather one of an uncertain young man changing directions, beset by financial and health problems. He's got asthma and he's just, in general, physically weak. And you're earning for something more, something invigorating and eventful. So this is where he goes off and he starts to develop his own personal curriculum through reading and through life experiences. And he says whatever Olga be achieved in his career does not appear to be the product of formal schooling. He felt his life at school had been a failure and he wanted to start fresh. His education was about to begin and this is where he has for the next, let's see, 17 years or so, these series of very odd jobs that all help. He takes all the lessons that he learns from these series of odd jobs and then when he has the ability to build his own company, to build the culture of Olga being a mother, he uses his lessons as a foundation for that, okay? So it says many people who succeed in advertising lack college degrees, instead of conventional credentials, they learn from one or more eclectic life experiences that would be a pattern of Olga be his education, starting with a seminal experience and a French kitchen. So he's in Paris, says where he observed and was taught high standards of leadership. So it's a very high end, one of them, like the best restaurants in Paris at the time. And the guy that's running, the head chef is relentless. And it's Montsour, putard maybe, I'm going to call him putard. It's probably not how you pronounce his name, but whatever. The imperious head chef putard fired one chef because he could not make his pastries rise straight. But Olga became to realize that such extravagant standards made the other chefs feel they were working for the best kitchen in the world. This part right there, got they feel they're working for the best kitchen in the world. This will be part of the culture as his future company. And he says, he's like, I don't want to be the biggest agency, I want to be the best and the people there talk about, they felt they were, they were on a mission. They were not mercenaries, they were missionaries, it's very interesting. Working in a great French kitchen was first step in Olga B's education. Putard's management style became his model for hard work, discipline, excellence. I remember my first day there, I was peeling potatoes and I was standing like this, lounging against a wall. Then this chap came by me and told me, stand up straight, everything you do here is important. Be proud of everything you have to do, where we've heard this before. One of the most influential, as far as technology entrepreneurs in modern day, one of the most influential books is talked about over and over again, it's Bill Walsh's, the score takes care of itself. I think it was Founders Number 106 and it's that idea. Do all the little things right and then the score will take care of ourselves. You don't have to worry about anything else, but everything you do from answering phones to carrying your helmet, everything to the organization of your locker, to how you write memos, everything Bill Walsh did, he made sure the little things were done right so the score would take care of itself and they were seeing the exact same idea in a French kitchen in the 1930s. I made an impression, what he learned about hot, hot cuisine is less relevant than the standards he digested. Petard once confronted him, my dear David, what is not perfect is bad. So he's working really hard and it was very interesting, he's not making a lot of money, but he's getting a lot of non-monetary value from this work, right? Working in underground kitchens in the underground kitchen 10 hours a day, six days a week, by early morning, Ogrevie would be soaking wet from head to foot. He was exhausting work, for which Ogrevie was paid $7 a week, but it got him out of academia, taught some lasting lessons, and provided him with stories he never tired of relating. Okay, so he, I'm obviously going to be fast-forwarding, the book goes into more detail, I hope you do read it, it's fantastic. So I'm going to go into, he leaves, he starts becoming a door to door salesman. Again, this is all stuff he's going to use later on his life, right? So he's selling, it's a Scottish company I think, maybe he's not, he's doing it in Scotland, I don't know if it's a company Scottish, but they're selling like these expensive ovens. So he says he was promoted to become the company's first sales representative in Scotland, selling stoves door to door. It's called the Aga. The Aga was the most expensive stove on the market, making cold calls in the depths of the depression could not have been easy, but Ogrevie made sales by showing cooks how to use the Aga, doing the cooking himself if necessary, so what is he doing? He's teaching. He offered to give free cooking lessons with each stove and found plenty of takers. Ogrevie revealed his sales approach. He described how he'd always go around to the back of the house to talk to the cook about the Aga, because if the cook was on his side, he would, if the cook was not on his side, he could never sell the lady of the house. When he sold more by offering six cooking lessons for three, it's called Euros, it's not the, I don't know what the currency is, but let's say three Euros. When he sold, when he sold more by offering six cooking lessons for three Euros, but free lessons if they bought the stove, Ogrevie learned something about the power of the word free. The experience of door to door selling turned Ogrevie into a salesman. Otherwise I might have been something quite different. It made me think always in terms of selling things, which is what he's known for in developing his advertising, right? He's one of the, the, the models of his eventual companies, we sell our else and he met for his clients and for the firm. He believes about, he believes about the purpose of advertising were shaped by his reception at the doors of Scottish households. No sale, no commission, no commission, no eat, that left a mark on me. So he's, he becomes the, the company's most successful. Sales representative so much that they ask him to write a manual. This is really interesting. There's some notes from the sales manual, he wrote. So effective was Ogrevie at selling stoves that the company asked him to write a guide for the Enlightenment of his fellow salesman. When he was 24 years old, the theory and practice of selling the Aga Cooker became the company's sales bible. Fortune magazine called it probably the best salesman you'll ever written. It's portrayal of a good salesman we derive from Ogrevie's view of himself. This is a quote from that, from 24 year old David Ogrevie. The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bulldog with the manners of a spaniel. If you have any charm, ooze it. He also talks about something, you know, some people are a little bashful about that you should not be scared of self-promotion. He says, if you can't advertise yourself, what hope do you have of being able to advertise anything else? So he uses this instruction manual as a way to get his first job in the advertising agency. He idolizes his older brother. It winds up being his best friend for the last like 30 years of his life. And his brother is working for a advertising company in London. So he says he sent the manual to his brother at Mather and Crowther as evidence of his aptitude for advertising and was hired as a trainee in London. The aga experience provided him a foundation for his beliefs about advertising and instilled in the young man the habit of hard work. And as he would later recall, when Mather and Crowther doubled his salary, I tasted blood. He was 24 years old. It was his first experience in advertising and he spent time in every department. And so this is where the first time we see his fanatical desire to learn every single possible thing he can about his profession. This is how he was at the beginning of his career and I would say he maintained this and only added on it later on. Finally, Ogreby was ready to start his career. He subscribed to a Chicago Clipping Service so he could get all the new advertising campaigns for America and copied the best for his British clients. He studied the business feverishly, reading everything he could find. After just one year, the young man had learned enough to write a marketing plan, which he described many years later to his partners in New York. And so he's now, let's see, 52, and he's looking back at what he was writing. And he says in the section on advertising, there's a passage which proves two things. A, at 25, I was brilliantly clever. And B, I have learned nothing new in the subsequent 27 years. So that's actually something that's going to be really, really interesting. One of Ogreby's strengths was that he played the same tune all of his life. He'd be prepared to repeat yourself for years. He develops his, and he obviously learned more than at 25. But even in the first years of his advertising agency, he found