#82 David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising)

What I learned from reading Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. --- In my Confessions of an Advertising Man I told the story of how Ogilvy & Mather came into existence, and set forth the principles on which our early success had been based. What was then little more than a creative boutique in New York has since become one of the four biggest advertising agencies in the world, with 140 offices in 40 countries. Our principles seem to work. I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip.’ Does old age disqualify me from writing about advertising in today’s world? Or could it be that perspective helps a man to separate the eternal verities of advertising from its passing fads? Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on. All I do is report on how consumers react to different stimuli. I ask you to forgive me for oversimplifying some complicated subjects, and for the dogmatism of my style – the dogmatism of brevity. We are both in a hurry. I have seen one advertisement actually sell not twice as much, not three times as much, but 19½ times as much as another. Both advertisements occupied the same space. Both were run in the same publication. Both had photographic illustrations. Both had carefully written copy. The difference was that one used the right appeal and the other used the wrong appeal. Do your homework You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework. I have always found this extremely tedious, but there is no substitute for it. On product positioning: Now consider how you want to ‘position’ your product. This curious verb is in great favor among marketing experts, but no two of them agree what it means. My own definition is ‘what the product does, and who it is for.’ I could have positioned Dove as a detergent bar for men with dirty hands, but chose instead to position it as a toilet bar for women with dry skin. This is still working 25 years later. When asked what was the best asset a man could have, Albert Lasker – the most astute of all advertising men – replied, ‘Humility in the presence of a good idea.’ It is horribly difficult to recognize a good idea. I shudder to think how many I have rejected. Make the product the hero. There are no dull products, only dull writers. The idea of a positively good product: It may be sufficient to convince consumers that your product is positively good. If the consumer feels certain that your product is good and feels uncertain about your competitor’s, he will buy yours. ‘If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don’t try to imply that your product is better. Just say what’s good about your product – and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it. Repeat your winners If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency. You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create. Search the parks in all your cities You’ll find no statues of committees. The good ones know more. I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any; he preferred to rely on his own intuition. Why should our clients be expected to bet millions of dollars on your intuition?’ This willful refusal to learn the rudiments of the craft is all too common. For 35 years I have continued on the course charted by Gallup, collecting factors the way other men collect pictures and postage stamps. If you choose to ignore these factors, good luck to you. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they are found in oak forests. Most good copywriters all into two categories poets and killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end. If you are both killer and poet, you get rich. Set yourself to becoming the best-informed person in the agency on the account to which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, talking to motorists. Visit your client’s refineries and research laboratories. At the end of your first year, you will know more about the oil business than your boss, and be ready to succeed him. Be personal, direct and natural. You are a human being writing to another human being. Neither of you is an institution. You should be businesslike and courteous, but never stiff and impersonal. Don’t get a job in advertising unless it interests you more than anything in the world. St Augustine had this to say about pressure: To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world: war, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures, and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendor. But there is another sort of man who is under the same pressure, but does not complain. For it is the friction which polishes him. It is pressure which refines and makes him noble. Any service business which gave higher priority to profits than to serving its clients deserved to fail. Here I go, boasting again. There are better copywriters than I am, and scores of better administrators, but I doubt if many people have matched my record as a new business collector. Focus on value not price: They want to know what commission you will charge. I answer, ‘If you are going to choose your agency on the basis of price, you are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. What you should worry about is not the price you pay for your agency’s services, but the selling power of your advertising. Tell your prospective client what your weak points are, before he notices them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points. If you are lucky enough to have some news to tell, don’t bury it in your body copy, which nine out of ten people will not read. State it loud and clear in your headline. Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client. One human being to another. All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short. I suspect that there is a negative correlation between the money spent on producing commercials and their power to sell products. My partner Al Eicoff was asked by a client to remake a $15,000 commercial for $100,000. Sales went down. Don’t dawdle. Most big corporations behave as if profit were not a function of time. When Jerry Lambert scored his breakthrough with Listerine, he speeded up the whole process of marketing by dividing time into months. He reviewed progress every 30 days, with the result that he made a fortune in record time. Pricing is guesswork. Advertising is a production cost: I have come to regard advertising as part of the product, to be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard, any more than you would stint any other essential ingredient in your product. What did these six giants have in common? All six of them were American. All six had other jobs before they went into advertising. At least five were gluttons for work, and uncompromising perfectionists. Four made their reputations as copywriters. Only three had university degrees. Advertising is salesmanship in print. A definition that has never been improved. Albert Lasker made more money than anyone in the history of the advertising business. Lasker held that if an agency could write copy which sold the product, nothing else was needed. He once defined an administrator as somebody without brains. He once said: I didn’t want to make a great fortune. I wanted to show what I could do with my brains. After the war I decided to try my luck in advertising, but I stood in such awe of Young & Rubicam that I did not dare apply to them for a job. As I thought they were the only agency where I would like to work, I had no choice but to start my own. In one of his last letters before he died, Rubicam wrote, ‘We knew you before you started your agency. How come we missed you?’ By that time we had become great friends. ‘Friends’ is not the right word. He was my patron, inspiration, counselor, critic and conscience. I was his hero-worshipping disciple. He didn’t leave behind a list of rules. He did leave behind an aphorism: resist the usual. In advertising, the beginning of greatness is to be different, and the beginning of failure is to be the same. His attitude to the creative process can be summed up in three things he said: 1 There is an inherent drama in every product. Our No. 1 job is to dig for it and capitalize on it. 2 When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either. 3 Steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love, honor and obey your hunches. Claude Hopkins’ book Scientific Advertising changed the course of my life. It is not uncommon for a change in headlines to multiply returns from five to ten times over. Bill was asked what changes he expected in advertising in the eighties. He replied: Human nature hasn’t changed for a billion years. It won’t even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it creative. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. In my Confessions of an Advertising Man, published in 1963, I told the story of how Ogilvy and Mather came into existence and set forth the principles on which our early success had been based. Our principles seem to work. But I am now so old that a French magazine lists me as the only survivor among a group of men who contributed to the Industrial Revolution, alongside Adam Smith, Edison, Karl Marx, Rockefeller, Ford, and Keynes.

• 0:44David Senra?

  Does old age disqualify me from writing about advertising in today's world? Or could it be that that perspective helps a man to separate the internal verities of advertising from its passing fads? Most of the advertising techniques which worked when I wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man still work today. Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money: beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status, and so on, all over the world. In saying this, I run the risk of being denounced by the idiots who hold that any advertising technique which had been in use for more than two years is ipso facto obsolete.

• 1:28David Senra?

  Okay, so that is from the introduction of the book that I read this week and the one I'm going to be talking to you about today, which is Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. All right, so let's jump into the book. This is a glimpse of his personality and he explicitly tells us who this book is for. He focuses on advertising, like he just said, like, I don't look at it as an art form. I'm not trying to be creative for creative states. I'm trying to convey information so you buy a product, right? And that's why my agency will grow because I'm effective at doing this for my clients. And as their business grows, they spend more money with me and therefore that rising tide lifts my boat. And then he talks about this, like, I don't care about, like, you know, what campaigns I'd favor. ...parties in New York and San Francisco.

