#89 David Ogilvy (Confessions of an Advertising Man)

What I learned by reading Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. ---- 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. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

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• 0:01David Senra?

  My mother was a beautiful and eccentric Irish woman. She disinherited me, on the ground that I was likely to acquire more money than was good for me, without any help from her. I could not disagree. At the age of nine, I was sent aboard in an aristocratic school in Eastbourne. The headmaster wrote of me, "He has a distinctly original mind, inclined to argue with his teachers and to try and convince them that he is right and the books are wrong." But this perhaps is further proof of his originality. At the age of thirteen, I went to a Scottish school whose Spartan disciplines had been established by my great-uncle.

• 0:38David Senra?

  I went to college at Oxford, but I was too preoccupied to do any work and was duly expelled. That was in 1931, the bottom of the Depression. For the next seventeen years, while my friends were establishing themselves as doctors, lawyers, civil servants, and politicians, I adventured about the world, uncertain of purpose. I was a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a social worker in the Edinburgh slums, an associate of Dr. Gallup in research for the motion picture industry, an assistant in British security coordination, and a farmer in Pennsylvania.

• 1:22David Senra?

  I had expected to become prime minister when I grew up. Instead, I finally became an advertising agent on Madison Avenue. The revenues of my nineteen clients are now greater than the revenue of Her Majesty's government. My father used to say of a product that it was very well spoken of in the advertisements. I spend my life speaking well of products in advertisements. By writing this book in the old-fashioned first-person singular, I have committed an offense against a convention of contemporary American manners. But I think it artificial to write "we" when I'm confessing my sins and describing my adventures.

• 2:07David Senra?

  That is an excerpt from the book that I read this week and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. And before I jump into the rest of the book, I just want to let you know why I chose to do, to cover this book this week. I had previously done, if you've listened to all the episodes I've done so far, you already know this, but on Founders Podcast number 82, I went over what I learned from David's book, Ogilvy on Advertising, which is less biographical and more like explicit advice on how to improve your company's advertising. So if that, that subject interests you and you have not listened to that, I'd highly recommend listening to Founders number 82.

• 2:46David Senra?

  He does a little bit of that in this book as well, but this is more of like a narrative as opposed to the way that he organized the other book. They were also written about two decades apart. If I'm not mistaken, he wrote Ogilvy on Advertising like in the eighties. And the book I have in my hand was first published in 1963. But, so I was obviously familiar with David Ogilvy. But the reason I'm doing it today is because the last, last week I did probably the hardest podcast I've ever done, which is I read 54 years of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. And it's easily the longest book that I've ever read for this podcast. And the longest podcast, it's like over three hours long.

• 3:26David Senra?

  But in several shareholder notes, so first of all, Warren Buffett calls David Ogilvy in the shareholder letters, a genius. And in the shareholder letters, you also see some of the Berkshire would publish like which like stocks they own. And I noticed not only did he call David a genius, but he also owned stock in David's advertising agency, which is Ogilvy and Mather. So once I read that, I was like, okay, well, if Warren Buffett, whoever everybody else looks up to, is learning from and admiring the talents of David Ogilvy, then you know, I should read this book right away and see what we can all learn from them. So that's how you're hearing this now. So let me go ahead and jump into the book. I want to start at the beginning. He writes this like updated forward.

• 4:10David Senra?

  This is him writing in 1988 and he adds this extra chapter on the book. It's called the story behind this book and he's got some interesting insights and you're going to see his personality right away.

• 4:21David Senra?

  So he says, 14 years before writing these confessions, I had gone to New York and started an advertising agency. Americans thought I was crazy. What could a Scotsman know about advertising? And this next sentence gives you an idea of the personality he has. And I would describe it as he definitely has an abundance of confidence. He says, "My agency was an immediate and meteoric success." He says, "I wrote this book during my summer vacation in 1962. I thought it would sell about 4,000 copies. To my surprise, it was a runaway bestseller and so far has sold about a million copies. Why did I write it? First, to attract new clients to my advertising agency.

• 5:05David Senra?

  Second, to condition the market for a public offering of our shares. And third, to make myself better known in the business world. It achieved all three of these purposes." And he continues, he says, "My colleagues at Ogilvy and Mather have largely followed my precepts and they have sold a lot of products for a lot of manufacturers, with the result that our agency is now 60 times as big when I wrote this book." That's crazy. So on the very next page, he left a note for myself and the note says, "He is very, very, very good at one thing." So he says, "If you detect a slight stench of conceit in this book, I would have you know that my conceit is selective. I am a miserable duffer in everything except advertising.

• 5:50David Senra?

  I cannot read a balance sheet, work a computer, ski, sail, play golf, or paint. But when it comes to advertising, Advertising Age, this is a publication, says that I am the creative king of advertising. When Fortune Magazine published an article about me and titled it, 'Is David Ogilvy a Genius?'" I asked my lawyer to sue the editor for the question mark." So it's interesting what came into my mind when I read that paragraph and then obviously reading the entire book, you get an understanding of how David thinks. And I kind of tied it into like, whoa, like, let me start with one thing. I'm pretty skeptical of the notion of institutionalized learning. I feel like in my own life, like the things that I was generally interested in, the ones

• 6:35David Senra?

  I sought out myself and wanted to learn about, whether reading books, listening to lectures, taking classes, whatever it is, those are the things that I And use in life and anything that was like force fed or forced to do that I was not interested in like went in one ear and not the other. So then I think about this is like, well, my experience is surely not unique, right? I'm sure a lot of people have the same experience. And I was like, well, what would you tell your child? Like if they're asking, hey, what is advice you have to help me become more successful in life? And I think this is it. Now you should have a broad understanding of the world around you and be and learn about a bunch of different things. But I think when it comes to your craft, the surest way to be successful is to be very, very,

• 7:18David Senra?

  very good at one thing. David Ogilvy, when he was alive, was arguably the best person in the world at advertising. And as a result, that's made him successful and gave him this set of unique experiences. But like you saw when I opened the podcast, he had to go through a lot of experimentation to figure out what that one thing is. Like he said in the beginning of the book, like he was a chef, he was a door to door salesman, he was a social worker, he was a researcher, and then a farmer in Pennsylvania. He's actually, I think, like, like where the the large Amish population is in Pennsylvania. So I don't know why that popped into my mind when I read that, but it didn't. So I thought I'd share it with you. All right. So I want to continue

• 8:03David Senra?

  with the section that he's talking about, which is the story behind the book. And he's kind of reflecting 20 something years, 25 years after his published. And he talks about, this is also something I noticed in the Warren Buffett shareholder letters, like David has these concepts that he's learned through trial and error, research and experience, and he kind of repeats them over and over and over again. And Warren does the same thing. Like, he has in 54 years, it's not like every single shareholder letter, he's introducing a new idea. What he's doing, he gives you a set of ideas, maybe there's five, maybe there's six, whatever the number is. And then he, he, he gives you different examples of how he uses the principles that he feels and

• 8:44David Senra?

  the philosophies he has in business and how it like how he applies it to what he's actually doing. David does the same. Thing and so he talks about hey like in my day there was no such thing as corporate culture no one talked about it we just you just created it you didn't know what you were doing and so now he's talking about like the ideas and they're called all the all of the isms

• 9:10David Senra?

  he repeats them over and over again so he says the maddening repetition some of my ideas have been woven into our culture here are some of them so I just picked out a few that I found interesting here's one we sell or else and so what he means there is like too much of the advertising world is they chase things that are not important so he says what is advertising is in his definitions it's it's salesmanship at scale right he doesn't write ads to win awards he doesn't add write ads so other people can think how clever that ad is he talks about in fact if your ad is noticed that for being clever it's probably not beneficial because your main goal should be sell he's like I write ads to sell client the products of my customers that's it so we sell or else that's the first thing he repeats over and over again says you

• 9:55David Senra?

  cannot bore people into buying your product you can only interest them in buying it this one I love so much we prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance we pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles a blind pig can sometime find can sometimes find truffles but it helps to know that they grow in oak forests so he one thing he credits the the immediate success he had in advertising was he says he's the only person running one of the largest advertising agents or agencies in America that spent time as a researcher first so he referenced it earlier he says I work with Dr. Gallup you might you might recognize that name

• 10:38David Senra?

  because think about all the polls that are referenced and all the the intelligence gathered by the Gallup and the Gallup organization so

• 10:49David Senra?

