Review: Ogilvy on Advertising

Image of David Ogilvy (via Business and Leadership)

Ogilvy writes honestly and concisely in his second book on advertising. While I haven’t yet read his other bestseller “Confessions of an Advertising Man”, I imagine it would be written in the same plain and understandable language that kept me turning the page.

His book restates what advertising should be. It should simply be a communication tool and not one of manipulation. He also states what it shouldn’t be, such as on highway billboards and worst of all, dishonest.

While some of his recommendations are quite antiquated for this day and age with digital and social ads dominating client spends, it does harken back to the fundamentals of advertising. Fundamentals that a wide variety of marketers and non-marketers can appreciate.

Overall his illustrations of different ads and their effectiveness along with advice that spans throughout an ad-person’s career was enlightening. While it’s easy to get caught up in the rhetoric of concern of advertising from friends and family, his positioning of advertising and the power it holds to make people’s lives better has reinvigorated me to continue my pursuit.

Excerpt:

When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.