• 2:11David Senra?

  So he says, "I comfort myself with the reflection that I have sold more merchandise than all of them put together," meaning the people that just win awards. "I am sometimes attacked for imposing rules. Nothing could be further from the truth. I hate rules." He's very much a misfit. "All I do is report on how consumers react to different stimuli. This is not a book for readers who think they already know all there is to know about advertising. It is for young hopefuls and veterans who are still in search of ways to improve their batting average at the cash register. I write only about aspects of advertising I know from my own experience." So he's right off the rip, he's telling us, "Listen, I'm not here to win awards, I'm

• 2:53David Senra?

  not here to make my ads be even the most beautiful visual representations. I'm here to serve my clients and his entire business." We've been talking about Howard Stern, we've been talking about Henry Ford lately, and his whole theme, when you read the two books, I've read the two ones that he's written at least, and they're in the other books written about him, is focus on service, service, service, service, service. In Henry Ford's opinion, there's no point in having a business that does not focus on service, because that's literally why you exist. And in David Ogilvy's case, he feels the very same way. "I'm here to service my clients. What they want me to do is help them sell more of their product." And so that's the prism into which I'm going to look at advertising.

• 3:36David Senra?

  I'm only going to look at advertising based on its effectiveness, which I find refreshing. So here's a little bit about brevity, performance, and lies. "I ask you to forgive me for oversimplifying some complicated subjects and for the dogmatism of my style." And so what's that dogmatism? He says, "It's the dogmatism of brevity. We are both in a hurry." I love this guy. "The first thing I have to say is that you may not realize the magnitude of difference between one advertisement and another."

• 4:07David Senra?

  And just like he studied consumer behavior, he studied the industry. Like he did a lot of professional research in his industry. He sought out and learned from people that came before him. In fact, the end of the book, I'm going to share with you where he goes over the six people that had been in the business before him, some of which he winds up knowing and they wind up mentoring him. So in this case, he's quoting another one of what he feels is one of the best direct response copywriters, and this guy named John Caples, and this is John speaking. And he says, "I have seen one advertisement actually sell not twice as much, not three times as much, but 19 times as much as another. Both advertisements occupied the same space, both were running the same publication, both

• 4:50David Senra?

  had photographic illustrations, both had carefully written copy. The difference was the one used the right appeal and the other one used the wrong appeal." And so he talks about like, well, I guess I'll get into that, but too many people, too many companies he was staying in, too many advertising agencies, they advertise the product. Customers don't care about your product. They care about what change your product makes to them. So that's what I'm talking about with the right appeal. This is very similar to when we, I keep saying we, there's no we. When I covered the two books by Charlie Munger, where he kept drilling in about study incentives, study incentives, study incentives, even when he was in his 80s. Munger's like, "Listen, I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort my whole life,

• 5:33David Senra?

  understanding how human behavior is shaped by incentives. And every year that passes, even up until this point where I'm later in my life, I still realize I have a lot more to learn. And that the impact, the incentives actually have a larger impact than I even thought before." So he says, "Everyone involved has a vested interest in prolonging the myth that all advertising increases sales to some degree. It doesn't." This is another example. So he has these just little paragraphs, little sections within chapters that have these headlines that I would say is basically him giving us direct advice. And this is something that I've talked about a lot, the importance of professional research. And he calls it doing your homework. She says,

• 6:16David Senra?

  You don't stand a tinker's chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework. And again, he's talking about people that want to work in the advertising business. This applies to all, whatever craft that you're doing. He says, "I have always found this extremely tedious, but there is no substitute for it. First, study the product you're going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it." This is actually the idea that books are the original links. I found this paragraph particularly interesting because it ties into the book that I did last week, which is on Henry Royce, one of the founders of Rolls Royce. So it turns out all goofy is connected to that because he winds up doing the, his, um, his agency winds up doing the advertising for Rolls Royce for quite a long time.

• 7:02David Senra?

  So he says, "When I got the Rolls Royce account, I spent three weeks reading about the car and came across a statement that at 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock. This became the headline and it was followed by 607 words of factual copy." And he actually shows that beautiful advertisement that he has, that he's talking about on the page next to us.

• 7:24David Senra?

  And remember the 607 words, a lot of people, well, he's going to talk a lot about the fact that it's a myth. That when you're writing an advertisement or you're communicating with potential customers, longer is almost always better. And he's, he's got some data on that. So just remember the fact that he wrote a 607-word advertisement in a magazine. Okay, or it could be a newspaper. I'm not actually sure where it was published. All right. "Later, when I got the Mercedes account, I sent a team to the, to the headquarters in Stuttgart and they spent three weeks taping interviews with engineers. From this came a campaign of long factual advertisements, which increased Mercedes sales in the United States from 10,000 cars a year to 40,000 cars a year."

• 8:09David Senra?

  Okay, so that's just an example of some of the results of his process. It's excessive, and I mean that in the best way possible. Professional research. He talks about consumer research and positioning a lot in this book. Here's some examples. Now comes research among consumers. Find out how they think about your kind of product, what language they use when they discuss the subject, what attributes are important to them, and what promises would be most likely to make them buy your brand. So the whole idea that an ad or anything, the first thing that customers should know about your product, what you're trying to sell them, is what do you promise that it's going to do for them? A lot of things, a lot of ads that he uses examples of is like, "We're the best. Look how great we are."

• 8:54David Senra?

  Consumers don't care about that. Everybody is, in some degree, selfish. So they care about them. So don't talk about yourself, talk about them. And he says the positioning. Now consider how you want to position your product. This curious verb is in great favor among marketing experts, but no two of them agree what it means. My own definition is what the product does and who is it for? So he talks about the importance of brand image, and this is some of the tests he does on consumer behavior. And he's doing, there is some kind of liquor, I don't know what kind. It's called Old Crow. Okay, so I guess that's not important, it's alcohol that he's advertising.

• 9:38David Senra?

  So he says, "Give people a taste of Old Crow and tell them it's Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it's Jack Daniels." So they're drinking the exact same thing, you're just lying to them, right? And he's doing this in like a consumer research study. "Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images."

• 10:00David Senra?

  That's such an interesting idea. So this is again tying into the importance of brand image. "I have always been hypnotized by Jack Daniels. The label and the advertising convey an image of homespun honesty. And the high price makes me assume that Jack Daniels must be superior." This is another like hidden secret about human nature that people determine the quality of the shortcut for determining the quality of a product is by looking at the price. So you remember when we did that, when I did that book on the two founders of Banana Republic, Mel and Patricia? And I found it fascinating when they first started the first Banana Republic store, which is really interesting because it's a completely different brand than what exists today.

• 10:44David Senra?

  They would have, Patricia would set up the store, and when an item wasn't selling, in fact, this is one of the reasons the founder of Gap wound up buying the company. Most retail establishments at the time, it's like, "Oh, this is this price or this item of clothing is selling. Here, 50% off. Now it will sell." Patricia did the opposite. She raised the price, and it wound up selling. Because the same scarf, or same blouse, or same shirt, same whatever, that was $25 is viewed one way. Now it's $100, and suddenly it's, "Oh, it's a luxury item. Oh, this must be really nice." And again, the world is extremely complex. Humans, all of us, myself included, look for shortcuts to try to convey information rapidly, and price is one of those.

