I was asked by a growing internet company to talk about how to hold and grow clients. I boiled my notes down to “Ten Commandments of Account Management”.

Guiding Principle

You win new business on creative – ideas that build client businesses.
You lose it on relationships.

1. Select clients carefully. Target list.
2. Treat your client as your best new business prospect. Walk the halls.
3. Take a proprietary interest in the health of your client’s business.
4. Get agreement on strategy.
5. Give your clients ideas they didn’t ask for. Initiative.
6. Build bridges at multiple levels. Pay attention to juniors.
7. LISTEN. Take notes. Confirm in writing. Deliver!
8. Treat the client’s money as your own. Put the client’s interest first.
9. Deal with issues, not people. Never badmouth a client.
10. Make friends with your clients. Hard to fire a friend.

The Oxford dropout turned his sights on advertising—and became a legend

By Kenneth Roman

David Ogilvy (D.O. on his memos) died in 1999 at 88. He was born June 23, 1911 (the same year as Ronald Reagan), and would have been 100 this week. I met Ogilvy when I joined Ogilvy, Benson & Mather in 1963 as an assistant account executive. I was 32, he was 56 and already famous for his tasteful, literate campaigns as well as for his arresting epigrams (“The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife”). He was driven around New York in a Rolls-Royce and occasionally wore a kilt, before most people had seen either.

In 1964, he published Confessions of an Advertising Man. It became the best-selling advertising book of all time, the only one most people outside the business have ever read; he was on his way to becoming the most famous advertising man in the world.

When I joined the agency, it was still small enough, at 600 employees, that he could make it a point to meet most new executives (even junior account managers). Once in his presence, the visitor was subjected to an interrogation: What had he done before? Where did he live? What were his interests?

In my case, he asked me to bring the research on Prime, a dog food being introduced by General Foods, a client he had cultivated as a new business prospect. On that initial meeting, he quickly put aside the research and discovered we both liked Gilbert and Sullivan operas, then offered me a ride home.

He correctly regarded his most important talent as new business—but had little understanding of mass consumer products like dog food. Learning the client wanted a better “promise” for the introductory commercial, he worked all weekend and arrived in my office Monday morning with his entry: “The Prime Minister of dog food.”

He had a surer touch with premium brands, putting the red-bearded U.S. president of Schweppes in the “The Man From Schweppes Is Here” ads. In response to the CEO’s nervous query about whether he looked like a rabbi in one photo, Ogilvy said: “Whoever heard of a rabbi named Commander Whitehead?”

Even as he elevated to world renown, he never pontificated—he interrogated, even with dinner partners. His great secret was an inquiring mind. He learned from accomplished people and from his experiences.

His life story is implausible. He was born and raised in England, the son of a Scottish father and an Irish mother. He was an indifferent student at Oxford and dropped out without graduating. After Oxford, he found work as a sous chef at the Hotel Majestic, at the time the best kitchen in Paris. Working long hours alongside volatile chefs, he learned high standards and leadership from the impe rious head chef M. Pitard: “Ah, my dear David, what is not perfect is bad.”

1. Ogilvy as a “gentleman farmer” in Lancaster, Pa., circa 1945.
2. At work at Ogilvy, early 1950s.
3. Leading a training program.
4. On the boat to America, 1938.
5. (l. to r.) Edmund Whitehead (the “Commander” in the Schweppes ads), Ogilvy, and Baron George Wrangell, the Russian aristocrat who played the “man” in the Hathaway ads.
6. At his typewriter in 1977.
7. Sporting a top hat in 1967.
8. On the set of a Western Union ad.
9. Head shot, 1977.

Then off to Scotland to sell Aga Cookers, the Rolls-Royce of cooking stoves, door to door to Scottish housewives at the depths of the Depression. Another learning experience. “No sale, no commission. No commission, no eat. That left a mark on me.” The mark it left was a lifetime commitment to judge advertising on its ability to sell, not entertain.

It became an opportunity to demonstrate his ability to distill experience into principles. The company’s best salesman, Ogilvy was asked to tell other salesmen how he did it, in what Fortune called “the best sales manual ever.” It was the most entertaining, for sure.