  The understanding, the experience he had, and how he applied what he learned, basically, he says, "Listen, there's nobody else that's studied consumer behavior like me. And so I actually know why people buy products, and then I orchestrate my advertisements around the traits that make people buy products." So knowing that, it makes perfect sense why he says, "Listen, I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance."

• 11:13David Senra?

  He says, "Unless your campaign contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night." He says, "I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea. I'm supposed to be one of the more fertile inventors of big ideas, but in my long career, I've not had more than 20."

• 11:29David Senra?

  And this is another thing he repeats all the time, and I'll talk more about this in a little bit. He says, "Search all the parks in your cities, you'll find no statues of committees." So he hates committees. He really very much believes in the power of an individual.

• 11:44David Senra?

  A few pages later, he's just going on, talking about like the, what he sees the evolution in the advertising agency, but a lot of the insights he has, again, can be applied to many things. He says, "Clients who haggle over their agency's compensation are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of trying to shave a few measly cents off the agency's 15%, they should concentrate on getting more sales results from the 85% they spend on time and space," meaning all the ad buys are doing. "That is where the leverage is. No manufacturer ever got rich by underpaying his agency. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys." And that paragraph could have easily been written by Warren Buffett. Talks about that a lot in his shareholder letters.

• 12:28David Senra?

  I see why Buffett admires Olga Vey, now reading both, like, reading like the results of their own writing. They have a lot of the same ideas, where Buffett says he credits like Charlie Munger with pushing him in the direction of not focusing solely on price, but really focus on the value that you get. This is Ogilvy telling us to study experience. He says, "Advertising agencies will waste their clients' money repeating the same mistakes." "During a 10-hour train ride, I read all the ads in three magazines. Most of them violated elementary principles which were discovered in years gone by. The copywriters and art directors who created them are ignorant amateurs.

• 13:10David Senra?

  What is the reason for their failure to study experience? Are they afraid that knowledge would impose some discipline on them? Or expose their incompetence?"

• 13:22David Senra?

  So now he explicitly lists like some of the most valuable lessons that he's learned. I just picked out a few that I thought were interesting. "The temptation to entertain instead of selling is contagious." So it goes back to that point. He's gonna, he's gonna reiterate that point in, in a bunch of different ways. He's gonna take the same idea and dress it up in different language, but it's the same thing over and over again. Your ad should sell. That is your primary goal. Focus on that. Stop trying to entertain people. Says that doesn't mean be boring, though. "The difference between one advertisement and another, when measured in terms of sales, can be as much as 19 to 1." Okay, so that is all, he also references that in Ogilvy on Advertising.

• 14:04David Senra?

  So I really do believe if you're selling any kind of product, you should pick up the Ogilvy on Advertising book. It's not like, the book I have in my hand looks like a normal book, right? I mean, he's a, Ogilvy's a fantastic writer, gets right to the point. So this is like a real short, concise, 180 pages with like no fluff in there. But Ogilvy on Advertising is like this big, beautiful example. There's a lot of pictures. It's, it's almost like a course on advertising in book form. And in it, he explicitly tells you like what to do, based on his own experience, which he gained through research and through years and years of trying to sell to people's products. And the reason I bring that up is because he talks about this a lot. And that's- That's insane. Think about what he's saying. If you study advertising, you get really good at it.

• 14:49David Senra?

  You could be doing the same act, but the difference in the outcome, so the same input, right? But the output is completely different in the sense that one ad can say 19 times as much as another ad. So he says, "It pays to study the..." This is also applicable to other things. "It pays to study the product before writing your advertisements." And he's going to talk more about that later. He takes this to an extreme, and I think it's a good idea. "The key to success is to promise the consumer a benefit." Something he hammers in Ogilvy in advertising as well. "Like better flavor, wider wash, more miles per gallon, a better complexion."

• 15:27David Senra?

  This is something I find that a lot of people overlook, where like, my belief is a lot of our behavior is biological. I'm not doubting that there's influences on different cultures, but humans are basically the same everywhere. And so, he arrives at the same point, the advertising equivalent. "What works in one country almost always works in other countries." So my point being is like, we're all way more similar than we are different. "Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing. Their advertisements look like the minutes of a committee." There he goes again. He really, really cannot stand committees.

• 16:09David Senra?

  You could tell he kind of ran his businesses much as like an individual at scale, like a leverage of his own. Like, he institutionalized his thoughts, and that gave his experience leverage. And he's able to, you know, scale up to whatever, 60 times the size of the business that it was when he's writing these words. "Good campaigns can run for many years without losing their selling power. My eye patch campaign for Hathaway shirts ran for 21 years. My campaign for Dove soap has been running for 31 years, and Dove is now the best seller." So he's just saying, "Listen," and he chastises other people, he says, "People get bored by running the same ads, but why would you stop running an ad if it's still working?" And it just echoes a main theme of this podcast, like, "Why would you study history? Because human nature is constant."

• 16:56David Senra?

  Okay, so let me jump, now we're back into the book. So every chapter has like an explicit like how to, so say how to manage an advertising agency, how to make good campaigns, how to write potent copy, how to build great campaigns, etc., etc. But in, what he, what he does is he's, he kinda like weaves a narrative, so he tells these stories. He has an idea, tells story, why that, that, like, give an example of why it's important. So it's, it's not like a dry book at all. I got to the end of the book, so the other day I saw this video, I, I was a huge fan of stand-up comedy. And I was listening to like, I saw this video where the comedian Kevin Hart is talking about,

• 17:41David Senra?

  him and Chris Rock were doing, like, they're just like practicing at the stand-up club one night. And so they, him and Chris have a good relationship, so when each, they each watch each other's stand-up sets, and then give each other advice, and they write it down, and they talk about it, so they can kinda like, share ideas. And they said, Dave Chappelle walked in, and he went up, and he said, Kevin Hart and Chris Rock were sitting in the back, while Dave Chappelle's doing his stand-up, and this is, you know, probably 10 years ago, or something like that. And 20 minutes into Dave's set, Kevin's like, "Me and Chris looked at each other, then we looked at the, the notes we had just given each other, and we crumpled them up and threw it in the trash." He's basically saying that Dave Chappelle was so good at comedy,

• 18:24David Senra?

  that it just made what they were doing look so bad. I felt that way when I finished this book, cuz I was like, maybe one day I'll, like, I'd wanna write a book about like the stuff I've learned from reading all these biographies. And I was just like, I will never be able to write like this guy, he's just so good at it. Alright, so that was a tangent. Let me jump into this, and let's start actually focusing on what we're doing here. Okay, so "The lessons you learn can be applied to other fields," these are my notes, "What he learned from the, from the head chef," so he was, like he said, this is this, what he learned when he was a chef in Paris. So he starts off, "Managing an advertising agency is like managing any other creative organization: a research laboratory, a magazine, an architect's office, and a great kitchen."

• 19:06David Senra?

  "Thirty years ago, I was chef at the hotel Majestic in Paris. There were thirty-seven chefs in our brigade. From morning to night, we sweated and shouted and cursed and cooked." "Every man was inspired by one ambition: to cook better than any chef that had ever cooked before." "I have always believed that if I could understand..." He's talking about the head chef. His name's Monsieur Patar. I don't know how you pronounce it, but I'm never gonna try to say that Monsieur word again. So let's just call this guy P. "I have always believed that if I could understand how P, the head chef, inspired such a white-hot morale, I could apply the same kind of leadership to the management of my advertising agency." So now he's gonna go into some of the stuff he observed. He says, "Mr. P..." I'm just gonna call him Mr. P. That's actually better.

• 19:51David Senra?

  "Mr. P praised very seldom, but when he did, we were exalted to the skies. Today, I praise my staff as rarely as Mr. P praised his chefs, in hope that they too will appreciate it more than a steady gush of appreciation." "Mr. P did not tolerate incompetence. He knew that it is demoralizing for professionals to work alongside incompetent amateurs." So, one of David's most famous quotes, and something that's also quoted in the Warren Buffett shareholders, he says, "If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we should become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we should become a company of giants."

• 20:35David Senra?