• 11:29David Senra?

  Okay, so, oh, this is, I love this quote. He says, "Have humility in the presence of a good idea." He says, "When asked what the best asset a man could have, Albert Lasker," this is a huge influence on him, and we'll cover more about Albert later, "the most astute of all advertising men," replied, "Humility in the presence of a good idea. It is horribly difficult to recognize a good idea. I shudder to think how many I have rejected. Research can't help you much because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea, and no idea is big unless it will work for 30 years." That's another, another idea of his that is kind of contrarian in the advertising industry, at least it was at the time he wrote the book, was that if you find an ad that works,

• 12:14David Senra?

  don't change it. In some cases, they've run the same ad for 30 years and it's still selling.

• 12:21David Senra?

  And now he's got some explicit advice for us. Make the product the hero and make it different. So he says, whenever you can, make the product itself the hero of your advertising. If you think the product's too dull, I have news for you. There are no dull products, only dull writers. Every time I have written a bad campaign, it is because the product did not interest me. Now, why wouldn't a product interest you? And keep in mind, ad agencies see tons of products. So he says, "The problem which confronts agencies is that so many products are no different from their competitors." This is why I guess I do believe in the axiom that you don't have to be better, you just have to be different. And I like this idea too, the idea of a positively good product.

• 13:07David Senra?

  And this is a quote from his partner, Joel. So he says, "In the past, just about every advertiser has assumed that in order to sell his goods, he has to convince consumers that his product is superior to his competitors." That's why I was referencing earlier how you'll meet a lot of ads like, "We're the best in the world," or "This is the Northeast's best car dealership," or "This is Europe's best coffee," whatever the case is. "This may not be necessary. It may be sufficient to convince consumers that your product is positively good. If the consumer feels certain that your product is good and feels uncertain about your competitors, he will buy yours." Remember, that has nothing to do with the quality, right? "If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don't try to imply that your product

• 13:52David Senra?

  is better. Just say what's good about your product and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it." That word "clear" is really important, and we'll talk about that later. Because remember, he told you from the beginning, advertising is conveying information. Don't confuse your customer. "If this theory is right, sales will swing to the marketer who does the best job of creating confidence that his product is positively good." And now this is Ogilvy with advice on down with committees. "Most campaigns are too complicated." Use the word "products" as well for campaigns. "They reflect a long list of objectives and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives.

• 14:35David Senra?

  By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing." This is also why I prefer founder-led companies. "Many commercials and many advertisements look like the minutes of a committee." In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create. And then this is his advice on this constant pursuit of knowledge. And he comes to the conclusion that the good ones just know more. They just know more. He says, "It is the same with advertising agents. The good ones know more. I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any, that he preferred to rely on his own intuition." Or his own intuition, excuse me.

• 15:19David Senra?

  "Suppose I asked, 'Your gallbladder has to be removed this evening. Will you choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where to find your gallbladder? Or a surgeon who relies on his intuition? Why should our clients be expected to bet millions of dollars on your intuition? This willful refusal to learn the rudiments of the craft is all too common." That's one of the most important sentences in the book. Let me read that again. "This willful refusal to learn the rudiments of the craft is all too common." So this is lessons of direct response. He's a really big proponent of direct response advertising. And he feels like it's kind of, at least when he's writing in the 80s, it's kind of like the ugly stepchild.

• 16:03David Senra?

  Because a lot of people just want to advertise their brand and make you aware of it. And he's like, "Well, the best people at advertising are actually people that know the effectiveness of their advertising." And at that time, it was only direct response. So we're going to talk a little about that here. He says, "The advertising community has turned its back on such research. Agencies which pioneered the search for knowledge now excel in violating the principles their predecessors had discovered." So they're ignoring the past, all the lessons that the people that were doing that job before had discovered. And so now they're going to make the same mistakes over and over again if they didn't have to. "If you choose to ignore these factors, good luck to you. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they are found in oak forests."

• 16:44David Senra?

  Direct response advertisers know to a dollar how much each advertisement sells. So, watch the kind of advertising they do. That's smart, really smart. Watch what they do, not what they say. You will notice important differences between their techniques and the techniques of general advertisers. And so, he says, for example, now, this is where he comes up with some of his ideas. Again, so, he relies on professional research. He doesn't really pay attention to what people say. He watches what they do, right? Which is really smart for a human, because humans, we're much more truthful with our actions than we are with our words. Okay? So, now, he's gonna go and contrast what direct advertisers do with what other people in advertising that don't do professional research recommend you do. See the difference there?

• 17:27David Senra?

  These are the people that actually are effective at what they're doing. Meanwhile, there's like this intelligentsia, if you want to say, or like these people are trying to win awards and not necessarily sell products, and this is what they tell you to do. So, he says, "General advertisers use 30-second commercials. But the direct response fraternity has learned that it is more profitable to use two-minute commercials." And then, this is David asking us, "Who do you suppose is more likely to be right? General advertisers broadcast their commercials in expensive prime time, when the audience is at its peak. But direct response advertisers have learned that they make more sales late at night. Who do you suppose is more likely to be right? In their magazine advertisements, general advertisers use short copy. But the direct response people invariably use long copy.

• 18:11David Senra?

  Who do you suppose is more likely to be right?" This is such a really important point that he's making here. "I am convinced that if all advertisers were to follow the example of their direct response brethren, they would get more sales per dollar." Now, so, this is what I meant by, "He's funny." Like, if you choose to ignore these factors, good luck to you. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles. Also, this is something he learned from William Maynard, somebody that was at a different agency. And this idea of, "If you're a killer plus a poet, you will get rich." So, he says, "Most good copywriters fall into two categories: poets and killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end.

• 18:53David Senra?

  If you're both killer and poet, you get rich." And now, I guess, the modern equivalent in the age of the internet. If you're a builder, if you can build things yourself and you can sell them yourself, you'll get rich. I think that quote is from the founder of Angelus, Naval Ravikant. This is just good advice for life. Set yourself to becoming the best informed person in the agency on the account into which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, talking to motorists. Visit your clients' refineries and research laboratories.

• 19:35David Senra?

  At the end of your first year, you will know more about the oil business than your boss. And again, this is another example of professional research, something that Bill Gurley talks about, Danny Meyer talks about, a lot of people talk about. And how many people, I would just ask you this question first, I think this is a great idea, go as deep as you can, right? How many people, like, if you assume that advertising agency is a zero-sum game, right? We're lucky, I think, most of us to, we don't have to, you know, most of the world now, at least in like the internet world, is not zero-sum. But you could argue that the world that David inhabited was zero-sum. Either your agency gets this, or they don't, right? That account's going somewhere. So it's highly competitive.

• 20:18David Senra?