Stress the fact that no cook can make her Aga burn more fuel than 4 [pounds] a year, however stupid, extravagant or careless she may be, or however much she may cook. If more fuel is being consumed, it is being stolen, and the police should be called in immediately.

Manual in hand, he talked his way into an apprenticeship in his brother’s ad agency in London and then a job with George Gallup doing research on the movie business in Hollywood. And it was Ogilvy, not Gallup, working with the moguls—choosing scripts, influencing titles, making (or killing) stars’ careers. It also led him to inject consumer research into the development of his agency’s advertising.

With the advent of World War II, Ogilvy went to work for the British Secret Service in New York under Sir William Stephenson, the model for agent 007 in the James Bond series. He engaged mainly in economic studies, but claimed to have learned tricks of the spy business—like stopping an attack dog by ripping its front legs apart. This amused colleagues who knew him as a physical coward who would lose an argument to a copywriter who took two threatening steps toward him.

Unsure what to do when the war ended, he became, of all things, a farmer in the Amish countryside of Pennsylvania. “We never thought of him as a farmer,” said a local reporter. “He was a gentleman who lived on a farm.” Amazingly, the plain and simple Amish and the flamboyant Ogilvy were a match. He adored their simple ways; they were charmed by him.

If he wasn’t going to be a farmer, he was now ambitious—for advertising. He arranged with the local library to get him new campaigns, and studied them in his room at night. He read every advertising book he could find, and soaked up knowledge.

Then, at 38, never really having worked in advertising (save for his brief stint at his brother’s firm), he opens an agency in New York to compete with the great agencies of the day, and within 10 years becomes the most talked about person on Madison Avenue. His ad campaigns set new standards in style and taste, his speeches about building brands and respecting the consumer made news, his dramatic dress and memorable sayings got him invited to parties and even to the White House.

People saved copies of his letters and memos. My first was a letter he wrote to my Gillette client, who came to us with a campaign created by their design department. After listing eight reasons why it would not be successful, 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 udder. But that cow would not produce results.

Despite a reputation as a creative genius, Ogilvy’s real genius was as instinctive leader. Some think the best advertisement he ever wrote was for Ogilvy & Mather itself, with the headline “How to run an advertising agency,” espousing principles that apply to many businesses.

More than setting down principles in writing, he dramatized them. At one board meeting, he gave directors sets of Russian nesting matryoshka dolls. Inside the largest doll a smaller one, then a smaller one, and so forth. Inside the smallest doll there was a slip of paper:

If we hire people who are smaller than we are, we will become a company of dwarfs. If we hire people who are bigger than we are, we will become a company of giants.

Hire people who are better than you are. And pay them more than you if necessary.

If he had composed a memo urging that we hire better people, everyone would have saluted—and forgotten it in 10 minutes. Nobody forgot the Russian dolls.

He strived to build a corporate culture (“We hire gentlemen with brains”) and make Ogilvy & Mather a meritocracy, and succeeded to a large extent. “No nepots, no spouses,” he directed. “Pay peanuts and you get monkeys” was another favorite, although he never paid himself more than $125,000.

In 1973, he retired to Château de Touffou, a 12th century castle with 30 rooms and a dry moat, several hours south of Paris. He would pick up visitors at the railroad station and, on the 20-minute ride back, start with “Tell me all about your life.” He named himself the agency’s international creative director and reviewed ads from around the world.

But the agency had become too far-flung, with 200 offices in 52 countries, for a man who hated to travel. And the business had passed him by. He was a print man; his great successes were in magazines and newspapers, and he never grasped the TV medium or the role of music and emotion in advertising.

He continued to give speeches (his final crusade was for advertising that sells rather than entertains), accept awards, and write. When I asked him for title suggestions for my first book, he replied, “The title of my next book is How to Advertise. If you like it, you may have it and use it.” I used it. Several years later, he told me he was writing another book. “Do you have any titles left over?” he asked me. I reminded him of his earlier contribution, and offered that the title of his next book was easy: “You’re the most famous advertising man in the world. You’re the title. It should be David Ogilvy on Advertising.” Published in 1983, Ogilvy on Advertising became a bookend to that story.