  And that's kind of the lesson he's teaching us here, that he observed from this chef in Paris, who had unbelievably high standards. "I said, 'Mr. P taught me exorbitant standards of service. For example, he once heard me tell a waiter that we were fresh out of..." It's a French dish. Dish, I'm not gonna try to pronounce. "And almost fired me for it. In a great kitchen, he said, 'One must always honor what one has promised on the menu.'" So David tells us, this anecdote right here, he's trying to... For first not become fired, he's like, this is my thinking, like, we don't have the ingredients that we need. If I could go to the store and go get the ingredients, it's going to take too long because the dish takes 50 minutes to cook. And, you know, what did you want me to do? And Mr. P is like, you do anything that you have to. He's like, you should have came

• 21:19David Senra?

  to me. I would have called around other restaurants that have that same dish. We would have went out and got it for him. And he's basically saying, hey, we're the ones that promised the customer. We're making a promise to the customer by putting this dish on the menu. And it's our fault that we were not prepared. So we're not going to penalize the customer for the fact that we didn't prepare correctly. We're going to do the extra work responsible to deliver what we promised, the promised benefits to the customer. Again, I think that applies to almost every single domain. All right, some more lessons here. I learned something else at the Majestic. If you can make yourself indispensable to a client, you will never be fired. That's another principle that David talks about in different ways, different stories. And then he says, so this is what he feels the founder of a company's principal responsibility is.

• 22:04David Senra?

  I have come to the conclusion that the top person has one principal responsibility, to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work. So he says the same point in another one of his most famous quotes. And again, if I didn't tell you this was a quote from David Ogilvy, you could easily think it's a quote from Warren Buffett. Like, it's striking to see the similarities in their thinking. And David said, hire people who are better than you, who are better than you are, and then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine. And that was Warren, his point. He's like, listen, I just buy businesses and we leave the CEOs alone because they're already fantastic businesses. They clearly know what they are doing. And if I was running the business, I would do

• 22:46David Senra?

  a worse job. So who am I to tell them what to do? Like, this doesn't make any sense. So he just focuses on capital allocation, which is saying, hey, all the profits of the businesses I own, send them back to me and I'll make them, turn them into more money. But I'm certainly not going to tell you what to do. This is a little bit about behavior that he admires. So, once a year, I assemble the whole brigade, meaning everybody in the company, to the auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and give them a candid report on our operations, profits, and all. Then I tell them the kind of behavior I admire in these terms. That's why he was referencing earlier. The way he communicate and reinforced like his beliefs over and over again, that's what gave the culture that Ogilvy and Mather had. It's not that he said, he sat down and said, "Hey, I'm gonna create a corporate culture."

• 23:30David Senra?

  No one even knew what that meant at the time. It's just saying, "This is, this is what we believe in." So, I'm just gonna read all this to you, and this is gonna be quite long, because I think they're, it's, it's worth our attention. Number one, "I admire people who work hard, who bite the bullet. I dislike passengers who don't pull the weight in the boat. It is more fun to be overworked than to be underworked. There's an economic factor built into hard work. The harder you work, the fewer employees we need, and the more profit we make. The more profit we make, the more money becomes available for all of us." Number two, "I admire people with first-class brains, because you cannot run a great advertising agent without brainy people. But brains are not enough unless they are combined with intellectual honesty."

• 24:15David Senra?

  Three, "I have an inviolable rule against employing nepots and spouses, because they breed politics. Whenever two of our people get married, one of them must depart."

• 24:32David Senra?

  Number four, "I admire people who work with gusto. If you don't enjoy what you are doing, I beg you to find another job. Remember the Scottish proverb, 'Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.'" That's fantastic proverb. "I despise toadies who suck up to their bosses. They are generally the same people who bully their subordinates."

• 24:56David Senra?

  I admire self-confident professionals, the craftsmen who do their jobs with superlative excellence. They always seem to respect the expertise of their colleagues. They don't poach. And number seven, I admire people who hire subordinates who are good enough to succeed them. That's a sign of leadership. I pity people who are so insecure that they feel compelled to hire inferiors as their subordinates. That's how you become, like he said, a company of dwarfs. Number eight, I admire people who build up their subordinates because that is the only way we can promote from within the ranks. I detest having to go outside to fill important jobs, and I look forward to the day when that will never be necessary.

• 25:40David Senra?

  Number nine, I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings. I abhor quarrelsome people. I abhor people who wage paper warfare. The best way to keep the peace is to be candid. And number 10, I admire well-organized people who deliver their work on time. The Duke of Wellington never went home until he had finished all the work that was on his desk. Alright, here's another idea I love, pursue excellence over bigness. I have no ambition to preside over a vast bureaucracy. That is why we have only 19 clients.

• 26:18David Senra?

  The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying. This distaste for bureaucracy, again, if you've ever listened to or read the writings of both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, I'm gonna say this over and over again because it's interesting how they learn from each other. Or maybe they just arrived at these conclusions separately, and just happen to be of like minds, but they abhor bureaucracy. I think Berkshire Hathaway is probably the most uniquely structured super conglomerate that I've ever come across.

• 26:56David Senra?

  This is some Ogilvy's thoughts on talent and imagination. And I love this idea of making yourself formidable. Alright, so he says, "Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among non-conformists, dissenters, and rebels, misfits. The majority of businessmen are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked." So check this out. This is such an interesting thought, or a sentence, rather. "I am almost incapable of logical thought, but I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my unconscious in case that disorderly repository has anything to tell me." What a, what a unique, do you see what I mean about like, I'll never be able to write

• 27:41David Senra?

  this, this well? Like, I mean, obviously, he's been a copywriter for years, too, so he's had plenty of practice, but he describes his unconscious as a disorderly repository. That's amazing. So he says, "I keep the telephone line open to my unconscious. I hear a great deal of music. I take long baths. I garden. I go into retreat among the Amish. I watch birds. I go for long walks in the country. I take frequent vacations so that my brain can lie fallow. No golf, no cocktail parties, no tennis, no bridge, no concentration, only a bicycle.

• 28:21David Senra?

  While thus employed in doing nothing, I receive a constant stream of telegrams from my unconscious, and they become the raw material for my advertisements. But more is required: hard work, an open mind, and ungovernable curiosity." So like, think about the three traits that you could see in other people. Are you ever gonna meet anybody that, that, that is a hard, that works hard at whatever they're interested in? So to me, it's more like craftsmanship I would replace hard work for. An open mind and ungovernable curiosity? Like, that's, those are gonna be appealing characteristics to almost anybody. And the opposite of them, let's say sloth, a closed mind, and somebody that thinks they know everything, like, those are people that repel you, right?

• 29:05David Senra?

  Like, the people that you're gonna run away from in life. So I don't know, I like that. I wanna be thought of as taking my craft seriously. I wanna have an open mind, and I wanna have ungovernable curiosity. She says, "I have observed that no creative organization, whether it is a research laboratory, a magazine, a parish kitchen, parish kitchen, an advertising agent, or an advertising agency will produce a great body of work unless it is unless it is led by a formidable individual." So this is, goes back to his distaste of committees. And of course, like, listen, it's kind of obvious here, like, he's got a giant ego. And probably deserved, deserved, deserving me so? He clearly thinks of himself as a formidable individual.

• 29:50David Senra?

  Now, some, some, some could argue it's probably better to keep that thought to yourself. Just if you wanna, like, you know, general humans find like arrogance and stuff like that distasteful. But I, I don't, like, there's plenty of people that I learned from that are considered arrogant. Like, I just don't let that get in way, my way of a good idea. Like, I don't care about it. But I do think his idea here is really, really smart. And it is a goal, like, why would you not? Like, we have limited time on the earth. Why wouldn't you want to tap into all the talents that you possess that you're currently having materialized? And one way to do that is becoming a formidable individual. I really like that idea a lot. And he's saying, listen, I mean, I would, I would agree, based on what? The eighty-something books that I've read so far for the podcast.

• 30:34David Senra?

  I, not one of them is not a formidable individual. Not one. They all are, I guess is a better way, instead of doing a negative there. Like, they all are formidable individuals. Okay, let's skip ahead a little bit. What is this? He wrote down his goal, no matter how delusional it sounded. Oh, this is really good. This is bananas. So he says, "Fifteen years ago, I was a obscure tobacco farmer in Pennsylvania. Today, I preside over one of the best advertising agencies in the United States, arguably the world, with billings of fifty-five million dollars and a, and a, and a payroll of five million." He says, "How did this come to pass? As my Amish friends have said, it wonders me.

• 31:17David Senra?

  On the day in 1948, when I hung out my shingle, I issued the following order of the day." So he, no clients. He's just like, "I'm gonna do this." Even though he has no, like, other than his, his time at Gallup, which probably gives him an unfair advantage, like, he didn't have money, he didn't, there's nothing that, that would lead one to believe that he's gonna be successful to the degree that he was successful, right? And you're talking about less than, was it less than 20 years later? And this is what he wrote down. This is, and, and, this is amazing to me. He says, "This is a new agency, struggling for its life. For some time, we shall be overworked and underpaid. In hiring, the emphasis will be on youth. We are looking for young Turks. I have no use for toadies or hacks.