  How many people are, that you're competing with, are actually going to do these things that he's talking about? Like, that's tiny, probably zero. So who are you actually competing with? You're actually really not competing with anybody. Because so few people are willing to do, you know, what he's saying. It's like, if I'm gonna advertise oil, I'm gonna go into that meeting. And that's why I recommend reading books, and of course, if you, by listening to this podcast, not only are you picking up, like, ideas and tips and habits and unique perspectives about work, but they make you a more interesting person to talk to. So when they're in these, and a lot of, he talks about like the process in which a company, a large, mostly large corporations, pick ad agencies. And it's almost, you know, it's just like a series of job interviews, essentially.

• 21:03David Senra?

  Now imagine how like the response that the person you're trying to solicit their business from would get when they when you can mention, "Oh yeah, I read on books on oil geology and production of petroleum products. I went to your refinery and went to your research laboratory." Like they're just gonna be blown away. I love this. I know I left myself with "only the autodidacts are free." "Eighty-seven American universities offer undergraduate courses in advertising and even give degrees in it." Okay, so it's eighty-seven American universities at the time. Some of them give degrees in advertising, right? "With a few conspicuous exceptions, the teachers lack the practical experience to be relevant." So he's saying they're selling you stuff that's worthless.

• 21:47David Senra?

  "All of them are handicapped by the poor quality of their textbooks and very few do research on their own." How many times, we're not even what, twenty, thirty minutes into this podcast, how many times does the word "research" come up over and over again? It's very much a theme of David's life. "Very few do research on their own. Most of their graduates get jobs with small agencies. The big agencies preferring to recruit people who have furnished their minds by studying history, language, economics, and so forth." So he's very widely read. And when I do cover his, um, what's interesting about his life, he talks about it a little bit in this book, but I'm sure more in Confessions of an Advertising Man, is that he didn't start in the advertising business until he was like thirty-eight. He was like an unemployed former chef, farmer,

• 22:31David Senra?

  researcher, and then he went into advertising. So he had a wide, um, like a broader set of life experiences that I think was useful when he started doing advertising and then eventually when he set up his own agency.

• 22:45David Senra?

  He's telling us in this section, "To talk and write like a human." He says, "Be personal, direct, and natural. You are a human being writing to another human being. Neither of you is an institution. You should be businesslike and courteous, but never stiff and impersonal." I think this is also like as time goes by, more of my own media consumption? Has skewed heavily towards podcasts and YouTube and away from like scripted shows. I just like another human, like it just feels more natural and authentic for one human to be talking to another and to like be like a person, not necessarily like a, like a company or like

• 23:26David Senra?

  even I always talk about my favorite TV show probably of all time is Game of Thrones. I definitely enjoyed it. Now, most TV shows are not like that, but think about like the production. It took like one person to write, you know, 25 years of five, seven books, however many there's been. And then you have like literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people working on that. Now you can come up with something is beautiful and epic is what I feel Game of Thrones was, uh, last season notwithstanding. Um, but there's also something extremely, um, gratifying like of, of have of consuming something that's, you know, not necessarily scripted. I always talk about my favorite podcast in the world

• 24:07David Senra?

  is Dan Carlin, and I think he's the best podcaster on the planet. And it's so crazy to me that, um, you know, his shows, uh, he's just talking to you. Um, and people are like, oh, is it scripted? He's like, no, I, I piece them together. So I don't sit down and record all at once is what Dan says. But, you know, I, I just, he basically talks to you as if you're sitting across from him. And, um, obviously he's one of the best storytellers I've ever heard. Um, so he says, good, this is more good advice for life. If you take my advice, don't get a job in advertising unless it interests you more than anything in the world. And now he's going to give us advice on how important discipline is to your life. He says, discipline works. And now he's going to quote from history. He says,

• 24:51David Senra?

  Saint Augustine had this to say about pressure. To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world. War, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures and, and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendor. But there is another sort of man who's under the same pressure, but does not complain. For it is the friction which polishes him. It is pressure which refines and makes him noble. And now back to David's takeaway on this. He says, "I have to admit that I have sometimes found the pressure unbearable. My own fault for frittering away so much time on things which lead nowhere. It is a good idea to start the year by writing down exactly what you want to accomplish

• 25:35David Senra?

  and end the year by measuring how much you have accomplished." So have a clear set of goals or ideas where you want your year to be. And then have the discipline to go after that goal. And I like that idea of not complaining, that understanding that pressure is just part of life, it exists everywhere, and it's intended to stress you a little bit to make you stronger. A few pages later, he kind of extends this theme, and he believes you should write down your principles. So he says, "This is written principles," and this is somebody else who he learned from, which is, I don't know if it's the founder of McKinsey, but he, well, let me go there. "Marvin Bauer, who made McKinsey, the consulting firm, the future consulting firm, who made

• 26:18David Senra?

  McKinsey what it is today, believes that every company should have a written set of principles and purposes. So I drafted mine and sent them to Marvin for comments. On the first page, I listed seven purposes, starting with earn and increased profit every year. Marvin gave me holy hell. He said that any service business which gave higher priority to profits than to serving its clients," he's echoing Henry Ford here, "serving its clients deserve to fail. So I relegated profit to seventh place on my list. Do you think it's childish to use a set of written principles to guide the management of an advertising agency?

• 26:56David Senra?

  I can only tell you that mine, writing it down, have proved invaluable in keeping a complicated enterprise on course." And I like this, this writing technique David has. There's a lot of times where he's asking directly, direct quotes to you. Like he'll, or direct questions, rather. He'll, he'll state his case, or a case that he learned from somebody else. He's like, do you think this is stupid? Do you, like, we just, when he, when he was comparing, contrasting what general advertisers do compared to direct response. It's very, um, it's very actually helpful, because it's, it takes you, when you're reading, you take a second, you're like, well, I don't know. Do I believe that? Like, let me think about what you're actually telling me. It's, it's, it's smart. I, I wish more writers use that. So this is why he feels he's qualified to give advice on sales.

• 27:41David Senra?

  And this, again, this is, he, more of his personality, more like he, this book, I, I think I said earlier, I'm very happy this book came into my life. So whoever recommended it to me, thank you very much. Like, I, I'm a smile. I don't know if you can hear that. But I'm smiling, just, he's funny. So he says, here I go boasting again. There are better, better copywriters than I am, and scores of better administrators. But I doubt if many people have matched my record as a new business collector. So he's saying, listen, I'm just, I'm really good at sales. And that's, and, and that can give you an advantage in life above almost every other, like, aspect. If you can get really good at sales, you're, you're gonna be successful in business. So this is his tips on sales meetings.

• 28:26David Senra?

  Oh, so, uh, what I should refer here. So this section we're in, it's how to, how to get clients for your, your, your business. And so that's what he's talking about. Like, not only does his ad, his ads sell, but he's really good at getting clients for his business. This is some tips which, which he used in his own experience, which were helpful in closing clients. So he says, they want to, they, meaning the, the corporation that wants at, uh, or wants to hire you. He says, they want to know what commission you will charge. I answer, if you're gonna choose your agency on the basis of price, you are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. What you should worry about is not the price you pay for your agency's services, but the selling power of your advertising. So what is he telling you there? Your focus on price, you need to, to focus on value.

• 29:11David Senra?