In 1989, Ogilvy & Mather was the object of a hostile takeover by the British holding company WPP. After a fierce defense (he called the WPP head “an odious little shit”), he came around and accepted the token position as non-executive chairman. But his baby had been taken away. He died a decade later.

His considerable legacies, beyond his beloved agency, include the concepts of brands and branding, which he pioneered. His support of research in advertising is recognized by the Advertising Research Foundation’s ARF David Ogilvy Awards. He is the only general advertising man in the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. He was an early consumerist, railing against billboards (“They spoil the landscape”) and misleading advertising. Starting from scratch in 1948, he built the only international agency started since World War II that is still there, with his name on the door.

Read the original article here

By Kenneth Roman

David Ogilvy had been in the advertising business only 15 years when he wrote “Confessions of an Advertising Man” in 1962. In that brief period, he had created “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” Commander Whitehead for Schweppes, Rolls-Royce’s “the loudest noise is … the electric clock,” and Dove’s “one-quarter cleansing cream,” among other iconic campaigns.

He saw the book as a new-business pitch for his agency, but allowed it was also to prepare the agency for going public and, in complete candor, “to make myself better known in the advertising world.” His method: to set down everything he had learned about advertising — “a textbook, sugar-coated with anecdotes.” He guessed it might sell 4,000 copies and assigned the royalties to his son for his 21st birthday — a decision he always regretted.

“Confessions” was an instant success and went on to become the best-selling advertising book of all time, selling several million copies and translated all over the world. As the only advertising book most people outside the business have ever read, it molded public perception of what the business was actually like. As a standard text in business schools, it formed the view of thousands of students and lured some to advertising careers. It led to a lot of new business for the agency. And it made Ogilvy the most famous advertising man in the world.

Ogilvy was hardly the first advertising man to write a book — it is almost an occupational disease of the business. What was it about “Confessions” — still in print nearly 50 years later — that struck such a nerve, and caused it to endure?

Despite the title, the volume contains few actual confessions, but there were enough juicy tidbits that few readers felt misled. It paraded his study of mail-order advertising and his experience as a researcher for George Gallup to show how consumer research can make advertising more effective. But the chapter on TV is a bit primitive in its understanding of the medium. His principles for magazines and newspapers fail to anticipate the potential of poster-type visuals — art directors were there to illustrate his text.

It is the quintessential how-to book — how to manage an agency, get and keep clients, be a good client, build great campaigns, write “potent” copy. Many principles hold up well, but it is not a creative textbook for today. His 1983 “Ogilvy on Advertising” comes closer to that mark.

There are several reasons why “Confessions” still charms almost a half-century after it first appeared, not least of which is the writing itself. Ogilvy festoons his text with anecdotes, vignettes of his colorful personal history (French chef, stove salesman) and memorable sayings. “Search all the parks in all your cities; you’ll find no statues of committees.” His style is free of cliches and sprinkled with wit.

He touted the perfect goal for clients — and prospects: advertising that sells. His commitment to high standards and honest research made the business appear professional and responsible. His dictates against nepotism and office politics — “I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings” — gave his agency the aura of a civilized place to work. And the general reader was attracted by his early consumerist views: “Never run an advertisement you would not want your own family to see.”

His reputation as a creative wizard notwithstanding, Ogilvy’s true genius was as an instinctive leader. He was an institution-builder. He savored the pursuit of new business and articulated principles of management that apply to many other businesses, inculcating them so deeply in his agency that it prospered after his retirement and remains highly respected today — with his name still on the door. In that sense, “Confessions” stands up as a still-readable management text.

Read the original article here

By Kenneth Roman and John Emmerling

David Ogilvy wasn’t Dan Draper. In a new poll, ad agency alumni spill the beans about the old days.

The advertising business is popping up in our living rooms a lot lately, most notably in the cable TV series “Mad Men,” now going into its fourth season. At the start of its first episode in 2007, this title appeared on the screen.