what works and he stuck to it. So the idea that you need to repeat yourself for many years because essentially he's teaching his philosophy to all the new people, his new clients, his new customers, everybody around him, right? But the main lesson is to stick to the fundamentals. I was thought it was really interesting. And people, the reason I think it's important to bring up is because we have a tendency, humans have a tendency to overcomplicate things. And so I was just watching this interview with Kobe Bryant right before he died. And he was talking about, he's like, you know, my 12 year old plays basketball. And they're always trying to teach them all these new tips and tricks. And he's just like, he, and you know, he, he was an expert at basketball. He's like, this just seems unnecessary. So he called Michael Jordan. And he was telling Michael Jordan this, he's like, listen, man, I'm having a hard time remembering what I was doing at 12 years old. But I'm pretty sure I wasn't doing all this fancy stuff. And he goes, he says, and then he goes, Michael, what were you doing? And he goes, and Michael says, man, at 12, I was playing baseball. And so Kobe says to the people interviewing him. I think he was like, I think he might have been a rod that was interviewing. He was to think about that. And that was his point. The greatest basketball player to ever live had didn't even pick up a basketball in your 12 years old. So what's the chance that you need to teach these 12 year olds all the stuff you're teaching them? Just stick to the fundamentals. That was a very powerful full lesson, just one sentence by Kobe Renter. Okay. So he's working for as a training in London, eventually he has to study. It's like, I need to go to America because that's where I'm going to make all my money, right? And that's where he eventually opens up a, his firm in New York. It's going to be in connection with the firm he's working for in London. But let me read this part and then I hit me, stupid as I, now I'm two and a half books in at this point about David Ogre and just hit me. So it says David persuaded his brother descendants of the United States to study American advertising techniques during the sabbatical and subsequent stints abroad. The brother stayed in touch with staggering volume of correspondence. They rode each other several times a week, sometimes twice a day, single spaced type written letters, two or three pages, occasion is many as many seven pages. This is type written. I'm pretty sure it's handwritten because it says later on that David wouldn't even use a typewriter. He was very anti-technologies. We'll see when he goes to live with Dalmish. So anyways, whether he typed them up and made this a mistake or he hand wrote them, it's just an amazing amount of writing. And it hit me because I always talk about David's one of the best writers I've ever come across. Like I envy his ability to communicate in so few words, right? I was like, you idiot. The left hand, the note of myself, he might be such a great writer because he wrote so much. After he retired, this is how crazy it was. So he's living in his castle in France, which I'll talk to you about in a little bit. But I was reading his Wikipedia page as funny, he says, why no longer involved in the agency's day-to-day operations, he stayed in touch with this company. His correspondence so dramatically increased the volume of mail handled in the nearby town that the post office was reclassified at a higher status and the postmaster salary raised. He was good at writing because he wrote all the time. How do humans get good at things? We have to do it over and over again. All right, sorry, it took me two and a half books to figure that out. One of his motivations for wanting to move to America was because he thought, okay, there's big money over there, right? So he says, I figured the same effort would produce three times as much, okay, this is the word he uses for money. It is from the word Latin. Let me make sure. I read it and I say, lucre, that's not how you pronounce it. It is lucre, according to Google Translate. So, lucre, okay, so hopefully I get this right for you. Let me go, let me read it since the end. I figured that the same amount would produce three times as much lucre, lucre just sounds super cool, which I mean, which as much money in America as it is in little England. Money was never far from the service with olgovy and he could be startling direct. His first question to the head of the major advertising group was, how much money do you make? How much money are you worth? That's hilarious. So he entered advertising to make money, olgovy had become interested, obsessively interested in the business itself. He said that he had read every book that had ever been written on the subject and as a young man had reason to believe he would be good at it and would enjoy it. Since American advertising was years of head of advertising anywhere else, he decided to study the trade where it was done best. So remember that a couple of weeks ago, it was Jackie Cochran, always shoot for the top is what she would say. This is very similar to olgovy's modus operandi. Always study for the best, always learn for the best. And then I just want to bring up a quote that he said in one of his previous books that I read about him that I never forgot and we just saw he's demonstrating that talent with that paragraph I just read to you. The good ones know more, that's just a fact. So read, learn as much as you can. The best basketball players know the most about basketball. The best advertising, the most about advertising, the best entrepreneurs know the most about their company. It's just the good ones know more. And again, it's very few words, he's telling entire stories, it's just a few words. Let me go back to this idea of shooting for the top, studying where the best, now he's in America. And so now he's going to go out and he's sought out people that were good at what they did and then copied them, right? This is not, we do not need to have a ton of original thought if we just copy the best ideas from history. It doesn't have to be complicated. And so he starts collecting these mentors in the back of the book that I think everybody should buy, no matter what, Olga be an advertising, the last chapters on the six people that he sought out, he calls them giants, the people that built the actual trade that he's going to practice his whole life. And this is one of the guys right here. So it says one crucial introduction was Rosser Reeves, who became the first of a series of mentors to Olga be, this is Kenneth's description of Olga be, a seeker of father figures and a self-acknowledged hero worshipper. Along with Reeves, Olga be later named Claude Hopkins and John Capel's as the main influences on his ideas about advertising, views that remain substantially unchanged throughout his career. There's that sentence again. I learned the very best. I learned the fundamentals and then I hammered those fundamentals for multiple decades. So this is Olga be talking about the importance of his mentor, Rosser Reeves, Reeves. When I came to work in the United States 58 years ago, I was typical British advertising men of my generation. I was a pretentious highbrow. A few days later, I met Rosser Reeves. We acquired the habit of lunching together once a week. During those lunches, Rosser talked without stopping and I listened. I have two years and one mouth. I should use them in that ratio, right? Now he's talking about I had lunch and I just shut up and absorbed all this guy's knowledge. That's not very different than how Kenneth described reading Olga be's autobiography. It's like having dinner with a raccantoor, right? Just disguised downloading all the insights from his career into your brain. This is why the greatest entrepreneurs that have ever lived, they have this access and learn from the same things that you and I have access. They pick up a book. Well, Rosser said changed my life. He taught me the purpose of advertising to sell the product and taught me how to sell. Some people will tell you that Rosser and I were rivals, even enemies. I was his disciple. Now we need to go. I'm skipping ahead, but he continues on this idea of like this and these people are geniuses and I sought out and I copied their ideas and I left my note, my stumbling here, stuttering rather. And then I left a note for myself. I need to read this book. In fact, I already started reading this book. I think it's the one. No, I'm going to do this book next week because of what Olga be has said. Olga be we go on a credit more than one person would change in the course of his life. Reeves introduced him. So he met. Remember, he met Reeves, right? Reeves is getting all his ideas and Reeves like, no, no, you don't understand where I got my ideas from. Books are the original links, right? He says Reeves introduced him to the thinking of Claude Hopkins, lending him the manuscript of Hopkins scientific advertising, which