  This is really hard for humans to do. Really hard, but he's completely right. Not only is that a better selling proposition for himself, but better for the company. Like, no, don't worry about the price. Worry about the selling power of your advertising. Rehearse before the meeting, but never speak from a prepared text. It locks you into a position which may become irrelevant during the meeting. So it's more conversational how he would do this. Above all, listen. The more you get the prospective client to talk, the easier it will be to decide whether you really want his account. A former head of Magnavox treated me to a two-hour lecture on advertising about which he knew nothing. I gave him a cup of tea and showed him out. Tell your prospective client what your weak points are. This is a smart move too. Before he notices them.

• 29:54David Senra?

  This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points. So this is the importance of headlines and this is based on a lot of research he did. On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money. The headlines which work best are those which promise the reader a benefit. That's what we talked about earlier. Like a wider wash, more miles per gallon, freedom from pimples, fewer cavities. Rifle through a magazine and count the number of ads whose headlines promise a benefit of any kind. If you are lucky enough to have some news to tell, don't bury it in your body copy, which nine out of 10 people will not read. State it loud and clear in your headline.

• 30:39David Senra?

  And don't scorn tried and true words like amazing, introducing, now and suddenly. So he talks a little bit about in the book about like there's these words like he just described that they're so common, people doubt their effectiveness, not realizing that they're common because they are effective. And so a lot of advertisers are like, oh, I'm not going to use those words. I want to be more creative. Well, he's saying in that case, you're choosing creativity over effectiveness and therefore you're not servicing your customer. That's like a beautiful thought, the way he, the beautiful, like the beautiful logic he has there. And again, that comes from writing what he just said, right down to your principles. His main goal was to sell more products for his customers. So he can, he has his written principles. He can refer back to them.

• 31:21David Senra?

  He's like, is this behavior or this action I'm doing in line with my stated goal? Let me read my stated goal. Is this going to sell more for my customers? No, then I'm not doing it.

• 31:31David Senra?

  This is advice on good copy. Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client, one human to another. This isn't as easy as you may think. Aldras Huxley, who was once a copywriter, said, "It's easier to write 10 passably effective sonnets than one effective advertisement." You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it. It pays to write short sentences and short paragraphs and to avoid difficult words. So, long copy, but short sentences, short paragraphs, so it's easier to read. Copy should be written in a language people use in everyday conversation. Don't write essays.

• 32:14David Senra?

  Tell your readers what your product will do for him or her, and tell it with specifics. This is another thing. Include the price. You should have pricing if you're selling something and you're advertising. This is something that you don't see commonly, but he's a real advocate for. Always try to include the price of your products. You may see a necklace in a jeweler's window, but you don't consider buying it because the price is not shown and you're too shy to go in and ask. It is the same way with advertisements. When the price of a product is left out, people have a way of turning the page. So, people are scared to put the price. He's actually saying, "No, it's a good idea." So, this is examples of long copy. He has got like, let's see, 10 examples here.

• 32:55David Senra?

  I'm just, I'm gonna omit every single word in the description, except for how many words, right? Because he's gonna make this case. He says, "All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short." Now, he's gonna give nine to 10 examples of advertisements he did. Ready? 6,450 words. Five pages of solid text. 700 words. 600 words. 800 words. 4,700 words. 2,500 words. 3,200 words. And 800 words. And then he gives examples like, you know, went from, their company went from fifth in their industry to first.

• 33:37David Senra?

  You know, they went from 10,000 cars to 40,000 cars, etc., etc. And then this is his opinion on why long copy. "I could give you countless other examples of long copy, which has made the cash registers ring. I believe, without any research to support me, that advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not." That's interesting. Advice in life, keep it simple.

• 34:06David Senra?

  It's interesting. I think humans crave simplicity, but we default to complexity. Copywriters specify that a commercial should be shot in... Oh, this is funny.

• 34:16David Senra?

  Okay, so, "Copywriters specify that commercials should be shot in Bali when it could equally well be shot in a studio for half the price." "They insert expensive animation into live-action commercials." "They insist that original music be composed for background purposes, as if there were nothing suitable in the whole repertoire of existing music." "Worst of all, they use expensive celebrities when an unknown actor would sell more of the product." Let me pause right there. He says he has research. And this is interesting because it flies in the face of how a lot of brands advertise their products today and how they did back then. That when you use an expensive celebrity in your ad, the consumers tend to remember the celebrity, not the brand, not the product. So he's saying that, "I have data that it's much more effective to hire an unknown person to sell your product than a celebrity."

• 35:02David Senra?

  Which is funny because, think about, I've seen studies on this where like, like they hire... The example I saw recently is they hired this famous model, it's like fifteen thousand, fifteen million a year, sort of a jewelry company. And yet it's all brand advertising, it's not direct response advertising. So I'm like, "Wait a minute." I was like, "How do they know the effectiveness of that fifteen million dollars?" And the answer is, "They don't. They're just guessing." And it's a hell of a guess to make. That, "Yeah, okay, I want my product to be associated with you, but I can't actually track what the difference in my sales was." So it's a huge benefit for the person getting the fifteen million, and I would argue rather dubious for the company.

• 35:46David Senra?

  But again, large companies do really stupid things constantly. "I have no research to prove it, but I suspect there's a negative correlation..." Oh. So he's kind of echoing this. "I have no research to prove it, but I suspect there's a negative correlation between the money spent on producing commercials and their power to sell products." "My partner was asked by a client to remake a fifteen thousand dollar commercial for a hundred thousand dollars, and sales went down." So, it's interesting. I heard this podcast one time, I took notes on it.

• 36:16David Senra?

  I think the brand was called Tuft and Needle. It's one of those, you know, these, these direct consumer, they're advertised on podcasts a lot. If I'm not mistaken, these mattress companies, right? And the, they wind up selling the company, I think for like, I don't, like, let's say 500 million. Something like that. I don't remember the exact number, right? Maybe 450 million. And the founder was talking about this. He's like, the ads where we spent a lot of money did, were some of the worst performing ads. And he said they, they did ads where like, were like Blair Witch, Blair Witch Project style. That movie that was like real shaky and I think won awards because it's maybe we would record on like a camcorder back in the day. But he was just, it's rough and dirty.

• 37:00David Senra?

  He talked about tracking the ads on, if I remember correctly, billboards. And just like a black billboard with white text, like very simple, like one sentence performed way better. And I forgot what the sentence was or whatever the case was. Then, then like ones that had, like were overproduced. They had like images and, you know, because billboards have to be like a poster. Interesting enough, David hates billboards. He, he thought, he thinks the roads would be much safer. And he makes predictions at the end of the book that eventually billboards would be illegal. And I guess they're illegal in some countries because he, he references that in his writings as well. But anyways, enough about the billboards. But what the person, I think his name's JT Moreno, the founder of Tuft and, one of the founders of Tuft and Needle.

• 37:45David Senra?