MAD MEN – a term coined in the late 1950s to describe the advertising executives of Madison Avenue. They coined it.

The program is a well-crafted dramatic series set in a fictional advertising agency of the period, portraying a free-wheeling industry in which men smoked and drank – in the office, and bedded their secretaries with abandon.

Watching it, one might be tempted to ask how closely the show hews to reality.

We have a clue from a recent poll of 101 alumni of Young & Rubicam, one of the leading advertising agencies then and now. The informal survey, conducted by Emmerling Communications, reinforces many of these stereotypes – except the term “Mad Men,” which it reveals did not exist at the time. But it did confirm that advertising men, like most people, smoked – 58 percent of the sample, in fact. And that they drank at lunch – 68 percent had at least one, 39 percent had two or more, and a remarkable five percent somehow navigated with four drinks.

But the most revealing findings relate to the treatment – or mistreatment – of women. The overwhelmingly male survey group agreed that there was a hiring bias toward good-looking women – as secretaries or receptionists. Women in professional roles were rare birds. Forty-five percent of respondents agreed that women were subjected to male chauvinism, sexual innuendo and off-color jokes; another 27 percent acknowledged this, but put it down to “a few bad apples.”

Finally, sex. The survey question: “Were you aware of sexual activity that took place in the office? (This does not include ‘nooners’ at a friend’s apartment.)” Fifty-five percent gave it a resounding DEFINITELY YES! Plus 18 percent who said they certainly heard “strong rumors”.

By those superficial measures, the show is on the money. On the substantive nature of the business, it is wildly off-target. That dissonance is best personified by David Ogilvy, the most celebrated advertising man of his day, who has been described as “The Original Mad Man.”

In most respects, large and small, Ogilvy defied the show’s prototype. Unlike the gray-suited executives of “Mad Men,” he was a theatrical character. When he first came to Madison Avenue, he sometimes flaunted a black scarlet-lined cape. He was driven around in a Rolls-Royce and arrived at black-tie events in a kilt – before most people had seen either one. As he remarked, “If you can’t advertise yourself, how can you hope to advertise for your client?”

He was calculatedly outrageous in behavior and highly quotable on deeply held beliefs like honesty in advertising and respect for the consumer. Among his favorite aphorisms – “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife. You wouldn’t lie to your wife. Don’t lie to mine.” Don Draper and his colleagues, on the other hand, show little respect for the underlying purpose of their work – to serve the interests of their clients. Ogilvy never let his staff forget that. One oft-quoted refrain, to remind his people not to be profligate with client money, was that the production cost of a TV commercial was about the same price as a pretty swell house.

In building Ogilvy & Mather into a global enterprise, he was a champion of professional standards, including the concept of brands, the discipline of direct marketing, and the use of research in developing advertising. There is no evidence on “Mad Men” that anybody ever adheres to professional standards of any kind. Not for Ogilvy the winging of a campaign in a client meeting, as Don Draper does in the show with the Lucky Strike “It’s Toasted” campaign.

In a relatively short period of time, he created several of the most influential campaigns in advertising history, among them “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” with his aristocratic black eye-patch; the red-bearded Commander Whitehead bringing Schweppes tonic to the U.S., and the most memorable car headline of all time: “At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock. He called these his Big Ideas.

The Mad Men drink and smoke – a lot. Although he smoked pipes and cigars, chain-smoking cigarettes was not Ogilvy’s style. He drank moderately, except when he had to pour himself on a plane – he was terrified of flying. He never joined his colleagues’ imbibing at neighboring watering holes; in fact, he registered disgust toward such behavior. One evening, somebody came looking for Ogilvy’s secretary. “She’s probably across the street at Ratazzi’s, fornicating with copywriters,” said he.

Ogilvy was attracted to beautiful women and was married three times, but was discreet in his private life. His real love was advertising, and at that he was a workaholic with little time for the sort of extracurricular affairs dramatized on the show. The characters in “Mad Men” seem able to drift away from the office to bars and hotel rooms any time they feel like it. Ogilvy was almost the opposite, leaving social events and even the theatre to return to the office.