• 32:02David Senra?

  Agencies are as big as they deserve to be. We are starting this one on a shoestring, but we are going to make it a great agency before 1960." So he gave himself a 12-year goal there. "The next day, I made a list of the five clients I wanted most." Remember, he has no clients at this time. None. And this is the, the list. General Foods, Bristol Myers, Campbell Soup Company, Lever Brothers, and Shell, the, the oil company. Um, he says, "To, to pick such blue-chip targets was an act of mad presumption, but all five of them are now clients of Ogilvy and Mather." That's bananas. Oh, here, I love this idea, 'cause, um, the note of myself is why there's always, always, always, always opportunity for new businesses.

• 32:46David Senra?

  Uh, the reason that you have new, tiny companies that can, uh, either create something brand new, or take customers away from a, a larger, more established player, is, has to do with the, the nature of humans. And he says, "To new agencies about to embark on the pursuit of their first clients," so he's using the word agencies, but this applies to any company, "I bequeath a set piece which worked magic in my early days. Once every few years, a new, a great new agency is born." And so he talks about the traits. "It is ambitious, hard-working, full of dynamite. It gets accounts from soft, old agencies. It does great work." The years pass, the founders get rich and tired, their creative fires go out,

• 33:30David Senra?

  they become extinct volcanoes, or you could argue that their attention is elsewhere. The agency may continue to prosper, its original momentum is not yet spent. It has powerful contacts, but it has grown too big. It produces dull, routine campaigns based on the echo of old victories. Dry rot sets in. At this stage, it begins losing accounts to vital new agencies, ruthless upstarts who work hard and pull all their dynamite into their advertisements. We can all name famous agencies which are moribund. You hear demoralizing whispers in their corridors long before the truth dawns on their clients. So that's something that's played out.

• 34:11David Senra?

  He's writing these words in 1962, and that still could be as true today. It's most likely going to remain a constant for as long as we're building companies. Oh, I love this idea. Somebody I'm a huge, obviously I've studied a lot of Henry Ford. I've done, I don't know, three or four podcasts on him. I'm going to wind up doing more podcasts in the future because he's just, he's one of the most influential entrepreneurs of ever. There's so many people that came after him that learned from him. David Ogilvy is that same person. He gets his first client by following Henry Ford's idea. He said, following Henry Ford's advice to his dealers, meaning the people that want to sell Ford automobiles, following Henry's advice to his dealers that they should solicit by personal visitation, meaning they should come to Detroit and ask to be a dealer.

• 34:55David Senra?

  I started by soliciting advertisers who did not employ an agency at all. So he just starts dropping in on potential clients' office. He just stops by, starts doing a pitch, and he winds up being, he gets a first, he gets his first client, and they spent about $40,000 with them in the first year. And the chapter I'm in is called "How to Get Clients." I would, I mean, if you have, I think this book is like 12 bucks on Amazon right now. If you have 12 bucks laying around, I would definitely buy it and read this chapter because it's essentially a chapter on how to get customers, which every business... Obviously needs to learn and to understand how to do and he's just got some freaking really

• 35:40David Senra?

  good ideas like the next page. I'm not gonna read all of them, obviously. I think this is genius. He's talking about all the weird things he had to do because he's like, listen, we have no money. This is a new, um, this is like, we don't have any money and we have no clients. Like, we have to do, like, we have to, we have to outsmart our competition because we can't outspend them, right? So he does this thing where he, and he's always intentional, just like when he first, the first day of his advertising agent, he writes out the five, like, aspirational clients he has. So then he identifies a bunch of other people, then he wants to advertise, and he starts just, again, he has a background in research. So he just goes and looks for useful information and just starts sending them to them unsolicited. He's got this huge direct mail campaign going.

• 36:22David Senra?

  So he says, "I sent frequent progress reports to 600 people in every walk of life. This barrage of direct mail was read by the most august of advertisers. For example, when I solicited part of the Seagram account, Sam Brofman, the founder of Seagrams, played back to me the last two paragraphs of a 16-page speech I had sent him shortly before, and then he hired us." So, like, why is that important? Because the first time Sam Brofman, who is at this time most likely a billionaire, I actually did a podcast on him, it's on the reviewer-only feed and stuff, but anyways, um, the first time Sam Brofman ever hears of David Ogilvy, it's because

• 37:04David Senra?

  David randomly and unsolicited sent him 16 pages of information that is, that he might find useful for his business. Who is going, if you're going around just providing value and not expecting anything in return, like, that's a good way, like, being nice to strangers and providing the value is a good way to get leads coming back to you. And we see this with, the end result is, he gets hired by a massively successful company. He says, "Gentle reader, if you are shocked by these confessions of self-advertising, I can only plead that if I had behaved in a more professional way, it would have taken me 20 years to arrive." This may be one of my favorite sentences in the entire book. "I had neither the time nor the money to wait. I was poor, unknown, and in a hurry."

• 37:48David Senra?

  It's also like, he's not just being a jerk, like, he's not sending them... It'd be different if you just mail, like, you see these examples pop up on the line sometimes where like, people want something from you, so they email you over and over and over again, like, "Oh, you haven't responded to my fourth email, so I'm obviously gonna send this again." It's just like, you're asking me for something. Like, that's a completely different way to introduce yourself to me than if you just said, "Hey, I have a lot of value for you. Here you go." Like, that'll probably spawn a discussion. Maybe it leads to an opportunity for your company, maybe it doesn't. But, that's a lot better than just saying, "Hey, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme something." Like, that's the normal, uh, human tendencies, like, "What can you do for me?" To flip that. David Ogilvy reverse says, like, "This is what I can do for you. Hey, I have this information, you might find it interesting." And, he was right.

• 38:31David Senra?

  Sam found it so interesting, and so interesting that he hired him. So, a few pages later, I like this idea, I like this contrast, because he's extremely serious about being very skilled at his craft, skilled at advertising, but he also wants to have fun in life. And, you can read these pages and tell, like, he was, he's got a playful, very playful side to him. So, he tells you, like, well, let me just read it. "Handing in accounts once you have got them is deadly serious business. You are spending other people's money, and the fate of their company often rests in your hands. But I regard..." So, he's saying, "Take it seriously." Like, this is people's livelihood stake, you have to do a good job. "But I regard the hunt for new clients as a sport.

• 39:14David Senra?

  If you play it grimly, you will die of ulcers. If you play it with lighthearted gusto, you will, you will survive your failures, failures without losing sleep. Play to win, but enjoy the fun."

• 39:29David Senra?

  He's got more advice for us. Have a point of view. Not everyone will like it and that's fine. That's normal. I have never wanted to get an account so big that I could not afford to lose it. The day you do that, you commit yourself to living with fear. Frightened agencies lose the courage to give candid advice. Once you lose that, you become a lackey. So if you're candid with people, some people are going to like what you have to say and they're going to be more drawn to you. Some people are going to hate it and they're going to be repelled from you. That's life acting as it normally should. This is why it's so important to set high standards for yourself. This is something he talks about a lot. If you set high standards in one department, you are likely to set high standards in every department.

• 40:12David Senra?

  This one could be, this advice could just be embrace your humanness, your imperfection. That's what makes you human. So he says, "I always tell prospective clients about the chinks in our armor. I have noticed that when an antique dealer draws my attention to flaws in a piece of furniture, he wins my confidence." And I think understanding Ogilvy's personality and like where does this self-confidence come from? It doesn't come from like a place of like, it's not like, "Oh, I'm great because I say I'm great." He has confidence because he's put in the work. His advantage is he has done the work others couldn't do or unwilling to do. So he says, "In my heart, I know that my years with Dr. Gallup at Princeton gave me more insight into the habits and mentality of the American consumer than most native copywriters can bring to bear.

• 40:56David Senra?

  And I always hope that this will become apparent as my presentation unfolds." And this is him on why we should study advertising. So he's talking about this, this person was trying to hire, they're spending a lot of money in advertising, but not really, they didn't really understand it. So he says, "He was not aware that a million dollars worth of effective advertising can sell more than $10 million worth of ineffective advertising." Mail order advertisers, this is some class of advertisers that Ogilvy holds in high regard and he basically studies them and then applies their techniques to advertising for companies like Shell and you know, things that are not mail order, not like direct response.

• 41:39David Senra?