  The point he was making was commercials, doing them rough and dirty and spending less money. They actually produce, perform better. Okay, so, oh, this is, and I love how Ogilvy was saying earlier that he's a, his dogmatism of brevity. He's going to tell us exactly what the most important sentence in the book is. He says, "Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell. Yet the majority of campaigns contain no promise whatsoever. This is the most important sentence in the book. Read it again." I'll do as he asks. Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell. Yet the majority of campaigns contains no promise whatsoever.

• 38:24David Senra?

  And he continues, a few paragraphs later, he says, "Try to find a promise which is not only persuasive, but also unique."

• 38:37David Senra?

  This is why David loves research. Few copywriters share my appetite for research. Many others thought that it inhibited creativity. My experience has been the opposite. Researchers often led me to good ideas such as the eye patch in the Hathaway campaign. So it was this company that sells shirts. And he had this weird idea that just putting a fake eye patch on the model that's modeling the shirts would actually increase sales because it would increase. People would instead of glancing over the ad, they'd be like, "What is going on here?" And then they'd actually look at it. So he actually got more people to read the ad and then that resulted in more sales. He says, "I've seen ideas so wild that nobody in his senses would dare to use them until

• 39:20David Senra?

  research found that they worked." And this is another example. "When I had the idea of writing headlines for French tourism in French, my partners told me I was nuts until research revealed that French headlines were more effective than English headlines." Isn't that bizarre? "Researchers also saved me from making some horrendous mistakes." So what do you mean by French headline? The first sentence would be in French, then you'd have English translation under it. The next sentence is in France. The next sentence is in French and you'd have English under it and so on and so forth. So that's what he's talking about. "Researchers also saved me from making some horrendous mistakes. Researchers often misused by agencies and their clients. They have, oh, this is important, they have a way of using it to prove they are right.

• 40:00David Senra?

  They use research as a drunk uses a lamppost, not for illumination, but for support. On the whole, however, research can be of incalculable help. I love this idea. Don't waste time on problem babies. Most marketers spend too much time worrying about how to revive products which are in trouble and too little time worrying about how to make successful products even more successful. It is the mark of a brave man to admit defeat, cut his loss and move on. Concentrate your time, your brains, and your advertising money on your successes. Back your winners and abandon your losers." And he says, "Don't dawdle. Most big corporations behave as if..." This is so good.

• 40:44David Senra?

  "Most big corporations behave as if profit were not a function of time. When Jerry Lambert scored his breakthrough with Listerine, he sped up the whole process of marketing by dividing time into months. He reviewed progress every 30 days with the result that he made a fortune in record time." So again, think of profit as a function of time. I think that's really good advice. David has some thoughts on pricing. So he says, "Pricing is guesswork. It is usually assumed that marketers use scientific methods to determine the price of their products. Nothing could be further from the truth. In almost every case, the process of decision is one of guesswork. The higher you price your product, the more desirable it becomes in the eyes of the consumer." So they talk about the study that happened at University of Iowa.

• 41:29David Senra?

  Tried to relate the prices of 679 brands of food products to their quality. He found that the correlation between quality and price was almost zero. Then he has this idea of where you account for your advertising costs. And he says, "It's a production cost, not a selling cost," even though advertising is thought of as as written salesmanship in print is the word, is the quote he uses. "I have come to regard advertising as part of the product, to be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard, any more than you would stint any other essential ingredient for your product."

• 42:10David Senra?

  Okay, so now we actually got, we've gotten to the, my favorite. I love that all parts of this book, but I really love the ending because this is where he profiles people, like specifically like people that were, practiced his craft before he did and what he learned from them, which I think is the entire point of founders, right? So this is six giants who invented modern advertising. This introduction paragraph, he says, "All six had other jobs before they went into advertising. At least five were gluttons for work and uncompromising perfectionists. Four made their reputations as copywriters and only three had university degrees." So I'm just going to tell you the person's name and then he gives like short biographies for them all.

• 42:55David Senra?

  But I'm just going to point, pull out like the quotes that I wanted to remember. Most, I think Albert, so Albert Lasker's first, he might be the one I highlighted the most on too. All right. So this is Albert Lasker made more money than anyone in the history of the advertising business. One of Albert Lasker's copywriters came up with what he feels is the best description of advertising. He says, "Advertising was salesmanship in print, a definition that has never been improved." Lasker held that if an agency could write copy which sold the product, nothing else was needed. Isn't that like, it's beautiful when you can have a business where it's that simple. Doesn't mean it's easy, but it's very simple. Like, if we can write copy and sell more products, then that's it.

• 43:40David Senra?

  Nothing else matters, we will be successful. Now, what happens is, that means he's also kept, Albert Lasker, the reason he made, this is an interesting point, right? A lot of advertising agencies have a lot of revenue, but Albert Lasker, he made more money because he controlled his costs. Something talked about ad nauseam on founders, right? What he meant is like, he focused on copywriting. He didn't have like art directors and executives and all the other like fluff. Well, I just ran over my point here. So he said, "By dispensing with marketers, art directors, and researchers, Lasker saved so much money that he was able to make a profit of 7%, probably the world's record for advertising agencies.

• 44:22David Senra?

  If an agency makes more than 1% today, it is exceptional." His advertising agency was called Lord & Thomas. He says, "He ran Lord & Thomas as a dictatorship. As you all know," he told his staff, "I am the owner of this business and therefore I decide the policies." He owned 95% of the shares. So there's this idea of control that comes up all the time. After he retired, he said he had never attended a director's meeting and did not think that one had ever been held. He loathed talking on the telephone and abominated committees. He never belonged to an advertising club and avoided his competitors." That's actually, might be interesting, where you avoid like industry news so you can, so

• 45:06David Senra?

  you're not, that like, we have the tendency to copy those around us. If you avoid that, you come up with like your own unique, like ideas.

• 45:18David Senra?

  It might be more differentiation for your product. He was not shy about conspicuous consumption. His weekend estate outside Chicago had a staff of 50. He once defined an administrator as somebody without brains. He once said, "I didn't want to make a great fortune. I wanted to show what I could do with my brains." He could be overbearing, intolerant, and arrogant. He's a misfit. He could be bad-tempered, demanding, and inconsiderate. And he had three prolonged nervous breakdowns. And then check this out. This is how, like, he's got a very... I looked for a biography on him. I couldn't find one. Or else I'd cover him because this guy's such a weirdo in a, you know, affectionate way.

• 46:03David Senra?

  Um, this is how he just, he dominates an industry. And then one day, he's like, "All right, I'm out." One afternoon, late in 1942, he suddenly said to her, his wife, "Mary, I've decided to get out of the advertising business." Two days later, he gave Lord & Thomas to three of his bright young men for a token payment of $100,000. He lived for another 10 years. That's really interesting. All right, so now this guy's name is Stanley Rezner. Um, Rezner, so now he's comparing, tracing. Rezner was never overbearing like Lasker. He managed by consensus. So this guy had, did success in almost the opposite way, right? He managed by consensus, distrusting what he called "individual opinion", and thought that brilliance was dangerous. His agency was structured in the loosest possible way. He detested hierarchies.

• 46:48David Senra?