had not been had not yet been published. Now, this is crazy. This guy writes a book. It's so valuable. His boss or his partner, we technically his boss becomes his partner, won't let him publish it. Hopkins. Olga be later proclaimed Hopkins is to advertising what a scoffier is to cooking. The most successful copywriter of his time, Hopkins was so valued for his ability to build sales for his clients at Lord and Thomas, the agency he worked for, that the agency's owner, Albert Lasker, paid him a salary that would be equivalent in today's money. This book was published, I think, in 2008, of $4 million. Businesses will always pay you to give them more customers. This guy's writing was so good, it brought in so many more customers, right? For their clients, the owner of the firm, imagine having a job, and this guy didn't really have a job. He was a savage. Claude Hopkins was a savage. He was extremely dedicated to what he did, and you know, become the best in the world of something by accident, right? But that, you get a job, and you get $4 million a year. Lasker considered scientific advertising to value but publish and lock the manuscript in a safe for 20 years. Ogeby's introduction to the 1966 reissued edition, long since relief from the safe, released from the safe, made clear his debt. This is what he talks about, and this is why I bought the book. And actually, there's going to be two books on next week's podcasts. It's Claude Hopkins' autobiography, which is my life in advertising, and then that book, Scientific Advertising, which is what Ogeby's teaching us about right now. So he says, nobody at any level should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. So Warren Buffett tells me, David Ogeby's a genius. Warren Buffett has studied more businesses and more entrepreneurs in almost anybody alive. So no brainer for me, I'm going to go study with David Ogeby. Then David Ogeby, I find, oh shit, Warren Buffett's right, this guy is a genius, and now he's telling us, read this book seven times. This is very simple. Like, then we're going to have to do that. Let's do this. Every time I see a bad advertisement, I say to myself, the man who wrote this copy has never read Claude Hopkins. If you read this book of his, you will never write another bad advertisement, and you'll never approve one either. His point is like, even if you know, even if you're not writing your own advertising, you hire somebody to write the advertising for your company, you're not going to approve. So it has value to you, even if you're not writing it, because you're not going to prove, you read the book, and you're not going to prove a bad ad either. It's very interesting. Well, it will be so admired, admired, was clear in Hopkins opening paragraph. So it talks about, this is summary of that, of the book. He writes about the importance of offering service and ads, headlines itself, being specific telling the full story, and especially the lessons for mail or advertising, where false theories melt away like snowflakes in the sun. That's just really pretty writing. Just giving a head, this is the philosophy that Olga be learned from his mentors and made his own. Advertising had to be judged on its ability to sell rather than entertain. It should be based on research about what consumers want. In print, it should lead with a headline that offers a consumer benefit. It should rely on long text, text, meaning writing, packed with facts. The more you tell, the more you sell, as he would later preach. Okay. So he's still not ready to open his own advertising agency. He still has to have a series of, now he's got at least three more jobs he's going to do before he opens his agency, and they all inform how he builds this company. One of them is working with, you heard of Gallup Poll, he worked with the actual founder of Gallup. He says it's the most important thing that ever happened to him. So he says, Olga be forever described his work with Gallup as a lucky spake of his life. If you ever decided to seek your fortune in a foreign country, the best thing you could do is get a job with the local Gallup Poll. This is Olga be writing. It will teach you what the natives want out of life, what they think about the, and what they think about the main issues of the day. You will quickly get to know more about the country of your adoption than most of its inhabitants. So there are, there are stories in this book about the motion picture industry, Hires Gallup to study, essentially they're trying to study human behavior, what consumers want and to expand and make their films, their movies more profitable. So I'm going to skip over that, and this is the main point of why he talks about Gallup over and over again. He considers himself a researcher and why he says a lot of the people he competed with didn't put any value in research so he'd be able to kick their ass. The only other man, this is the, this is actually Gallup talking about Olga be probably the only other man I would put in the same category as Olga be was Raymond Rubicon who was the founder of Young and Rubicon and also one of the six people that Olga be profiled in Olga be on advertising. These two people made better use of research than any other people I've known. The research gave them a lot of ideas. So it's very, very practical. The research had a very practical utility to them and to their careers, right? Now, this is very, very weird, it's not even weird. I guess it's predictable at this point, but reading biography is a reminder that success is not a straight line, okay? So it says if Olga be came to America for money, he found other things, including a family and a fully formed view of advertising. So he gets married, but it's like during this time period, World War II is going to derail him again though. But if advertising the money, but if advertising in the money it might provide where his goals in moving to America, he would get there, he would only get there after a couple of detours that sent him far from Madison Avenue for some years. So he stops working with Gallup to help with British military intelligence. Again, the wide range of experiences he's having before setting up his company is very beneficial. So they are hired. He'd been moonlighting, let me read this part to you actually. Olga be had been moonlighting since 1939 as an advisor to the British government on American public opinion. So he was doing it at the same time he was working at Gallup. In 1942 with the United States now in World War II, Olga be resigned from Gallup and went to work full time in British military intelligence. He called it the Hitler War and was very pressient in recognizing what was at stake. So this is very interesting. His boss was one of Ian Fleming's inspiration for James Bond, right? This gives, it's funny when Olga be retell these stories. He almost like he's like portraying himself as more of like a secret agent. He's not really secret agent. They're studying, he's using what he learned to Gallup to help the British military study American opinion about getting involved in this war, okay? So it says his new boss in the spy business was Sir William Stevenson. He was the head of the British security coordination, that's the department that Olga be working for. In the central figure in covert operations involving Britain and the United States in the years leading up to World War II. In Britain, short of arms and supplies and facing certain invasion, this is going to, this is kind of relates to freedom's force, the bonus episode, she said, right? A desperate Winston Churchill said there was only one possible solution. I shall drag the United States in. In the years leading up to poor harbor, Stevenson led Britain's covert operations in the United States as Churchill's secret weapon. So Churchill, Stevenson is working for Churchill, Olga be working for Stevenson. See that connection? A successful Canadian businessman and venture Stevenson was alarmed to discover on one of his buying trips during the 1930s that virtually all German steel production was being diverted to armaments. Churchill, the only one to listen to Stevenson's campaign to alert the British government gave Stevenson the job of coordinating an unofficial pre-war relationship between British and American intelligence. So that's basically the main point, that's what Olga be is doing. Olga be described Stevenson as strong-willed, quiet, ruthless, and loyal. David Altnow, again, he's a suction cup, right? He's going to go to school and everybody. David also learns something about writing from his time in the intelligence service. Stevenson was a master of the Terce note. Memo's to him were returned swiftly to the sender with one of three words written at the top of the page. Yes, no are speak. And if you don't speak, it means come see him. This is what Stevenson thought of David. Stevenson put on record his high regard for Olga be's abilities. He had literary skill, a very keen analytical powers, initiative and