  So it says, "Mail order advertisers have found that a mere change of a headline can increase sales 10 times. And I've seen a television commercial sell five times as much of a product as other commercials written by the same person. I know of a brewer, of beer essentially, who sells more of his beer to the people who've never seen his advertising than the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell a product." So you want to study advertising because you don't want to be spending money and time on something that's actually counterproductive, your goal, which is to sell, essentially to sell more of your product. So this is interesting. You know what, should I read it first? Yeah, let me read this first.

• 42:22David Senra?

  "It has become increasingly difficult for agencies to make any profit at all. On every $100 spent by agencies on behalf of their clients, they now make an average profit of 34 cents. At this rate, the game is hardly worth the candle." Never heard that phrase before. "Experience has taught me that advertisers get the best results when they pay their agency a flat fee. The conventional 15% commission system is an anachronism." The agency is expected to give, so let me give you some, he actually got into trouble with, it's like the American Association of Advertising, because they, it's like, they set up this fee system where it's just like, okay, you're gonna pay your agency 15% commission on the advertising they buy for you, and that's basically how they're gonna, like, how they're

• 43:06David Senra?

  gonna make their money. But if you factor in all your expenses, like, that's what he's saying, like, "My profit is 34 cents on every $100. Like, that's terrible." So he says, and he's describing, like, why he was one of the first people to speak out about this. And essentially, what he's really talking about here is incentives, and I think that's the important part. So he says, "The agency is expected to give objective advice on the division of marketing expenditures between commissionable advertising and uncommissionable promotions." Meaning the advertising, sometimes when they buy, when advertising agencies buy from a specific, let's say, publication, they get a kickback. That's what he means by commissionable advertising. Well, what are humans gonna do? They're gonna guide you to the...

• 43:51David Senra?

  The publication that's paying them and not the one that's not. So he says, "It is unrealistic expectation to expect, it's unrealistic to expect your agency to be impartial when its vested interest lies wholly in the direction of increasing your commissionable advertising," meaning the advertising that you get kickbacks on. "I prefer to be in a position to advise my clients to spend more time," or excuse me, "to spend more without their suspecting my motive. And I like to be in a position to advise clients to spend less without incurring the odium of my own stockholders." So the note out of myself was, he's really talking about incentives here. And this is something that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger talk about constantly. Align your incentives completely with your customers, your employees, your shareholders, and yourself.

• 44:33David Senra?

  And one of the craziest things I learned when I was reading Buffett shareholders, shareholder letters, was that Warren put 99, he had 99% of his net worth in his company. His incentives were aligned. So he's not gonna be saying, "Hey, buy my stock, and if it goes up, I, if it goes up, like, you're gonna benefit, but if it goes down, I still, like, I already have your money." Like, no. He's like, "You're not gonna criticize." He's like, "I want my, our incentives aligned. You know, I'm damn sure, if 99% of my net worth is based on the decisions I make for the financial performance of this company, I'm gonna be paying attention. I have skin in the game." Compare that to, you know, most CEOs of large corporations.

• 45:15David Senra?

  They have a tiny, tiny percent of ownership, and usually their, their competition is organized in like a very short term, like quarter-quarter basis. Warren's got 99% of his family's assets in, in the ability to do his job correctly. And I, again, I think that understanding and studying incentives is just extremely important, not only for, it's for humans in general. It gives you an idea of why people do what they do. And I love their, their messages of, like, you really need to study the incentives. Like, are you, is your incentive aligned with your customer? Because all we're gonna be saying, "Hey, with this, with this 15% commission system, our incentives are not aligned with our customer." Like, why don't we align our incentives with our customer? Like, let's make sure that when they win, we win, and then when they lose, we lose as well.

• 46:00David Senra?

  So, okay. This idea, another note, this idea can be applied generally. Clear communication inside and outside of your company, plus set high standards. Most people won't. Most people don't, rather. Why go to work at all? Oh, okay. Let me read some, I'm jumping ahead of myself. So he says, um,

• 46:19David Senra?

  This is one idea that I was just saying can apply to be everything, the value of clear communication. So he's giving us, in this section, Ogilvy's just giving advice on, well, he said the subheading of the section I'm in is, "Be candid and encourage candor." "If you think that your agency is performing badly, or if you think that a particular advertisement is feeble," he's talking about how you could be a good client. "Don't beat about the bush." This is what he wants from clients. "Speak your mind loud and clear. Disastrous consequences can arise when a client pussyfoots in his day-to-day dealings with his agency. I do not suggest that you should threaten.

• 47:01David Senra?

  Don't say, 'You are an incompetent,' I don't know what this word is, 'muck,' and 'I will get another agency unless you come back tomorrow with a great advertisement.'" "It is better to say, 'What you have just shown me is not up to your usual high standard. Please take another crack at it.'" "At the same time, you should explain exactly what you find inadequate about the submission. Don't leave your agency to guess." Another word of advice he has here is, "Set high standards. Discourage bunting. Make it plain that you expect your agency to hit home runs and pour on the praise when they do." And then, this is the thing I love, because I always think about Nolan Bushnell, who's the founder of Atari, and Chuck E. Cheese.

• 47:45David Senra?

  He also was Steve Jobs' boss when he was young. Steve Jobs worked at Atari. And Nolan wrote this book that I did a podcast on, it's called, I think, "How to Find the Next Steve Jobs," something like that. And it's like this book of aphorisms on what he's learned from, you know, five decades of running companies. And Nolan's a hell of a character in general. Like, he's just a crazy, crazy, crazy dude. And he had this thing where he's like...

• 48:10David Senra?

  Steve Jobs had one speed, go. And so Nolan says, like, when I gave a young Steve Jobs a directive, or I needed something done, I just had to tell him, and I just never, like, I knew, that's it. I told him what to do, or I told him what I needed done, rather, not what to do, because Steve would come up with his own ways to do things. But he's like, I could tell them, tell them what I needed done, and I just knew he got on it. And like, he didn't stop until it was done. And so I love this idea where, um, what David's saying here, very, uh, it's similar, it's a similar idea where it's just like, listen, time is important. Like, how fast you can do things is extremely important. So he says, hurry, that's the heading. He says, "Most big corporations behave as if profit were not a function of time." And he's this example of the guy that invented Listerine.

• 48:55David Senra?

  "When Jerry Lambert scored his first breakthrough with Listerine, he speeded up the whole process of marketing by dividing time into months. Instead of locking himself into annual plans, Lambert reviewed his advertising and his profits every month. The result was that he made $25 million in eight years, where it takes most people 12 times as long. In Jerry Lambert's day, the Lambert Pharmaceutical Company, uh, lived by the month instead of by the year. I commend that course to all advertisers." And finally, another piece of advice, tolerate genius. Conan Doyle wrote that, quote, "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself." Ugh.

• 49:38David Senra?

  My observation has been that mediocre men recognize genius, resent it, and feel compelled to destroy it. There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies, but we need all the ones we can find. Almost with, this is very interesting, and also something I find, uh, probably true based on reading all these biographies, almost without exception, they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them, they lay golden eggs.

• 50:07David Senra?

  What I love about Ogilvy II is he knows the true purpose of his product. So he goes there and he's, at this point in the book, he's talking about like, people, you know, there's different schools of thought about like, what is a good advertisement? And, you know, some people are saying it's the one that wins awards, it's the one that's creative. And he rejects that because he knows the true purpose of his product. He says, "I belong to the third school, which holds that a good advertisement is one in which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. It should rivet the reader's attention on the product. Instead of saying, 'What a clever advertisement,' the reader says, 'I never knew that before. I must try this product.' It is the professional duty of the advertising agent to conceal his artifice.

• 50:50David Senra?

  When Eskenes spoke, they said how well he speaks. But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let's march against Philip. I am for Demosthenes.'" And I probably pronounced that incorrectly, sorry. "If my new recruits boggle at this stern definition of good advertising, I invite them to return to their previous incarnations, there to flounder in silliness and ignorance." Hilarious. I invite them to flounder in silliness and ignorance, that's hilarious. Alright, so this is a, this is what I said was really genius of something he did. He learns lessons from one industry so he can apply it to his own. He says, "From the experience of mail..." First I study, he's talking about like where he learns from. He says, "First I study from the experience of mail order advertisers. This is the elite core of advertising.

• 51:34David Senra?

  They know more about the realities," he italicized that word, "of advertising than anybody else. They are in a position to measure the results of every advertisement they write because their view is not obscured by those complex channels of distribution, which make it impossible for most manufacturers to dissect out the results of their advertising from all other factors." So they know. He says, "The mail order advertiser must rely on his advertisements to do the entire selling job. A few days after his advertisement appears, the mail order writer knows whether it is profitable or not." So since they are one of the few forms of advertising at the time he's writing this, it's able to actually measure performance. He studies their principles and then applies them to non-direct mail or direct response advertising, which is most of what Ogilvy...

