#189 David Ogilvy (The book I've given as a gift the most)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Will any agency hire this man? He's 38 and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He's been a cook, a salesman, a diplomat, and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing. He has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising his career and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will hire him. However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later, he became the most famous copywriter in the world and, in due course, built the 10th biggest agency in the world. The moral? It sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring. This is a book unlike any other. It is a career's worth of public and private communications, memos, letters, speeches, notes, and interviews from the father of advertising, David Ogilvy. First collected more than 25 years ago as a birthday present from his devoted family and colleagues, it provides an entertaining and incisive look at leadership, management, and creativity.
That was from the back cover of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Unpublished David Ogilvy, written by David Ogilvy, but put together by his friends and colleagues, and I'll go into more of that in a minute. So just a few things before I jump into the book. One, this is a very old book. It was actually published for the first time in 1987
Two, David Ogilvy is a personal hero of mine. He's one of my favorite people I've ever discovered. There's a lot of traits that he has that I wish to emulate in my own life. And you'll see some of that if this is your first introduction to Ogilvy and the way he thinks. Warren Buffett, if you read his shareholder letters, he calls David Ogilvy a genius. And this is the fourth book I've read on him. And I think that Warren is absolutely correct. If you want to learn more and you haven't listened to the other episodes I've done, let me just listen for you. And number 82 is Ogilvy on Advertising. That's a book that he wrote towards the end of his career. It's a beautiful book full of pictures and ads. And he kind of summarizes his career in advertising and what he feels is the principles.
So that's number 82 Number 89, episode 89 was Confessions of an Advertising Man. That's more of like Ogilvy's autobiography. And then more recently, number 169, which is a biography of David Ogilvy written by somebody who worked for him. That's The King of Madison Avenue, David Ogilvy and The Making of Modern Advertising. All those books are fantastic. So let me go ahead and jump into the forward of this book. And it talks about how this book was put together, which I found really fascinating. They published The Unpublished David Ogilvy on David's 75th birthday in 1986, and gave it to him on a boat party in London. When David received his copy, for once words failed him. Otherwise, words were what made him. He's one of the best writers I've ever come across. Reading this collection, one is struck piece after piece, whether the most apparently casual of memos are the most public of pronouncements by how David's words seduce, or excuse me, surprise and seduce, tease and provoke. To me, his writing is in the best tradition of Dr. Johnson, opinionated, forceful and urgent. Whether it addresses the higher principles of management or the dangers of the lowly paperclip. Above all though, one can see in it the reoccurring theme of his love for people, which is an abiding legacy for us in Ogilvy and Mather, and an essential part of the extraordinary culture which he crafted and which endures so strongly. When Ken and Bill decided to make this book, they turned to Joel Ralpheson, one of David's paladins. I asked Joel how he went about it, and this is what he told me. I canvassed the Ogilvy world, asking for anything David had written, handwritten or typed, long or short, important and thoughtful, or spontaneous and frivolous. Responses by the dozen came pouring into my office. When I'd accumulated a big stack, I went through it, item by item, hoping to find things piling up naturally into a few well-defined categories. And they did. For example, I saw to my surprise that I had made a pile of memos made up entirely of lists. David loved lists, by the way, and they're really easy to read, which is, I think, what makes his writing so enjoyable. Relaxed, though, this book may be, it will also stimulate the most jaded brain in today's world of business. Different in so many degrees, but not in fundamental kind, to the years when David was building his first, this is the most important sentence of this entire section. I'm gonna repeat it, too.