special aptitude for handling problems of extreme delicacy. David not only made a good intelligence officer, but a brilliant one, and that was Stevenson's opinion. Now, after the war, this is where we see, this is the most surprising detour that Olga be takes. He goes to live with the Amish in Pennsylvania. Olga be became a farmer, remember his grandfather's, as his blueprint, right? Olga be became a farmer, well not exactly. Olga be was not a farmer, but a man who lived on a farm. He was a local mystery. He was then 35 with no career and no very clear prospects. So why is Olga be doing this? He admired certain things about the Amish lifestyle. The contrast between the flamboyant Olga be and the understated Amish could not have been much greater. There was a double paradox, his unstinting admiration of the sect and their views on modern living while conducting himself in a style that was anything but plain and simple. Olga be claimed that he had become disenchanted with city life and preferred the Amish lifestyle. No razors, no telephones, no automobiles, no electric lights. I love these people in their way of life. Like them, I prefer driving behind a team of horses, reading by candlelight, eating what you grow and communicating by note. He's going to last about a year and a half there and then he's deciding, okay I'm going to go, it's time, I'm going to work in advertising and what was very interesting about this section that I'm about to read to is no one would predict that he could do it, that he could start an advertising firm except himself, that's extremely important. Of all his ideas, the biggest was the notion that he could run an advertising agency in America. Here Olga be describes himself on the day he started his agency. Now he's writing about himself, he's 38 and unemployed. He dropped out of college, he had been a cook, a salesman and a diplomat. He knows nothing about marketing and has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising his career and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will hire him. So he winds up starting an agency, he's the American outpost for the British agency that his brother worked for, the one that he was a trainee, maybe a decade and a half earlier. They did not think he was ready, so they thought he was a number two. They did not think he was capable of running the company, so he has to find a president to work, that has experience before they let him open, and then very soon after they realized, okay, the agency, or the agency, Olga be forces a confrontation, that guy winds up getting kicked out and Olga be runs it. But this is a little bit about the very beginning. It was David against Goliath, a startup British outpost against dozens of majors and agencies with established pedigrees, a handful of tiny overseas accounts with unfamiliar names. They have almost no business. Minimal funding, an unproven president and a brash research director, with lots of theories but no practical experience in advertising. This is not exactly a shared bet. Olga be understood it would be tough struggle to carve out a niche in the United States, but he put up a brave front and outlined his goals in a bold memo. That's what he said, that's what he wrote. This is a new agency, struggling for its life. For some time, we shall all be overworked and underpaid. Our main object is to provide a pleasant living for the people who work with us. Next comes profit. In hiring, the emphasis will be on youth. We are looking for young Turks. I have no use for totes or hacks. I seek gentlemen with brains. We've seen that before, right? We heard that before from his grandfather. Agencies are as big as they deserve to be. We are starting this one on a shoe string, but we are going to make it a great agency before 1960. Olga be often talked about a list he set down from the outset of the five clients he wanted most, this is before he had an agency. Shell, lever, lever brothers, Campbell Soup, General Foods and Bristol Myers. It was a wildly ambitious roster. He eventually won all five. So right from the jump, remember what he learned in the French high cuisine from the chef? He knew he wanted high standards, so he had no qualms about imposing his standards. You have to have the height of a rhinoceros to survive a meeting with Olga or have done your homework in depth and executed your strategy impeccably. This is one of his employees. And like De Gaulle, he felt that praise should be a rare commodity, lest you devalue the currency. Now remember what he learned from from Stevenson, right? Later on he taught he says, Olga be says he believed in the dogma of brevity that we're all in a hurry. Okay. So he says a disarming present, presents, Olga be would pop into offices unannounced, sit down and commence his grilling. You became the focus of his attention. He looked straight at you and asked direct questions. When he was done, he would get up and bolt suddenly as he had entered novices thought this meant that he had somehow angered him, and brooded over it until they discovered he behaved the same way with big shots. One aspect of his personality we see right from the beginning, he's extremely persistent. A large part of Olga be success came from the energy he put into getting what he wanted. He would start by mentioning an idea, more or less casually, then follow up with a memo or a letter, clips of articles, more memos, a tsunami of communications, an ordinarily purposeful person might follow up an idea with a second note or a call. The more dogged might come back several times before moving on. Olga be never gave up. And one of the reasons that I think people like his communication style, one reasons why he's such, he's writing is so readable, is that he would use aphorisms as a way to help remember important ideas. He understood that the dirtity is very complex, we're getting any day with information all the time, even more so now than in his time, and you've got to have a way to compress into still these ideas down so you can carry them with you and retain them easily. And so I'm going to read some of this, Kenneth the author of this book talks about, well let me just read, he says, his ideas gain power from a Terce compact writing style. I believe in the dogmatism of brevity, Olga be explained. He collected and repeated, that's an important part, the repetition of this, he collected and repeated aphorisms to make his points on compensation, pay peanuts and you get monkeys on leadership, search your parks and all your cities, you'll find no statues of committees. Points were made by, points were made memorable by vivid metaphor, discussing which of two commercials to show first a client, Olga be told the creative team. When I was a boy, I always saved the cherry on my putting for last, then one day my sister stole it from then on, I always ate the cherry first, what's he telling you? Let's play the best commercial first, more about his personality. He hated laziness, there's a great quote by Kobe Bryant that I keep on my phone in case I ever feel I'm not doing enough, he says, I can't relate to lazy people, we don't speak the same language, I don't understand you, I don't want to understand you, David Olga would say the same thing, he had a near psychopathic hatred of laziness in all its forms, he was the least lazy person I've ever encountered, his advertising philosophy was shot through with intolerance of sloth, lazy people accept mediocrity, which he hated, no matter how good everything had to be better, what did the chef say? Anything that's not perfect is bad, he took that exact same idea and his running as agency with this. So most of the days, early days of the firm, they're constantly out, they're taking anything they can get, they're constantly going out and trying to convince clients, eventually they become, their ads become so successful that clients start, it goes from like an outbound process to an inbound process and they can be more, more selective, right? So he had to work himself to get that. This is covered in both confessions of advertising man and Olga being advertising and more length, but what blows your mind is how, like there's several examples in this book and both those books, how all ads do not perform equally and that he was looking for these unequal performers. And I'm just going to list, I'm not going to go into too much detail because the other books cover it better than this one does, but it's just, it's a remarkable, like people think, okay, I ran an ad, maybe I can get an ad to do, you know, one, twice as good, or three times as good. And it's like, no, some of them do 20 times as good. It's really crazy. The same amount of money spent, 20 times more effective. So it says Rubenstein ad, this is cosmetics revolutionized as a company's advertising approach, replacing small units with a news approach in large newspaper ads. So they're saying what the advertising agency before Olga we did and what he did. He put it in new, it's like more news when