Maybe it’s all a matter of perspective. A former creative director at Ogilvy & Mather who met his copywriter wife there stopped watching “Mad Men” because it bore so little resemblance to the business he was in at that time. His wife had a divergent view: “You didn’t have your behind pinched right and left every time you walked through the art department.”

—Mr. Roman, a former chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, is the author of “The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising.”

The world of ‘Mad Men’ was really brought to you by a Chicago-based agency and its mercurial founder

By KENNETH ROMAN

In the nascent days of advertising, in the first half of the 20th century, no one was more successful—or more influential—than Albert Lasker. Under his energetic leadership, the Lord & Thomas agency promoted new habits as well as new products and became for a period the country’s largest agency. He devised a way to help women overcome their shyness in buying sanitary napkins (Kotex), helped break the prejudice against women smoking (Lucky Strikes) and made orange juice a part of the American diet (Sunkist).

Albert Lasker and his Lord & Thomas advertising agency in Chicago transformed the industry a century ago.

Lasker is the subject of “The Man Who Sold America” by Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz, a former chief executive officer of Foote, Cone & Belding, the successor agency to Lord & Thomas. As the authors note, Lasker’s influence extended well beyond the confines of the advertising world. “He is the super-salesman of the generation,” said Will Hays, who managed the 1920 presidential campaign that, with the super-salesman’s help, put Warren Harding in the White House.

A major investor in his beloved Chicago Cubs, Lasker persuaded owner William Wrigley to change the name of Cubs Park to Wrigley Field— Lasker wanted to help the chewing-gum magnate sell more product. When the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal threatened the sport, Lasker came up with the plan to restructure major-league baseball and appoint Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as its czar.

Lasker, a lifelong Republican, helped elect a president— Harding’s 1920 campaign is considered a landmark in the convergence of politics and advertising—but he also became the president’s close friend, dining or lunching at the White House several times a week. Harding appointed him chairman of the Shipping Board—making Lasker one of the few Jews, in addition to Louis Brandeis on the Supreme Court and Bernard Baruch on the War Industries Board, to achieve a position of public influence during that era.

“The Man Who Sold America” shows us the advertising industry well before the age of “Mad Men,” when the promotional brilliance of Lasker and his shop helped turn Kleenex, Pepsodent toothpaste, Quaker Oats, Goodyear tires and Palmolive soap into household brands. An authorized Lasker biography in 1960, “Taken at the Flood” by John Gunther, was richly readable but felt incomplete; Messrs. Cruikshank and Schultz fill in the gaps and along the way provide an equally engrossing account.

The second child of prosperous German Jewish immigrants who settled in Galveston, Texas, Lasker was born in 1880. He was a precocious child: In 1892, a cogent endorsement for a Texas gubernatorial candidate appeared in the Galveston Free Press—a newspaper written, edited and owned by 12-year-old Albert. While still in high school, he wrote for the Galveston Daily News and aimed for a journalism career after graduation. But then his father, put off by the notorious drinking habits of newspapermen, intervened and called in a favor from a friend. Lasker would work in the slightly more respectable advertising business, with the Lord & Thomas agency in Chicago.

When Lasker moved to Chicago in 1898, advertising agencies were still mainly brokers of space in newspapers and magazines. Lord & Thomas employed just one graphic artist and a part-time copywriter. All that was about to change. America’s population was swelling, and manufactured goods were flooding into the market; the emergence of large-circulation newspapers and national magazines like The Saturday Evening Post meant companies had new and inviting places for promotion.

Lasker, not yet out of his teens, was an instant success at Lord & Thomas. With his inventive mind and engaging personality, he easily won clients; he became a part-owner of the business at 24 and was running the agency (and its sole owner) within a few years. Messrs. Cruikshank and Schultz note that he could be a dictatorial chief—his staff and clients admired Lasker’s vitality and magnetism but were exhausted by his demands. “To his subordinates,” the authors write, “he could be alternately inspirational, baffling, and demoralizing. He could be cheerful, playful, irascible, generous, or petty—and he could shift from mood to mood with bewildering speed.”