• 52:16David Senra?

  Olga V. does. Now he's just gonna tell us a little bit about his personality. "I am an inveterate brain picker, and the most rewarding brains I have picked are the brains of my predecessors." Other words, he's learning from people that came before him, "and my competitors." "I have learned much from studying their successful campaigns." In fact, the last chapter, if I remember correctly, in Olga V. and Advertising, he analyzes the six godfathers of advertising agencies that came before him, and he talks explicitly about which ideas he took and what he learned from them, which is really interesting.

• 52:53David Senra?

  Skipping ahead. Oh, so this is something that may be a little counterintuitive. He says over and over again, "Longer advertising sells more product than short advertising." So he's like, "You need to give your customers more information."

• 53:08David Senra?

  "When I was a door-to-door salesman, I discovered that the more information I gave about my product, the more I sold." "Claude Hopkins," who's one of the most famous copywriters, "made the same discovery about advertising 50 years ago." "But most modern copywriters find it easier to write short, lazy advertisements." "Collecting facts is hard work." So that's one of the benefits that he has over his competition is that he studied the history of the industries in, and therefore knows that a lot of the counterintuitive ideas can only be gained through experience. So you might as well study the experience, and he studied Claude Hopkins extensively.

• 53:46David Senra?

  This is him repeating himself, "Keep the ad the same until it stops working." "If you're lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops pulling." "Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency." And this is something that's really hard to understand, because your ads go out, and you don't know, like, you can maybe assume that the same people are saying the same stuff over and over, and he's like, "That's not true." You aren't advertising to a standing army. You're advertising to a moving parade. "Three million consumers get married every year." "The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year "were probably just as successful with those who get married next year." And this is just random, but he quotes this poem from Kipling that I really like, and it talks about...

• 54:30David Senra?

  There's just, if you, if you come up with original thoughts, if you study your craft, like you're gonna have, your creativity and originality and leaning more into what makes you unique as a person, like it can't be copied. Even if your competitors copy every single thing your business does, they're always gonna be behind. So he has this, um, it's a poem by Kipling about a self-made shipping tycoon. This guy's name's Sir Anthony Gloucester. And on his deathbed, the old man reviews the course of his life for the benefit of his son, and he, he refers contemptuously to his competitors. So he says, "They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind. And I left them sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

• 55:14David Senra?

  And I want to quote from this chapter, it says, this is a fantastic chapter, it says, "How to Rise to the Top of the Tree: Advice to the Young." So he says, "After watching the careermanship of my own employees for 14 years, I have identified a pattern of behavior which leads rapidly to the top."

• 55:33David Senra?

  He says, "First, you must be ambitious," but he also says, "Don't be nakedly ambitious." Like you gotta kinda hide that a little bit. But he says, "After, once you realize that you're ambitious, like go, set yourself," he goes, "Set yourself to become the best-informed man in the agency on the account to which you're assigned." Of course, now he's giving explicit advice for people working in advertising, this applies to everything else in life, though. "Set yourself to becoming the best-informed person on the account on which you're assigned," meaning what you're, what you're doing for work or what you're interested in. "If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read textbooks on the chemistry, geology, and distribution of petroleum products. Read all the trade journals in the field. Read all the research reports and marketing plans that your agency has ever written on the product.

• 56:14David Senra?

  Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, pumping gasoline and talking to motorists. Visit your clients' refineries and research laboratories. Study the advertising of his competitors. At the end of your second year, you will know more about gasoline than your boss, and you will be then be ready to succeed him." And why is this important? "Most people in agencies are too lazy to do this kind of homework. They remain permanently superficial." See how it's important for him to say like, in different ways, he's telling us, "Go as deep as possible, learn as much as you can, deep, deep, deep, deep." And we're gonna talk about more on that. But when, when I read this section, I thought of one of my favorite talks that I've ever heard, and I have, um...

• 56:58David Senra?

  Just notes, I just put all my notes in this database. But I have notes on that, let's say 200, I don't know, 25, 250 different talks. And there's some more on like a Google Doc that I gotta combine. But let's say 250 for the sake of argument. Of notes from entrepreneurs and founders, talking about entrepreneurship, right? And

• 57:20David Senra?

  out of all those, one of my favorite talks I've ever heard was this talk by Bill Gurley. It's called Running Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love. It's on YouTube, you can watch it for free. It's like less than an hour long and he's giving a talk to, I think, like, what's he like, University of Texas MBA students or something like that? And, you know, he's been wildly successful, I think, like, undoubtedly wildly successful. And so now he's going back to the school and giving advice that he wished he knew when he was younger, which I think is some of the most valuable advice you can find, right? But there's a quote in this fantastic talk. And it reminds me, like, Bill Gurley is giving that talk maybe the last few years. It's echoing what David Ogilvy is writing to us in the 1960s. And this is a quote from Bill Gurley.

• 58:04David Senra?

  "You have zero excuse for not being the most knowledgeable person in any subject you want. The information is right there at your fingertips." Right? So the beginning of that quote, he says, "The good news is if you're gonna research something, this is your lucky day. Information is freely available on the internet. The bad news, you have zero excuse for not being the most knowledgeable person in any subject you want. The information right there is your fingertips." Think about what he's saying. How ridiculous, how ridiculously easy it is to get an advantage. Right? The information is there. You can pull it up, you can watch YouTube videos, you can read trade reports, you can buy books. You can go and learn anything and nobody can stop you. Like what he's saying here, the description of reading books on geology, chemistry, visiting the plants. This is probably a few months, but most people won't do this.

• 58:48David Senra?

  So the reason I say this is like so ridiculously easy of an advantage to do is like, you know, it's a ridiculously easy advantage to have because the information's right there. You can access it anywhere you are in the world. And yet, nobody does. Or such a tiny percentage of people do. And I'm gonna give you an example from somebody that does. That actually followed the advice that Ogilvy is giving us here. So he says, "Several years ago, Lever Brothers," so Lever Brothers is a giant company at the time, "has a bunch of different advertising agencies." I didn't, something I also learned is businesses have multiple, usually large companies, have multiple different advertising agencies. So it says, "Several years ago Lever Brothers asked their seven agencies to submit policy papers on the television medium, which was then quite new.

• 59:33David Senra?

  The other agencies put in adequate papers of five or six pages, but a young man on my staff took the trouble to assemble every conceivable statistic, and, after working day and night for three weeks, came up with an analysis which covered 177 pages. His lazy colleagues sneered at him as a compulsive worker. But one year later, he was elected to our board of directors. On such isolated incidents are most successful careers built." Think about that. The reason I say this is such a ridiculous, it's not like you have to be born with any like unique skill. You just literally have to read and learn more than other people. And just doing that, and he did this in three weeks?

• 1:00:17David Senra?

  Like, just doing that gave him such an advantage to the point where like he, the speed at which, so maybe he invested, let's say the other people, it took maybe what, a couple of days to write five or six pages? Maybe they did two days of research. So he did, let's say 21 days of research, so 10x. But he also accelerated his career, what, 10, 20, maybe 50 times faster than they did. Maybe they never even get past with that, with like, with like just doing the bare minimum. Maybe they never advanced in their career. So maybe they don't even advance at all. So that's why I say, it's just like, I love that quote by, um, I love that quote by Bill Gurley. Like, he's like, "Good news is, you can learn anything you want. The bad news is, you have no excuse not to."

• 1:01:00David Senra?

  The thing is, the advantage here that's really important is that most people are never gonna hold themselves to that standard. Right? And by doing this, you're making yourself unreplaceable. So he says, "Nowadays, it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on teamwork is bunk, a conspiracy..." Listen to what he describes this out. "The emphasis on teamwork is bunk, a conspiracy of the mediocre majority."

• 1:01:30David Senra?

  No advertisement, no commercial and no image can be created by a committee. Most top managements are secretly aware of this and they keep their eyes open for those rare individuals who lay golden eggs. There's that term again. So what is the result of being like this? It's you, when you're such a formidable person, using that word he used again, you become immune to the threat of dismissal in times of scarcity. So if you are the single best person at your job, but there's nobody else that does it, whether you're running a company or you're working for somebody else, you're like, if you become, you're irreplaceable, which means even in a downturn, they can't get rid of you unless the company's going, obviously, out of business. I just like that, immune to the threat of dismissal in times of scarcity.