you have a development, you put in the newspaper as news, you write a lot of copy on it. Within three weeks, a single advertisement brought in orders equal to sales estimates for the next 12 months. They could not run any more ads until the factory increases its production. So that gives you an idea, you have to be effective, your companies are hiring you to do a job. It's the more effective you're at the job, the more clients you're going to have, right? Another example was the half the way these dress shirts, he had this idea, he was reading a book. Actually, I'm not going to run over my point. So he, he instead of all dress shirts at the time or any kind of clothing talks about the clothing in the ad, he just put an eye patch on the model. And so people were flipping through a magazine like what the hell is they, they stop. Now he's got your attention. He's like, why does this person have an eye patch? So it says the patch was there to imbue the advertisement with with what Olga be called story appeal where you get that idea. The reader wonders how the arrogant aristocrat loses eye. Olga be said he discovered the concept of story appeal in a book by Harold Rudolph, a former agency research director who had analyzed attention and readership factors of illustrations. It was the first time shirt advertising focused as much on the man wearing the shirt as just shirt itself. Within a week, every halfway shirt in stock was sold out. And they start, he has this idea is like, hey, the US president for Shwebs, it's a, some kind of liquor brand. I don't know how to pronounce. I was like, he, he looks like an adventure. Let's put him in the ad. So it says sales leapt 600% in the first six months. Hotels and bars started stocking Shwebs, I don't know how he pronounce it. In many, it was the only choice if you asked for a gin and tonic. It was the most successful campaign for a British product ever. And again, I just give you those quick examples just to him, hammered the main point that there is wide variance between the effectiveness of advertising. And people are really good at it are obviously going to, the companies are going to flock to them. And that, that's what happens to his, his agency, this is a magazine quote. This is insane. It says his place among, talking about Olga be now, his place among the great advertising writers of all time is practically a shirt. This was about a man who had written his ad, his first ad only five years earlier. So that's a lot to accomplish in five years, but really, as if paying attention to the story, he didn't do it in five years. He did the application of five years. His whole life experiences added to that ability. That's a very important part not to miss. Now Olga be a genius, but we all make mistakes, and this is one of his. Xerox came to him with the first copier. Olga be was not interested in an invention he did not understand, even when they offered some of its stuff for some of their stock. It's too small for us, he said, go see my friend, my friend, Fred, paper, he's just starting an agency, Xerox was soon spending $10 million through paper, and Fred paper became wealthy with Xerox stock. He had to share it with me, said Olga be. One of the accounts he wanted to, and he eventually gets his Rolls Royce, which this excerpt I'm going to read to, just really shows the benefit of reading and research, something that's really simple, yet most people won't do it. Olga be preaches the need to do it over and over again in this book and every other book. Olga be spent three weeks talking with the Rolls Royce engineers and reading everything about the car. He wrote over a hundred headlines, and then freely admitted that he did not invent his actual choice, but pulled it out of an article that it appeared 20 years earlier. At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in the Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock. His long, meticulous text was packed with facts. The coach has given five coats of primer paint, and hand rubbed between each coat. That's just really weird and funny. Before nine coats of finished paint go on, this example just goes on and on, okay? The ad rain in just two newspapers and two magazines, but stimulated more praise than anything the agency had produced. Everyone in the business could recite whole paragraphs verbatim, so this is a really funny story. The person now, his personality jumps off the page, and I think that's actually an important part of studying his life. He treated, you know, that Shakespeare quote all the world to stage, Olga be treated life like that. He was very over the top fling boy and personality, almost like an actor playing a role, right? He's got very, he's got main character energy. So he says the former Amish, Amish farmer now wanted a Rolls Royce page, this is a guy running finances the firm, told him, we can't afford a damn Rolls Royce. And who's going to drive it? We'd have to pay a show for. Page prevailed until he took a vacation. When I got back, there was a Rolls sitting in the front office with a chauffeur. This is hilarious. There's too funny things, and this tells you the showmanship, and he cannot afford a Rolls Royce. The license plate was OBM-2, so that's the initials of the firm at the time before it's Olga be in matters. I think it's like Olga be Benson in matters, not important, but this is the port part. The license plate was OBM-2 to suggest there was another, there wasn't another one. A copywriter at the agency remembers walking down Fifth Avenue on his way to the office on a hot humid summer day. A Rolls Royce pulled up next to him and Olga be put his head out of the window. If you work very hard and are very successful, one day you'll be able to go to work in a car like this. Don't be late. With that, he drove off. Oh my god, this guy. Now, so he's funny, he's working really hard, but he also is terrified. This was very surprising. He's worried that his success will not last, and this also this fear, this irrational fear, or maybe it's irrational. Causes him to do unwise things later on, like sell all of his stock, when he shouldn't know. Lingering insecurities about himself and the prospects for his agency, Olga be started two years of psychoanalysis. Every day for years, I thought this agency was going to fail. I was scared sick. I remember saying one day, if this is success, God deliver me from failure. The cure was not found on a psychiatrist's couch, but in work. Olga be redoubled his efforts, working deep into the night and virtually full-time on weekends, creating campaigns, hunting new business. He seldom entertain clients, telling them that he worked his guts out, trying to produce good advertising, and couldn't do that and take them to the theater. So let's go back to him building. The term company culture didn't really exist at this time, but that's essentially what he's doing. So this is some more lessons, and they have a lot of highlights actually, because I found it interesting. And they're probably the most like actionable parts of this book. The entire story is with only a few words, is the Northern left myself, he exhorted his staff in memos, raise your sights, compete with the immortals, blaze new trails, soak yourself in research, never stop selling. Never content with just writing ads, Olga be larger goal was to create an enduring institution that sounds like a lot about, if you read about Steve Jobs, that's what he was trying. He wanted to be in the pantheon. There's no price you could have offered Steve Jobs for Apple, there's nothing, he's like I want a historical, a long lasting institution that's able to pump out great products. And part of that is not only holding your employees and your co-workers to high standards, but he also found other people to hold himself to high standards. So he would go, it says he would go to the smartest people and pick their brains. In the 1950s, four men were independently trying to build professional service firms, linking theory with practicality. So we have Olga be is being one of them, I'm going to skip over the names, I'm going to tell you the companies because you probably know that the company is more than names, McKinsey, Arthur Anderson and Goldman Sachs. The four Olga be being amongst them would frequently compare notes on their common ambition. They shared philosophy, spoke over each other's role models, encouraged each other in breaking new ground, and shared an unrementing drive to achieve excellence. So they're having lunch and constantly meeting and pushing each other on. The guy from McKinsey's name's Bauer actually became a real big influence on Olga be. Here's a little bit about that. Inside both McKinsey and Olga be and everybody from the boardroom to the mailroom knew and understood what the firms values were, what the mission was, and the way things are done here. That is exact. I mean, that paragraph could be in Bill Wasch's book, The Score Takes Care of itself. If you're looking for something interesting