Diary: Book review - Confessions of an Advertising Man

I had a colleague (Jerry Judge, since you ask) who used to keep a list of Bill Bernbach's finest sayings sellotaped to his desk, next to the phone. When conversations with clients got tricky, he'd lob one in, more or less at random. This earned him a reputation for sagacity beyond his (then) tender years.

This wonderful book is full of similar stuff. Pick from gems such as "the surest way to overspend is not to spend enough", "very few products do not benefit from a first class ticket through life" or "the consumer is not a moron" and get sellotaping.

It's autocratic, bombastic, chauvinist, lordly, intuitive. It is also, perversely, principled, decent and logical. Just when you've started to tire of the author's conceit, he throws in a piece of wonderfully funny self-deprecation.

I read it for the third time for the purpose of this review. The first time (like many of you, I bet) was when I was diligently and doggedly applying to join the business. Most of it I didn't understand at the time but, even then, it seemed to be describing a delightful lost world.

The second time I picked it up was in the mid-1980s, and I realised that one of the reasons that Bartle Bogle Hegarty was such a wonderful place to work was that the founders had, wittingly or unwittingly, followed many of Ogilvy's principles in establishing their agency. Not a bad advertisement, then.

Reading it now something very obvious occurs to me. It's not a confession, it's a 'how to' book. Ten of the 11 chapters start with those two words.

(The 11th is called 'Should advertising be abolished?' Shockingly Ogilvy concludes that, on balance, it shouldn't).

The first half - a hundred or so pages - is about establishing and running an agency, keeping business, being a great client, recruiting talent.

They're brilliant - as fresh, radical and inspiring as I imagine they must have been in 1963.

The second hundred pages are about how to do effective advertising and, as I suppose you would expect 41 years on, they are slightly comical.

If Sir Alan Parker says (and he does in the introduction to this new edition) that COAAM was required reading for "all us young bucks" in London's '60s advertising scene then I, for one, certainly believe him. But anyone following the immutable Ogilvy rules today would be impolitely shown the door.

Now, times have changed, and that's a big factor. Television advertising, while not exactly in its infancy in 1963, was still at junior high school.

The author writes, "I have not yet seen a commercial that satisfied me", and he's equally dismissive about posters. Nearly everything he has to say on the subject of making effective advertising concerns press.

For all that, you have to read this if you haven't, and re-read it if you have. The brilliance of the first half outweighs the outdatedness of the second. And here's my favourite bit. Years ago I came across a little ditty that stuck in my mind. The other day I repeated it for our creative director, Nik Studzinski, who looked at me with admiration (actually it may have been pity, hard to tell). It goes:

"When a client moans and sighs

Make his logo twice the size

If he still should prove refractory

Show a picture of the factory

Only in the gravest cases

Should you show your clients' faces."

Now I know where I encountered it. It's here, in the book. For this and much else, thank you, David Ogilvy.

- This book review was first published on brandrepublic.com.