• 1:02:15David Senra?

  And you're doing that just by differentiating yourself because you realize that most people are at, like, they're not going to do that work. I was just listening to, um, let me pull up the note real quick. I was just listening to this guy named Josh Wolfe, who's got, uh, he's an investor, but he like grew up poor, he was raised on Coney Island. His dad skipped out, didn't like left him and his mom. His mom, you know, had to be a single mother. I think she had to work like two jobs or whatever. And Josh is like a wickedly smart person. And I've taken a lot of notes on whenever he appears on podcasts or give talks just because he's got a weird, unique mind. And he thinks about things very, very differently than other people.

• 1:02:56David Senra?

  And I think like, just by listening to him speak, there's going to be a lot that I can actually learn. So he was giving this talk and I just, I have my notes in front of me and I want to read them to you real quick because I've heard this idea expressed other ways, right? People use the idea of like, oh, like, oh, let me just read what he says first. So he talks about like the things that his company tries to invest in and the entrepreneurs that he tries to partner with. He doesn't like, he has no interest in doing like just normal apps or just other stuff like that. He's like, I don't feel I have an advantage there. He says, what we look for, he's like, we want really high scientific and technical complexity. And this is the main point. Why would you do that? Not because we want to tackle things that are really hard. It's because we don't want competition. This is counterintuitive point. It's because we don't want competition.

• 1:03:40David Senra?

  The problem with funding and doing easy things is you get hundreds of competitors. I'm psychotic about competitive advantage. So.

• 1:03:51David Senra?

  I apply this like, I've heard this term where it talks about like, a lot of people like, if you're doing something truly unique and truly really hard, it means like, it's still gonna be really hard, but it's probably easier than other people think because you can attract talent and resources to the one thing you're doing. So let me give you an example, I'm not being clear here. Elon Musk wanted to start a private space company and he did SpaceX, right? When he started, it was ridiculous. Like, people shoot, things shooting, when you shot something into space, it was like the domain of governments, right? Like, who the hell has their own private rocket company? This is insane. But, so yeah, it's obviously really hard. He almost failed at it many times, if you know the history of SpaceX, but the point he was making is like, well, but I can attract the best talent. Let's say you were obsessed with rocket science

• 1:04:36David Senra?

  and space from an early age and you dedicated your life to that. How many jobs could you actually like be fulfilling? Means, I will get the people that have been obsessed with this their whole lives because nobody else is doing this. This is the same thing that Josh is saying here. We want a really high barrier to scientific and technical complexity, not because we want to just make our lives hard, although I do personally think like inducing artificial, like making your life harder than it needs to be is beneficial to you. Like, don't take the elevator, walk up the stairs. Like, there's a million other ways you can make your life harder and you actually benefit from that. But this idea of like, you have less competition. Ogilvy is telling us the same thing here. That, first of all, you should be doing, he has less research because not many people are gonna spend years as a researcher, right?

• 1:05:21David Senra?

  Working under Gallup and Princeton. This, the guy that's working for Ogilvy that he just gave us the story from. Like, he has less competition to become, in his case, he got promoted to the board of directors because most people are writing five-page reports. Given that same prompt, that same opportunity, he's like, no, I'm gonna take the harder route. I'm gonna do 167 pages. And as a result, he distinguished himself. He's not doing that because he wants to make his job harder. He's doing that because he doesn't want competition and he didn't have competition. Because now you're like, oh, who are we gonna promote? Not these other five people that didn't do anything. Like, this guy's clearly, he did, you know, 25 times the amount of the work, given the same prompt.

• 1:06:05David Senra?

  And I think this idea is extremely important and counterintuitive. Like, you wanna do hard things because it's, if it was easier, everybody would do it. And if it's easy, there's gonna be hundreds and hundreds... Of competitors, naturally, because humans don't like doing hard things. The amount of people that like doing hard things is a tiny, tiny percentage of the overall population. It's probably a higher, high percentage of population of people that listen to this. But in general, you can't like, and that's the weird thing, being exposed to these ideas all the time, like you become normal, like think like, uh, these excessive traits are normal. Uh, are these uncommon traits are normal, would be a better way to put that. But when you, I'm reminded that when you get on the general population, like, oh, like no one thinks about this. And just having that mind frame is such a huge, um, a huge advantage.

• 1:06:50David Senra?

  So I don't know, I love that point. Okay, so the book is short, I'm gonna close here, he's got the last chapter, you know, I've told you before, I'm a sucker for aphorisms. So I'm going to just read the aphorisms that he has in this book, some of them, in this last chapter, some of them you've heard before, and I'm not gonna elaborate at all on them. I want you to just, they can just sit in your mind and you can take them wherever you want to go. First one. I believe in the Scottish proverb, hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work. The second one. Big ideas are usually simple ideas. Number three.

• 1:07:33David Senra?

  Get rid of sad dogs who spread doom. Number four. In the best establishments, promises are always kept, whatever it may cost in agony and overtime. Five. Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating. Six. We prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. And lastly, I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings.

• 1:08:13David Senra?

  Alright, that's where I'll leave this story. See, I really think you have to, if you want to buy the book, I'll leave a link in the show notes. It's an Amazon affiliate link, which means if you buy it, Amazon sells it at a small percentage of sale, no additional cost to you. So it's a way for you to support the author, support yourself by getting a great book, and support the podcast at the same time. So what I would say is like, the reason I think especially you have to buy Confessions of an Advertising Man, and then also buy Ogilvy on Advertising is because a lot of these are explicit, like, "This is what I learned from my experience, do this." And if you don't read the whole book, you're gonna miss out on some of those. So obviously, I just presented this book with, based on like, stuff I want to learn. These are my personal notes, stuff I want to remember and keep, you know?

• 1:08:55David Senra?

  But you may read the book, and undoubtedly, you'll have different takeaways. So, as you just saw, I just presented this entire podcast without ads, which means I rely on the people that give value to my work to sustain the work that I'm doing here. So the way I do that, remember, we study incentives. If I just put out every single podcast for free and said, "Please, support voluntarily on a monthly basis or an annual basis," a lot less people would do that, right? Which I've run these experiments, if you've listened to this podcast for a long time, I've run these experiments over time, and definitely, and see that result. So what I do is, what I think is extremely fair is, hey, I put a lot of damn work into this. Like, there's hours and hours and hours of preparation I have to do before I sit down to record. Obviously, I have to read an entire new book every week.

• 1:09:39David Senra?

  So, what I think is fair is, I'm gonna give away half of my podcasts for free, which is what I do. I think it's like, every odd number is free, every even number, I charge. It's called the Misfit Feed, in case you don't know what that is. It's the same thing. I feel like the free podcasters, like, the free trial version, if you think of this podcast as a product, right? So if you learn and you like the free podcast, you'll like the Misfits. It's the same thing. Now, how do you get access to the Misfit Feed? It's not difficult. In your podcast player, if you're listening, most podcast players make all the links in the show notes clickable. You just pull it up, press "Hey," I think it says like, you know, "Become a Misfit," unlock all the premium episodes. You tap that, within 10 to 30 seconds, you

• 1:10:22David Senra?

  Sign up, support the podcast on a monthly or annual basis. And the private RSS feed, which is what a podcast is, is automatically installed in your podcast player choice. So within 10 to 30 seconds, by the time you tap on that link, you can then unlock all of them. And I forgot how many I have so far, a lot. And in addition to unlocking my back catalog, right? I do two extra podcasts for only for Misfits every month. So you have not only you unlock, you can go through, I don't know, dozens of hours. I don't even know how long it is, but at this point of my back catalog, but you'll also get two every month. Now, the people that sign up for the Misfit feed, essentially you're getting two extra ones, but you're also paying for my ability to make the two free ones every month. So if people didn't sign up for the Misfit feed, I obviously wouldn't be able to do that.

• 1:11:05David Senra?

  So if you're the kind of person that's like, hey, I find a lot of value out of your work, David. For a few bucks a month, I'm willing to make sure that you don't stop, quit doing this, because I want you to go search through the history of entrepreneurship and find me ideas that I can use in my life. And I'll say, cool, I'll keep doing that. Now, I'm gonna say something else. And so, oh, and another thing, anything else, like if it's too confusing to do on your podcast player, go to founderspodcast.com browser on your cell phone. And you'll see it'll say like, you know, support founders or support this podcast and unlock all the premium episodes. It's in the header too. So some people get confused because, you know, podcast players show links different ways, but the browser is gonna look, work like any browser does.

• 1:11:48David Senra?