to read, pick it up, pick it up, you'll like it. And invite people, oh, this is reading my own, reading my own note instead of reading the page, invite people into your life who will hold you to high standards. This is not popular, but we should run towards these people instead of away from them. That's a note to myself. It is said that if you sent an engraved wedding invitation to my friend, Marvin Bauer, he will return it to you with revisions. That's the guy from McKinsey, right? On one such opportunity arose when Olga be drafted as statement of purposes for the agency, starting with earn and increased profit every year. And then he sent it to Bauer for comment. Marvin, that's his first name, gave me holy hell. He said that any service business they gave higher priorities to profits and serving its clients deserve to fail. So in the beginning, he's writing a lot of the advertising. He says he was a near genius for 10 years, and then his creativity like fizzled out. Then he got, it was much more in getting new business. He was also a master salesman. And so again, use that phrase or that motto from Olga be the agency, Olga be a mother. It's we sell or else. He means for his advertising that they write for the clients, it needs to sell or it doesn't work. And the same thing. He's like, you need to be making the ads and you need to be selling. That's where you should be focused on getting new business, right? And so there's a lot of examples in the book where he's gifted at doing that. But I want to read this one because it's hilarious. And it reinforces a common thing that we've seen multiple biographies about people not liking committees and Olga be hitting committees. So it says with the ray on manufacturers association, which had given each agency exactly 15 minutes to make its case before ringing a bell. Okay. So they're interviewing a bunch of potential agencies, saying you have 15 minutes, 15 minutes up, ringing the bell and it's over, right? It's a collection of manufacturers. This is hilarious. He asked how many of these 12 of the 12 people, so it's him giving a presentation of 12 these 12 people are part of the association. Okay. He asked how many of the 12 people present would be involved in the agency decision? 12. All of us was to reply. And how many will be involved in approving the advertising? All of us, the 12 members of the committee, ring the bell Olga be said and then walked out. There's no way he was subjected, especially at this point he's created and have to. He could turn down clients left and right. He's not. I'm not going to sit here and let a committee tell me, prove my advertising and not like that's absurd. I thought it was hilarious. Go back to his ruthless time management. He kept his giant clock in his office at a very unique clock. It's called like a parliament clock. What it looks like to me is if you took like a wristwatch and cut off like 60% of it and blew it up, made it giant and then hung it on the wall, kind of what it looked like to me when I googled it. But anyway, says my biggest problem is finding time to do everything he said. The clock in his office is to remind visitors that time is passing and they must pass along too. And something, the book has a lot of examples of physical success of personality. Something that he carries on until he stops working and he says he continued to work very hard, taking home two stuff briefcases. He was very short tempered, very focused and totally obsessed with one thing, the advertising agency. Was he doing it for recognition, fame, a sense of accomplishment? And this is his response. Many of the greatest creations of man have been inspired by the desire to make money, Olga be said. If Oxford undergraduates were paid for their work, I would have performed Miracles of Scholarship. It wasn't until I tasted Luka on Madison Avenue that I began to work and earnest. So he's up for it. He's like I like advertising but I want to be rich and I'm doing this for money. This whole idea of taking home two stuff briefcases, well let me not run on my point. The note of myself, he's getting his Enzo Ferrari on. Enzo Ferrari had a very similar schedule. I work from nine in the morning until midnight seven days a week, Olga be said. So this is going to be great for work, not good for much of anything else. He winds up being married and forced. He's got like three different marriages and none of them work out. He's married, you know, 15 years, one time, 16 years, I think another, like 20 years and the other. But he was just, you know, he read, he wrote, and he worked. And that's as far as I can tell, you know, the vast majority of how he spent his time. And you know, obviously doing that, making that choice, you're going to, to over optimize in that one domain at the expense of almost all others. He says his regret later in life was not, he wanted like 10 kids. He wanted to have one. So I thought that was interesting. A little bit about Confessions of an Avertising Man, which again, I highly recommend. He says Olga be's bestselling book, Confessions of an Avertising Man was published in 1962. It was described as the only civilized, literate, and entertaining book ever written about advertising. A magic distillation of learning and wisdom. That's a great way to put it. Founders number 89, if you have not listened to it, and I cover that book, that's another good way to put it. In one review, Olga be emerges as one of the most lovable rascals in literature. What makes the book indoor is Olga be's ability to distill experience into principles and state these impungent and memorable aphorisms. You cannot bore people into buying. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they cannot create them. Compromise has no place in advertising. Whatever you do, go the whole hog. You can't save souls in an empty church. And those are just some examples. There's obviously more in that book. There's a picture, a quote I keep on my phone to think about all the time, and it says never dismiss an effective movement simply because it seems too simple. There's a sentence in this book that reminded me of that quote. Olga be prefers to stress basic, old-fashioned disciplines. One of Olga be's favorite forms of advertising is direct mail. He thought direct mail advertisers were the best advertisers in the world, and he uses that to help build American Express. The founder of American Express, I think it's the founder, I'm pretty sure it's the founder, might be the CEO. He comes to Olga be at the time, and it's a tiny account. I mean, they're doing, not a lot, like a couple of million revenue at the time. It's a very small company. So anyways, the CEO of American Express, his wife says, hey, why don't you call Olga be? And their last name is Clark. So this is a clerk called Olga be at his wife's urging, who said, Olga be said he didn't think he was interested, and those days the account was too small. The clerks persevered, however, and Olga be went to their house for an informal talk. We're sitting in the library. He puts all this stuff on the floor and lies down, and starts to describe the things he would do. It can't get much better sales presentation than this, right? You could not help but get excited about what his ideas were. And then Kenneth, the author of this book, makes a point. Ideas prepared for a client he said he wasn't interested in serving. Very interesting, right? By the 1980s, many years after this meeting, Sting and Place, American Express had replaced general foods as the agency's largest clients. American Express built its business in part with an effective Olga be direct mail letter that stated, quite frankly, the American Express card is not for everyone. Direct mail, Olga be's first love, was a legacy from his days of door to door selling. So this is something I learned when I was reading every single one of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters for what I think is found as number 88, I was doing it for that podcast. So Buffett winds up avoiding the mistake Olga be made. This is also why I think entrepreneurs and people in general would benefit from studying investors. I consider investors entrepreneurs. Some people don't. I think it's the same thing. But even if you don't study investors because their ideas transfer well, Buffett came to New York once a year to meet with the management team and asked a lot of questions, he bought a lot of stock once Olga be my public. He debate. This is really fascinating. He debated the wisdom of acquiring other agencies, which is a very possible popular thing to do at the time for one agency to buy another. He says, why don't you buy the best agency? Buy your own shares. After Olga be had so much of his stock, he would introduce Buffett as the fellow who has made more money out of Olga be a matter than I have. So that's one of the things that he got older and mistaken made is he lacked some control over the company. And they go off and every other agency is doing this. So you