  There were no department heads and no job descriptions. He used to say that his agency was a university of advertising. So he, um, he was a very, um, he spent a lot of time in, in training his employees. He was a fervent believer in research. A man of rigid principles, he threw away an opportunity to get the huge Camel cigarette account because he would not show speculative advertisements. Reznor made one mistake. He stayed too long. By the time he was in his 80s, his ideas for advertising campaigns had become anachronistic, I don't know how to pronounce that word, and partners who would have made good successors retired before he did. Alright, so this guy is probably the most important person on a personal level to David.

• 47:32David Senra?

  His name is Raymond Rubicam. "He was my conscience for forty years, teaching me that advertising has a responsibility to behave. Raymond Rubicam assembled the best team of copywriters and art directors in the history of advertising. Under Rubicam's inspiration, they created advertisements which were read by more people than any other agency. In one of his last letters before he died, Rubicam wrote to David, 'We knew you before you started your agency. How come we missed you? By the time we had become great friends, friends is not the right word. He was my patron, my inspiration, my counselor, my critic, and my conscience. I was his hero-worshipping disciple. Rubicam was the most outspoken man I've ever known.

• 48:15David Senra?

  He blurted out what was ever on his mind without considering what effect it might have. The youngest of eight children in a poor family, he left school when he was fifteen and spent the next nine years bumming around the country as a shipping clerk, a bellhop, a chaperone of cattle, a movie projectionist, a door-to-door salesman, an automobile salesman, and a newspaper reporter. When he was twenty-four, he applied for a job as a copywriter at the now-defunct Wallace-Armstrong Agency in Philadelphia." Now, check this out. The reason I include this, this is how he gets a job. He's very resourceful and tenacious is the word I'm looking for? Persistent, maybe is the better word? And this is a direct quote from Raymond. "I sat in the lobby," meaning of the agency, "on a bench so hard that I can still feel

• 48:59David Senra?

  it," he later recalled. "At the end of the ninth day, I exploded." So he's sitting in the lobby, nine days straight. "I wrote the boss a letter, calculated to produce an immediate interview or a couple of black eyes." So he knows the value of being polarizing. "The boss stormed into the lobby, waving the letter and said, 'Those ads you wrote didn't amount to much, but this letter has some stuff in it.'" She winds up getting the job. Moron Raymond. "In old age, he told me, advertising has a responsibility to behave properly. I proved that you can sell products without bamboozling the American public." While he had no monopoly on this virtue, he had more right than anyone to boast about it.

• 49:43David Senra?

  So this is actually interesting because I didn't know that. I learned this by reading Anthony Bourdain's book, I don't even, maybe a decade ago called Kitchen Confidential. And he talks about like, at the time when he got, and I guess Danny Meyer talked about that a little bit in his book Setting the Table. How when they got involved in the restaurant industry, it was like an island for misfits. Your family would look down on you for working in the industry. And now it's like the opposite, right? They have TV shows about chefs and they become individual personalities and all that sort of stuff. So David talks about this in the book, what they were talking about, what Raymond taught him, is that people looked at advertisers like scum. They thought they were like scam artists and stuff. And so that's why Raymond was like, listen, yeah, advertising, you're going to have a

• 50:24David Senra?

  small percentage that are just trying to trick people into buying useless products. But for us, it's our obligation to make sure that it behaves properly, that we're advertising and selling effective products and that we're not like tricking or lying to customers. So that's interesting because I don't, maybe I don't know enough about the ad agency business now, but I mean, they have TV shows like Mad Men about it. Like it seems to be somewhat prestigious in that sense, at least from like a cultural perspective. I could be wrong though. So he says, "He taught me to resign accounts when they were spoiling the morale of the staff. He resigned the huge American Tobacco account because he disliked being bullied by the notorious George Washington Hill," who I guess was the head of that.

• 51:09David Senra?

  "His letter is before me." So this is what Raymond, he's like Raymond sends to George Washington Hill about we're going to part ways. This is hilarious. And his agency is called Young and Rubicon. So it says, "Young," this is now Raymond writing to Hill. "Young and Rubicon and American Tobacco were both successful companies for some time before our association began. I trust both will continue to be successful companies after our association ceases, which it is doing as of now." So I love that. He has some kind of principles and he's willing to turn down money. He's like, "Listen, you're a bully, you're ruining the morale of my staff, and be gone." He says, "I knew," this is David, "I knew Rubicam for 40 years, longer than any other giants,

• 51:54David Senra?

  and I loved him more."

• 51:57David Senra?

  Wow, that's beautiful. "He did leave behind an aphorism." I love this, too. "Resist the usual." "In advertising, the beginning of greatness is to be different, and the beginning of failure is to be the same." There's a hell of a quotes in here, man. Leo Burnett is the next guy. It wasn't, now, this kind of pierces the myth that, you know, like entrepreneurship or success only comes early in life, where not only is that empirically not true, the data states, like, at least from, like, I think the data I've seen is like, and this is not the best metric for success in entrepreneurship, keep in mind, but like, I want to say IPOs usually started by people when they're like an average age, like 42 years old or something.

• 52:42David Senra?

  This guy, Leo, he says, "It wasn't until he was 60 that Leo hit his stride. It was as if he had suddenly turned on his afterburners. By the time he died 20 years later, his agency had become the biggest in the world outside of New York." That's bananas. So Leo has a set of principles and he wrote them down. Maybe that's where David got that idea from. "His attitude to the creative process can be summed up in three things he said. Number one, there is an inherent drama in every product. Our number one job is to dig for it and capitalize on it. Number two, when you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either. And number

• 53:22David Senra?

  three, steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love and honor and obey your hunches." I've never heard that before. "Love and honor and obey your hunches." At the end of his life, he wrote, "Looking back over our greatest achievements, I recall that few of them were generated in an atmosphere of sweetness, light, and enthusiasm, but rather one of dynamic tension, complicated by offstage muttering." And this is my own personal view that we need stressors, not chronic stressors, but definitely acute stressors in our life for the best outcomes. Instead of assigning a project to one creative... Oh, this is another good idea too. Check this out. "Instead of assigning a project to one creative group, he had a habit of putting several groups in competition.

• 54:06David Senra?

  'It was enough,' he once said, 'to send strong men staggering to buy a goat farm.'" So you get more out of people. This is kind of known in human nature. You get more out of people when they're in direct competition. I do this from time to time. I use the Apple Watch to track. Like, I don't use it for anything else but to track fitness. And I don't even know if it's the best for that, but it's the one with the biggest network of people I know. So friends will challenge you to... Like, let's have a week-long or three-day-long or week-long competition. Let's see who can burn the most calories or who works out for the longest. And I don't know if I'll do that anymore. I've done it a few times where I've almost destroyed myself.

• 54:48David Senra?

  So this is actually not proving the point that I was trying to make, but to the point where I was just like, "All right, I can't do anymore. This is insane." But you definitely, at least in my case, I definitely burned way more calories than I normally would because I had that direct competition and I could see what the other person was doing. "Leo deplored the tendency of mega agencies to put their own aggrandizement ahead of service to their clients." There's that word "service" again. "Not long before he died, he told his staff..." Oh, I love this. "Somewhere along the line, after I'm finally off the premises, you may want to take my name off the premises too.