  So founderspodcast.com and you can do the same exact thing. And everything that I do is on founderspodcast.com, like all the list of books and everything else. Now, here's something else I never talk about, but is really valuable. And for some reason, people are still finding it, even when I'm talking about it and they're still signing up for it. So I, um, I, like I just mentioned earlier, I've taken notes on lectures, podcasts, talks on entrepreneurship for years. Years, the same way like what you just heard me do is I read books, I take notes and highlights, and then I keep all this stuff because I like to go back. And like, even if I never read Confessions of an Advertising Man before, again, right? I can go back six months from now, just read my highlights and like, wow, like I remember all this stuff.

• 1:12:31David Senra?

  So I do the same thing for talks, right? And, um,

• 1:12:37David Senra?

  I did this for a little bit. So I have this thing called David's Notes, right? And what I'm essentially doing now, it's another, I have another private podcast that I don't even talk about too much. And essentially, what I've done is when I take notes on a podcast, let's say I take notes and there's an hour-long talk. I might have notes that that'll take me, if I read them to you, five or 10 minutes. And these are the main ideas and the stuff I want to remember, right? Well, I turned that into a podcast and I'm gonna start leaving, I'm gonna start talking about it in case, because like, there's people, it's very, it's just weird because I did this for a little bit and I was like, man, that's a lot of work. Because I do, on average, about three of these mini podcasts a week on different talks that I've heard, right?

• 1:13:17David Senra?

  And what's weird is I was like, this is too much work. It's like, it's taking away from my focus on, on the main founders episodes. So I did it for a little bit. People found it. They started signing up and paying for it. And then I stopped doing it and people got mad. They're like, not, they weren't like, I don't mean that like, they weren't like angry at me. They're like, damn, don't stop. I'm sad that you stopped because I liked it so much. And so after like two months, I realized, oh, you know what? It wasn't that I was distracting from founders podcast. When I take notes on all these talks and I read them constantly, that actually adds to other stuff I talk to you about, talk to you about on founder, on the main founders episodes, right? Because as I just referenced, I don't know, two or three times in this podcast,

• 1:14:00David Senra?

  ideas that I've had, ideas I got from taking notes on lectures from podcasts that I may have done six months ago or a year ago, that I can then use, that I can then like continue to use in conversation and podcasts in life. So I started back up like a few months ago and people kept, they started signing up again, even though I don't talk about it.

• 1:14:19David Senra?

  So I was like, maybe David, like these people, and then I get emails, people respond back to the email.

• 1:14:26David Senra?

  And they're like, I learned a lot from this. I'm like, oh, this is interesting. So anyways, I'm gonna leave a link in there if you want to sign up. I've done, I was shocked when I counted the archive the other day. I've done 53 of these podcasts, these like miniature podcasts, anywhere from five to 20 minutes long. So if you want to unlock that, now I need to be, the reason I don't talk about this because I don't like, like James Dyson says, don't like confuse people with multiple messages. So I'm violating his principle. So my main goal is for you to sign up for the Misfit feed, right? But I do know that there's people that are willing, that want to go deeper on this subject of entrepreneurship, because entrepreneurship just seems to attract extreme personalities. And extreme personalities seem to like more information. They don't want to limit what they're learning. So what I would say is first, sign up for the Misfit feed,

• 1:15:10David Senra?

  because that way I can keep doing Founders Podcasts. And you know, I think I do their, you know, hour, hour and a half, whatever they are.

• 1:15:19David Senra?

  And you'll learn in four to five, six hours a month. Like you'll learn a lot about the history of entrepreneurship, right? And then if you want to go deeper, sign up for David's Notes. And David's Notes is completely separate. This is just literally the notes I take. Instead of you reading the notes, I read them to you and I had additional commentary, which is exactly the same process I do with the books. But this is on lectures. So let me just go through some of the ones I've done. Like I did Charlie, Charlie Munger just gave this, this, um, this talk. And Charlie Munger's advice on investing in life choices that make a person wealthy. It's 45 minutes of a 95 year old genius talk. I took notes on that. Mark Andreessen talking about how he's, he's famous for studying history. So he gave this talk on the keys from like the internet past to the future of crypto.

• 1:16:03David Senra?

  John Carmack on time management, discipline, limits and resilience. Steve Jobs planned to turn around Apple. So I take podcasts, notes on podcasts. But what I've been doing more lately is scouring the internet and essentially YouTube for talks, like in the past, because podcasts, you know, they're presented in like a reverse chronological order. So people, we seem to like favor like the new and podcasts. But like, you know, I'm, I think there's more knowledge about starting and running companies from dead people than there are about people alive. For sure, I believe that. So I found this, this talk where Steve Jobs, it's, it's in like 1987, like a few weeks after, he comes back to Apple before the iPod, before the iPhone, before anything else. And he lays out his plan exactly who's going to turn around Apple.

• 1:16:49David Senra?

  And he does it. And the principles that he lays out in that are the exact same principles that could be applied today. I did Elon, Elon Musk's commencement address. He, it's called The Magicians of the 21st Century. There was a lot of information in there. How Jeff Bezos makes decisions. Jimmy Iovine talking about founding Interscope Records and selling Beats by Dre. So you see what I mean? It's like, there's a variety of things that I cover. And I just, I think I might've been making a mistake by not trying to confuse you, but. I should probably tell you the stuff I'm working on and not just like have to make you jump through hoops to find those things. So from now on, I'll put the links in the show notes and I think I'll just, I'll find a way to add like another header in founderspodcast.com.

• 1:17:31David Senra?

  But you might want to, you might want to, to hear these. And if you want to hear them, then obviously you can sign up and that'll benefit you and obviously benefit me as well. Okay. So I think I've talked enough. One thing I do want to say, I want to tell you the books I'm going to be doing. So if you haven't signed up for the miss it feed, please do. I really think the podcast I did, the three hour long podcast on Warren Buffett shareholder letters, it was, it was by far the hardest podcast I've ever had to do, by far. I mean, it is insane. Like it's funny because I start reading these shareholder letters and you know, 1965 Berkshire Hathaway is, it's just a textile company. Then he expands into insurance. So I'm, I'm reading through the shareholder letters like, wow, look at the progress I'm

• 1:18:15David Senra?

  making, not realizing that as the business gets more complex, the shareholder get letters get longer. So I could see the finish line and then I felt like I was going further and further away from it because they get long. I think, I don't know how long each one was. The only time he referenced it, he said like, he wrote, he's like, last year's shareholder letter was like 12,000 words or whatever. So anyways, the reason I bring this up is because I think if you just listen to that, it would pay for years of, of the subscription fees for, for description prices for, for the miss it feed. Now, I'm going to, the reason I bring that up with too, is because last week I did the Berkshire, right? This week I did a book that I learned about from the Berkshire letters. For the

• 1:19:00David Senra?

  next two weeks, I'm going to stay on this topic. Next week, which, oh my God, help me, I'm going to be doing Poor Charlie's Almanac, one of the most recommended books by entrepreneurs that are alive today that I've ever seen. I mean, literally, everybody says over and over again, read this or read this book. It is massive. It's not like 54 years of Berkshire Hathaway letters, but it's up there. It's gonna take me a long time. Hopefully, I can finish that by next week. And the week after that, I'm gonna read a book by somebody you've never heard of. This guy named Jim Clayton, most likely you've never heard of. I didn't know who Jim Clayton was. But I'm reading Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder letters. And the students came to visit Warren Buffett. They gave him a book. They gave him a gift.

• 1:19:43David Senra?

  The gift was Jim Clayton's autobiography, which is how Jim Clayton's talking about like how he built his company. Warren Buffett liked the book so much, he bought Jim Clayton's company. And so when I read that, I'm like, I don't know who Jim Clayton is, but all I know is Warren Buffett admires him so much that he liked the book that he bought a company. That is a clear indication to us that we should be listening, like we could learn a lot from that book. So let's go ahead and do that. So that's the basic plan. After that, I can deviate and go back and pick whatever book I want. But that feel like there'd be like four, basically four weeks straight of things that are heavily influenced by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, which again, I've learned so much from. And they're, speaking of that, the notes I was talking about a minute ago, David's notes.

• 1:20:25David Senra?

  There's a lot of talks that I take notes on by Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. I mean, YouTube's a treasure trove for them. So I'm losing my voice. I've talked enough. Thank you very much for listening to the podcast. Thank you very much. If you can please tell your friends. I'd really appreciate it. And I will be back next weekend, or next weekend. Next week, hopefully talking about the wit and wisdom of Charlie Munger.