know, everybody thinks they have to copy that they're trying to just get bigger but through acquisition. And Olga be says, Olga be dislike the concept. He insisted his company should be one agency indivisible. It's hardly surprising that he would direct other agencies with different philosophies being invited into his sacred domain. He fought the acquisition at board meetings and by memos. There can only be one true church, he wrote. Olga be's position was that his principles have been shown to work. They had provided a solid foundation for growth. Why must we welcome diversions in the name of growth itself a debatable philosophy? In a company dedicated to placing clients first. My ambition for Olga be a matter is that it should be the best agency. Not necessarily the biggest. So he now he does the right ads but he writes a lot of material for internal company communication. He wrote this thing that they call principles of management. And he says what followed in principles of management conveyed a unity of purpose to O&M offices around the world. The principles apply equally to almost any business. And we go back to this like aphorism way he had and writing, right? On minimizing office politics, sack and curable incurable politicians crusade against paper warfare. On morale, when people aren't having any fun, they seldom produce good advertising. That rid of sad dogs who spread gloom on professional standards. Top men must not tolerate sloppy plans or mediocre creative work. In one employee who had worked several different agencies noted the difference between Olga be's culture and other ones he says, people I knew who worked at other agencies had a job. We had a mission and it was different. No place I've ever worked at had anything remotely like it. The agency was developing a personality, Olga be spelled out the high standards and humane attitude toward those who work there that he expected from his people. We're looking for gentlemen with ideas in their heads and fire in their bellies. If you join Olga be in mother, we shall teach you everything we know about advertising. We shall pay you well and do our damnedest to make you succeed. If you show promise, we shall load responsibility on you fast. If in our agency can be very exciting, you will never be bored, it's tough, but it's fun. I want to go back to this idea that Olga be always considered himself an advertising writer. Never more. I'm just an advertising writer, I think that's very, obviously this guy had a giant ego, but if he just stuck to the fundamentals, if I write good ads, then I'm running the agency and it writes good ads, everything will take care of itself. I really like that idea. So it says, Olga be was above all a writer and his agency had a writing culture. He wrote like an angel, even his memos were worth saving. There's actually a book, another book that I'm going to read, I'm going to mention the book. I think I have other notes on it, so let me not run over this. Just remember this idea that his memos were like writing of an angel. He was capable of organizing his thoughts into brilliant prose. This is how he wrote ads. He started by looking at every advertisement for competing products for the past 20 years. That's a lot of work and how many people are actually going to do that? Very, very few. So when people are like, oh, you have competitors, other ad agencies, Olga be, do I, do I really? Who's going to look at every single ad that their competitors have placed for the last 20 years? I don't really have competitors. I mean, maybe out of a thousand companies that want that account, how many are going to do this? A couple, three, four, five. That's a lot more manageable competition than just by doing more work, right? But higher you go, the less crowd you'll see. Study the precedents, he said, then he'd go to work on a headline. Finally, when he could no longer postpone the actual copy, he would start writing, usually throwing away the first 20 attempts. If all this fails, I drink a half a bottle of rum and I play classical music. I don't know how to pronounce this guy's name. This generally produces a gush of copy. The next morning, he would get up early and edit the gush. I'm a lousy copywriter, he would say, but a good editor. And this was a very fascinating to me. His writing looked different, the actual, the way the words are on the page. So for years and years and years, and I should slap myself for this, for years and years and years, people that I respect, people I think are great writers to talk about the genius of the writer, Kormack, Kormack McCarthy, right? I'm talking about for a decade, people have recommended the book to me, people that I like their writing, talk about. He's one of the writers they idolize. And for some reason, it took me a decade to pick up one of his books. This happened, I don't know, a few weeks, a few months ago, something like that. I picked up the book The Road by Kormack McCarthy. His writing looks different too. And if I ever write a book, it's going to look like Kormack, I love the way the actual what the words, it's the most readable writing I've ever read. I remember, I can't remember, I want to say two days, I can't remember how long it took me to write the book, I don't write the book, read that book if you're looking for fiction, I did highly recommend picking it up, but it's post apocalyptic, which I'm a sucker for anyway, it's been anyways, all I remember, I think it took me two days to read, is those two days I could almost do nothing else. I remember we were having, we were going to have dinner with family and I showed up like an hour late because I could not, like my entire rest of my family left and I showed up an hour away and I was like, I can't, I have to know what happens in this book, I'm sorry, I, it's taken a whole of me, I can't do anything else. It was that fantastic. I'm trying to compare that idea, I didn't mean to go off in that weird tangent, but all of these writing look different, not that it read different, which it did to, it looked different. I'm going to tell you more about that, just like Chromach and Carthes in the road, I have picked up his master piece that he says, everybody says, the blood meridian, I'm scared to start reading it because I don't think I'll be able to do anything else to I finish it and it's not that short of a book, because anyways, he was meticulous in making it attractive and easy to read. It was double spaced, short paragraphs, key phrases underlined, sections indented for further emphasis, sections separated by a row of spaced asterisks. It's not only is the writing readable, even if you put in paragraphs, he's like, no, I'm going to separate it, it's going to be easier to read, he, with a, what he does here, his more flamboyance pops up. With an occasional flourish, after a letter had been typed, he would sign his name in red. Oh, so it says, everything was handwritten, never typed, so he wrote, okay, so now I think I understand what they mean there. He writes it, somebody else types it, and then once they type it, he signs it. All right, so Moran is writing, Ogreby would go through a document and take out adjectives and adverbs, leaving nouns and verbs to make it clear and readable. Short sentences, short paragraphs, never using more words when fewer would do. When you read them, you must, when you read them, you think this must have been like Mozart's music, it came straight out of his brain, says a writer who worked with him. But no, I couldn't believe how much trouble he had, he had to get the sentence he wanted. So it goes back to, I'm a crappy writer, a good editor, it's very interesting. The widow of a friend said his was the best condolence note when her husband died. It's three words. He was golden. Okay, real quick, I don't, I obviously, I love this guy. I'm not impartial by any means, but I don't want to give you the impression that you never make mistakes. This, I don't understand why he did this when he got older, other than being, you know, when you're fearful, you make bad decisions. Why would he sell ownership in something that you created and loved and believed in? I don't understand this, so the note of myself is don't do this. Why did Ogreby not hold on to his shares? I was always terrified the thing would go bust, in the middle of the takeover battle, I called his chateau to talk with Ogreby, so this is now the author of this book going from a biographer to participant in the story, okay? And so he's the one, I think he's a chairman of the company when they're having the fight this takeover battle. Ogreby's older, we've already fast-forward in his life story, he's living in his castle and friends that he get forward with his young third wife, okay? So it says in the middle of the takeover battle, I called the chateau to talk with Ogreby. Herta, that's his French wife, answered the phone and said, how upset he was about what was happening to his company. I said I certainly understood, but at least he had made money