At the turn of the century, advertising was largely understood as a matter of keeping your name in front of the public. Lasker instinctively felt that there must be something more and was searching for a broader definition of the business. He was instantly receptive when John E. Kennedy, a free-lance direct-mail writer (”a troubled and inebriated genius”), broached a new way of thinking about advertising. It boiled down to three words: salesmanship in print. Advertisers, Kennedy said, should come at readers as a salesman would a prospective buyer: offering “reason why” advertising that made an argument, a creative one, for a product or service. “Finally,” the authors write, “there was an idea on the table which Lasker could work with.”

Kennedy moved to a New York firm in 1906 and was succeeded by copywriter Claude C. Hopkins, lured to Lord & Thomas by Lasker’s unprecedented offer: $1,000 a week. Hopkins was already a legend in the business and his fame would only grow at Lord & Thomas. He and Lasker created hugely successful campaigns for Quaker Oats Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat cereals (”foods shot from guns”), for the “beauty appeal” of Palmolive soap and for Goodyear “all-weather” tires. They branded California raisins as “Sun-Maid” and California oranges as “Sunkist.” Lord & Thomas encouraged the production of glass juice extractors for home use—essentially inventing orange juice as a popular American beverage.

Lasker was involved in all parts of the business, writing and editing ads, but more than anything else providing counsel and ideas for his clients. The complete advertising man. He set high ethical standards and made advertising more respectable than the patent-medicine ads that had come before. He didn’t believe in expensive consumer research—one reason for his agency’s much-envied profitability. Regarding the early days of marketing Kotex, Lasker years later recalled, “we didn’t have to make investigations among millions of women. Just a few of us talked to our wives.

The at-home research led the agency to propose to Kotex that the company put its product in plain wrapped packages on the retailer’s counter so women wouldn’t be embarrassed to ask for them. Lasker was especially adept at appealing to women: Kleenex tissues were transformed, to great effect on sales, from a “cosmetics remover” to a “disposable handkerchief.” Working with the irascible George Washington Hill of American Tobacco, Lasker persuaded women that smoking Lucky Strikes would ultimately be good for their figures: “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” (”Candy manufacturers screamed,” the authors note.) Pepsodent toothpaste went to the top in the 1930s with radio—as did the Pepsodent-sponsored show’s host, a heretofore not particularly successful comedian named Bob Hope.

Instead of just keeping an advertiser's name in front of the public, he used 'salesmanship in print' to promote brands including Sunkist, Goodyear, Palmolive and Pepsodent.

By 1938, Lasker had made a fortune, which he spent on himself and others. He advanced millions to friends during the Depression and at times lent money to clients to finance their advertising campaigns. In 1942, tired and bored, he abruptly decided to leave the business—and take the agency’s name with him, selling its assets for a token amount to Emerson Foote, Fairfax Cone and Don Belding. He had made lucrative investments and up to that point had been paying himself $1 million a year ($13 million today). He lived a baronial life; the 480-acre weekend estate he built outside Chicago had a staff of 55 and a challenging golf course where he hosted friends and clients—if they were also friends.

His third wife, Mary, introduced him to fine art—they collected Impressionists—and philanthropy. The Laskers became major contributors to the American Cancer Society, the National Heart Institute and, in part because he suffered from debilitating depression all his life, the National Committee for Mental Health. With his “energetic advocacy,” Lasker “reshaped philanthropy,” the authors write, by using “the tools he had embraced in the commercial context, including radio, to change the way the nation thought about cancer and other diseases.” Another sign of his influence: Lasker suggested that the Birth Control Institute change its name to Planned Parenthood.

Except for a six-hour staff talk in 1925, Lasker made no speeches and wrote nothing for publication. Mary had to persuade him to put his name on the Lasker Awards for medical research. He died in 1951 at 72. The authors liken him to the Great Oz in Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz,” “the man behind the curtain” who operated with relative invisibility. “The Man Who Sold America” pulls back the curtain and shows us a remarkable life spent shaping much of the world we know today.

—Mr. Roman, a former chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, is the author of “The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising.”