• 55:28David Senra?

  But let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door. That will be the day when you spend more time trying to make money and less time making advertising. When your main interest becomes a matter of..." Size just to be big rather than good, hard, wonderful work. This is what I love. I always talk about. I favor small companies in general that I feel I get the best products and services for them because they actually give a damn. They actually have some kind of skin in the game. Uh, and a lot of, a lot of, uh, literature and, and, and, um, media and entrepreneurship is, is kind of, we, we fetishize the big. Um, and I love that idea. Like you can get big as long as services, number one, like Henry Ford seemed to have done.

• 56:12David Senra?

  But when this, what Leo says, when your main interest becomes a matter of size, just to be big rather than good, hard, wonderful work. I love that. He's like, I'll make you take your name off it. And then this is what David said, I wish I had written that. Oh, that's so good. All right. Claude Hopkins is the next person. Uh, by exercising the pseudo literary pretensions endemic in British copywriters. Remember David definitely favored, uh, practice and research over theory. And concentrating my thoughts on the obligation of advertising to sell. Claude Hopkins book, scientific advertising changed the course of my life. So this will be the second or third time I've mentioned in the podcast that books are the original links. David believed that too, because at the very end of the book, he's like, here's all these books you need to read.

• 56:55David Senra?

  That I, that influenced what I just wrote. I got the ideas from them, read them. Really interesting. Uh, wish all books did that. And that's why I also, um, I buy, so I prefer to read and do the podcasts and highlight. And take notes in the paperback or hardcover versions of these books, but I almost always buy the Kindle version too, because. One, I can search the book and add notes, but it also tells me in the Kindle version, what other books are mentioned within that book. So I find a bunch of other books like, like what, what's this idea that Henry Ford said? It's like the idea that we're ever going to, um, automate our way to like where humans have nothing to do. He's like, that's not real. Like every new opportunity creates two new opportunities. Every new book creates two new books. Um, when he was 41, he was hired by Albert Lasker. So this guy didn't run his own firm, right?

• 57:38David Senra?

  He was hired by the guy we talked about first, the very first one, Albert Lasker, the guy that made the most money. To write copy for Lord and Thomas. Lasker paid him 185,000 a year, equivalent to $2 million in today's money. Wow. What does that tell you about his skill? And again, when, when, uh, people are always like, what, like, I don't, I want to start a business. I don't know, um. Like what I should do, there's two things I normally say, I use that example that Richard Branson says, "A business is just something that makes somebody's life better." So if you look at it to that point, you find tons of opportunity. And the second thing is like, try to, businesses will always pay you to bring them more business. So think about, why is this guy getting, as an employee, making $2 million a year? Because he's selling more business. So he's gonna get paid for that.

• 58:23David Senra?

  He stayed at Lord and Thomas for 18 years. Hopkins was a prodigiously hard worker. Sunday was his favorite day because he could work without interruption. He held that "nobody with a college education should be allowed to write copy for the mass market." David says, "I know what he meant." "He was an uncompromising practitioner of the experimental method, forever testing new ideas in search of better results." And then, um, he wrote, uh, he wrote like, uh, like, takeaways, I guess you'd call it, from his life in advertising. I'm just gonna read to him, to you. "Ad writers forget that they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause.

• 59:08David Senra?

  It is not uncommon for a change in headline to multiply returns from five to 10 times over." That's interesting. Um, this is another one called Bill, Bill Bernach. Um, and this is actually the last guy, uh, we'll cover. Um, so he says, "He held, as I do, that the quality of the idea and the excellence of its execution was the alpha and omega of successful advertising." So, quality of the idea, excellence of execution. "He worshipped at the altar of originality and was never tired of denouncing research as the enemy of creativity." Remember, a lot of these people are successful even though they have conflicting views. That's why it's so important to collect as many ideas as you can, because entrepreneurship, like life, is a complex adaptive system.

• 59:52David Senra?

  It does not act, uh, in a predictable way. Um, so, there could be a good idea that you pick up, that it applied in the wrong situation, yields a bad result. And that same idea in a different situation, can yield a better result. It's very confusing. That's why so many, so few people, uh, are entrepreneurs. It's really hard. Uh, "This may have irritated some of his clients, but it made him the hero of the creative fraternity. He spoke in a quiet voice and looked modest, but he wasn't." Uh, "When some of his stodgy," here's an example of his, his non-modesty. "When some of his stodgy competitors started raiding his agency in search of swingers..." I don't know, I assume good talent and not the other meaning of the word swinger. Uh, Bill told me, "They don't realize that these people will be helpless without my guiding hand."

• 1:00:36David Senra?

  Woo, he was a philosopher. He lived without ostentation and organized his time with a self-discipline that is rare among heads of agencies. Um, shortly before, uh, Bill, shortly before he died, Bill was asked, oh, this is, th- this is where I'm gonna close this podcast and this is so important because it's, it's a foundation of why we're going to history to learn, right? Shortly before he died, Bill was asked what changes he expected in advertising in the eighties, remember the 1980s. He replied, "Human nature hasn't changed for a billion years. It won't even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about cha- a changing man.

• 1:01:20David Senra?

  A communicator must be concerned with a unchanging man. What compulsions drive him? What instincts dominate his every action?" This is very similar to what Jeff Bezos says, like, uh, "Find the things that don't, um, that are never gonna change and then build your business around that." So for Amazon's case, he's like, you know, in 10 years from now, are people gonna be like, "I wish Amazon had less selection?" No. Are they gonna say, "I wish you delivered, uh, my, my product slower?" No. "I wish you had worse customer service?" No. So he's like, "That's the things that we orient around because they're gonna be true today and they'll be true in the future." So he says, "What, uh, a communicator must be concerned with unchanging man. What compulsions drive him? What instincts dominate his every action? Even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him."

• 1:02:01David Senra?

  Another trend we keep talking about, actions indicate, or I, I always say in like our family, actions express priorities. Okay, so remember, language often camouflages what really motivates him. So, watch actions. Uh, "For if you know these things about a man, you can, you can touch him at the core of his being." Again, that's another way to say you know his incentives. This guy's really, there's a lot of knowledge in this one paragraph. "One thing is unchangingly sure: The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed." Without them, he will fail. A gentleman with brains. I think now, after hearing me talk about this for maybe an hour,

• 1:02:46David Senra?

  you realize how much I love this book. I know you can't see me, but I've had smiles on my face a lot of the time reading this to you and talking about this. I think it's great. The book is beautiful. Like, you know, obviously a podcast, you're not going to be able to see the ads. I'd buy it just for that, but this guy is just so smart. He's just so interesting, so I cannot wait to read his biography. That'll undoubtedly be another Founder's episode in the future. But if you want to buy this podcast, if you want to buy this book and support me, the author, and yourself at the same time, there's always a link in the show notes. And that link is an Amazon affiliate link, which means if you click on that link and buy through that link, Amazon will send you a small percentage of sale and no additional cost to you.

• 1:03:27David Senra?

  You can also go, another way to do that is amazon.com/shop/Founder'sPodcast. Other than that, I think I've spoken enough. I will talk to you next week.