this time on the rising share price. He sold it all two weeks ago, she replied, the takeover destroyed a part of Ogreby. His secretary in France said she can mark the beginning of his decline to that period. He winds up suffering from asthma and faceme and Alzheimer's, so the last few years of his life was really rough. He lived to 88, but they were not the last years, they're not good years. The agency was the most important thing in his life. It was the nearest thing he could have to childbearing. He felt he had brought Ogreby and Mather into being and nurtured it and had been brutally taken away from him. That's why he says he didn't want to go public because the company's public allowed for this hostile takeover. They went up, the guy that bought it winds up going into deep debt to do it. Like I said before, it's almost 862 million and something like that. A lot of money for it, but Ogreby did not want that happening. Then he winds up becoming chairman of the larger company that buys his firm, but he hated the guy. At the beginning, he called him an odious little shit, and then a year later, he said he wished he knew the guy, he apologized to him, he never apologized to anybody in his adult life, but he's like, I wish I knew you 40 years earlier because he actually thought he was real to be smart, but he did not like him at the time the hostile takeover was happening. So my question to myself was like, why are you accepting being a chairman of a company whose purpose you abhor because he's like, this guy's just going around buying all these advertising agencies for the sake of bigness. Remember, he wants to be best, not big. So this is what he says, Ogreby believed he had no other choice. He hadn't managed his money well, avoid this. As he often admitted, there were expenses. He continually worried about money. I'm supposed to be terribly rich. I'm not because I screwed up my financial affairs on my life. A visitor at the castle told Ogreby to stop complaining about money. You're an excellent health. You have this glorious chateau. You have a devoted wife in everyone's admiration. Stop grousing. He did for 15 minutes. Again, I know. I was like, you're living in a castle. That might be part of your problem, man. Okay. So now, when he's 75 years old, he's still beloved to the day he dies. He's like a large part of his life. He's writing memos and he's like on company culture and ideas and going around giving speeches and obviously, you know, he's very gifted at that. And so what people do in the company, they do something very fascinating. They take all these internal memos, you know, this guy's writing so many of them, that the post office by him gets reclassified, right? And the postmaster gets a raise, hilarious. So they put together a book and it's called the unpublished David Ogreby and this will be a future episode. But they don't tell them they're doing this and they give it to him for his 75th birthday. After two weeks of nervous waiting for reaction to a book published under his name without his permission, the verdict was delivered, my best birthday present ever. Okay. So there's a lot of quotes from speeches and writings he's doing at an advanced age. And this is regrets and reminisces from a 70 year old David. This is gold from anyone towards the end of their life because they're further down the path than you and I are. I want to know what they thought for some most important aspects of life and I want to know what they regretted the most so we can avoid that. I hope you don't make as many mistakes as I have. I've made some frightful mistakes, like turning down an obscure little office machinery account company that never heard it before. That was called Xerox. I've always been a terrible coward about firing non-performers. I frit, he's just going to list off in very simple sentences, regrets, right? I frit it away far too much time on things which were not really important. I failed to recognize some big ideas when they came along. May God forgive me. I made a mistake when I gave up creative work and concentrated on management. I regret that. I was always petrified of losing accounts. Now wait a second, in my heyday I resigned five accounts, five times as many accounts as I was fired. So he's making a joke there. He's funny. Here at the castle, I've succeeded in forgetting all the disagreeable aspects of the agency business, like losing accounts and losing good people, which is worse. I've forgotten the hellish pressures, 16 hour days, six days a week, three brief cases. But I've gotten a lot of happiness out of advertising. I've never been bored by my job. Above all, I've made some wonderful friends, friends with my partners and with our clients and with some of our competitors. I would like to be remembered, but as what? As a copywriter who had some big ideas, that's what the advertising business is all about. Big ideas. So now here's a few quotes from a speech he was giving about recruiting new people to an advertising firm. He says, take care of any new terrific person who you've recruited. He came, read my books for crying out loud and says, where was it for laughter? He's giving a speech, holding them up one at a time. Confessions of an advertising man by David Ogrivy, Ogrivy on advertising by David Ogrivy. The unpublished David Ogrivy, I keep writing these books and they're widely read all over the world. They're absolutely stuffed with priceless information. And if you read them, you won't be so calo and ignorant. One, I love that he's self-promoting even to the very end. He's probably 75, almost 80 years old when he's given that speech. And two, the note of himself is big facts. He's right. They're absolutely stuffed with priceless information. So he's actually telling them the truth. Another thing that David would teach you or studying David would teach you is that you should be stealing from the best. Ogrivy had long preached that all copywriters should study the Bible of direct marketing business, tested advertising methods by John Capel's. And he wrote an introduction for the book's fourth edition, quoting his favorite Capel's fact. I have seen one advertisement sell 19 and a half times as much goods as another. He said an earlier edition of the book taught him most of what he knew about writing ads. He meant that literally. What does he mean by he meant that literally? He means he plagiarized it and he admits plagiarizing. When Capel's died in 1990, Ogrivy was asked to deliver the eulogy. After extolling Capel's as the nicest man he had ever known, Ogrivy declared he was very simply the best. And for that reason, he had plagiarized his work unashamedly. Wised and then this is how he ended that part of the eulogy. Why steal from anyone but the best? And even with his big eoeas and obviously colorful personality and vivid writing, he didn't think he was an all-purpose genius. He said, I dedicated my career to the one thing I could be good at. I'm good at one thing. And in the beginning, the professions of advertising, he says, I'm a genius at one thing advertising. He's like, I can't ski, I can't cook, I can't do all this other stuff, but I can advertise. So he says, ask why he chose advertising when he could have done well at anything he responded. You're quite wrong. Advertising is the only thing I could have done well. At 80 years old, he's still giving a speech about his philosophy, teaching these ideas until the very end, he says, my crusade is in the favour of advertising which sells. My war cry is we sell or else. This has been my philosophy for 50 years and I've never wavered from it. No matter what the temptations have been, he allowed a good idea, he allowed good ideas to compound and he did that for multiple decades. That's a very important lesson for us. And finally, I'll close on this because this is fantastic, I've never heard the Scottish saying before, but it's one I'll never forget now. A reporter once asked Ogrivi what he would like as his epitaph. Turning back to an old Scottish saying, he said, be happy while you're living for your a long time dead. Assessments of David Ogrivi's happiness may vary, but no one will disagree with the conclusion by an American friend of his from his Oxford days. He is done rather well for an immigrant, don't you think? And that is where I'll leave it. I can't recommend this book enough. I can't remember. I recommend any of it. Just pick one. It doesn't matter which one it is. I promise you. You're going to love reading it. His writing is fantastic. So if you want to buy the book, if you use the link that's in your show notes on your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. A lot of new listeners are discovering this podcast because other misfits are buying gift subscriptions for friends and co-workers. If you want to do that, there's a handy link below. It feels good to do something nice for someone else, and it also helps the podcast at the same time. That is 169 books down 1,000 ago, and I'll talk to you again soon.