David Ogilvy is a legend in advertising. He has overseen Ogilvy and Mather grow into one of the largest and most famous advertising agencies in the world. He is universally recognised as a major influence in modern advertising. Ogilvy was in India recently. VINITA BALI, marketing manager, Hindustan Cocoa Products, interviewed Ogilvy on behalf of UPDATE on creativity in advertising, managing an agency, client-agency interface, the O & M culture, social advertising and advertising in India. Ogilvy spoke in his naturally witty and irreverent manner. Excerpts:
You had ended your book Ogilvy on Advertising with 13 predictions about the advertising profession. What have been the most significant changes in advertising in the US and Europe over the last decade? Is there anything you would like to add to your list of predictions?
I didn’t want to make that list. I don’t like predictions --- I’m not a futurist but the publisher made me put it in. Anyway, they weren’t really predictions; it was more a wish list -- such as posters would be abolished. I go around the world attacking billboards and if I’m ever found in a dark alley, dead with a knife in my back, it’s the poster industry that did me in, they got me.
You’ve said that successful campaigns normally have the “big idea”. How does one recognise the “big idea”?
When I think of the number of big ideas I haven’t recognised and killed, I shudder. One way is that you look at the campaign and say: could we run this for 30 years. If we could, then it’s likely to be the big idea. I suppose one campaign in a hundred has a real big idea.
In what way can a client contribute to the emergence of a big idea from the agency?
The first way to contribute is to ask for one. They’d kill me in the office if they heard me say this. Next time somebody comes to you to show you a new campaign, say to them: have you got a big idea? They’ll say well no, not exactly. And you say would you mind going away and coming back when you’ve got one. I don’t want to look at what you’ve got now. I need a big idea.
A big idea is a very strange thing, you know -- I’ve studied this a bit and big ideas in all fields of endeavour come from the unconscious mind. You cannot rationalise, you cannot think yourself into a big idea. This is true in physics. It’s true in architecture --- God knows it’s true in advertising. You’ve got to take on board a lot of information. You’ve got to study the product, you’ve got to study the research if any and when you’ve got all that in, switch off. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a telephone call from your unconscious saying: I’ve got an idea, how about this?
There are ways to oil this process. I’ve always found wine very helpful... and the better the wine, the better the idea.
I’ve got another way of getting big ideas: go to sleep. Once I was desperate for a big idea for a client, and I couldn’t think of anything nor could anyone else. One night I had a dream, woke up at two in the morning and had the presence of mind to write it down on a piece of paper at the side of the bed. In the morning I went into the office, made a television commercial of it and its still running 30 years later. It was for a brand of bread called Pepperidge Farm. That was a big idea.
Creativity in advertising seems to be more and more of a buzzword. What is creativity, according to you?
I’m always trying to find out --- I’m supposed to be the creative king of the world of advertising and I haven’t the faintest idea.
Often it’s taken to mean originality. As a friend of mine once wrote, originality is the most dangerous word in the lexicon of advertising. The self-conscious striving for originality is a very dangerous pitfall.
If you were recruiting a creative director for your agency, what qualities would you look for?
First --- in no particular order --- he or she has to be very good at dealing with neurotic people. Because that’s what most people are at creative jobs at advertising agencies.
Secondly, he’s got to know a lot, he’s got to know what works and what doesn’t. He’s got to be prepared to accept that selling is his bottom line, to stick to selling products, resist the temptation to think that selling is an unworthy occupation and that what he wants to do is to entertain the public and win awards for his creativity. I had a friend who was the head of a big agency in New York who once announced that “anybody in his agency who ever won a creative award needs to be sacked”.
Thirdly, it helps if he’s got some talent himself, because then the others will respect him. I was a cook when I was a young man. The head chef was a fantastic chef, but his job was an office job largely. There were 35 chefs. Once a week, he’d come out of his office and go over to some station --- the sauce cook or the fish cook --- and he’d do something himself. We all crowded around because he was the best. This respect helped us a lot. ….if your troops know you can do their job better than they can, I think that helps.
You’ve also been concerned about research as an essential input in the creative process...
I earned my living in research before I became a copywriter and I’ve always used research in the creative process. I’m bound to say I don’t think there’s enough research going on in Indian agencies and by Indian clients. I want to test promises with research and I want to test communications.
The public has an incredible genius for misunderstanding advertising. There was an ad the other day in America for French liqueur. It showed an elegant old fashioned bathtub with an elegant girl lying in it and an elegant foot stuck out at one end. Beside the bathtub was a little brown marble table with a bottle of Cointreau. We showed this ad to a lot of women and asked: what’s this an ad for? Forty nine percent said it was an ad for a shampoo or bathwater.
So, do they understand what you’re trying to say? And above all does the advertisement achieve its purpose?
In what ways, do you think, can a client get the best out of his agency?
The fewer people involved, the better, at both ends. Some of the best advertising case–histories have come out of companies where there was one person at the client end and one person at the agency end, working together. But when you’re a committee this end and a committee that end, it starts to get political. Then you start playing what I call creative politics.
I had an extreme case --- the United States government hired us to do a campaign all over the world to attract tourists. The client said to me one day: I want you to do an ad featuring South Dakota -- I said, you must be mad! You’ve seen the research -- what foreigners want to see in the Grand Canyon, Yosemite Park, San Francisco and Manhattan. South Dakota! There’s nothing there. Why do you want me to do an ad on South Dakota? He said: you innocent fool, don’t you know that the chairman of the Congressional committee which votes our budget is a Senator from South Dakota? So I immediately did that … That’s creative politics.
There are other ways to get work out of agencies. One is to brief them and tell them a lot. I’ve always been obsessed with this. You shouldn’t start working on a campaign -- if you’re going to write it -- until you’ve studied the product and know a hell of a lot about it. The more you know about the products the more likely you are to come up with an idea for selling it.
When Unilever were launching the toilet soap Dove in New York, I was asked to do the campaign. In those days they had a horrible system -- they told the agency what the promise was and all you had to do was go ahead and execute it. So I said: what’s the promise? They said: it’s the first 100 per cent neutral toilet soap. I said what do you mean, neutral?
They looked at me pityingly and said soaps are either acidic or alkaline, but this is the first neutral one and it’s supposed to be a great technical breakthrough. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Overnight, I interviewed a few women -- maybe 20 of them -- and none of them had the faintest idea what it was.
I took my head in my hands and had the guts to back and say: I won’t do it, it’s stupid. It doesn’t work. And I said, would you mind showing me the formula for this product? They showed me the formula and I saw that 25 per cent of it was something called stearic acid. I’d never heard of it. I said, what is this stearic acid? And they told me that’s what cleansing cream is made of, mostly.
So I said, now you’re talking. You mean one quarter of this product, this soap, is cleansing cream? So I came out with a campaign, “Dove creams your skin while it washes.” It’s still running 31 years later and it’s now the biggest selling toilet soap there is. So the more you know, the more likely you are to come up with an idea for selling it.
In your books, you’ve talked about corporate culture. What according to you are the core values of O&M?
It’s difficult for me to answer without sounding very pious. We have a corporate culture -- it’s very personal but it is shared by most of the people running the company today in most countries. It starts by saying that a lot of the people that come to us spend their whole working lives with us. Let’s do our best to make it a happy experience, let’s make it a nice place to work in. That’s the first thing. We hate office politicians and get rid of them. We like people to work hard and we like people who are honest. I don’t mean about money, but I mean intellectually honest. We like people who have gentle manners. We give an award every year in New York -- quite a large one -- to the person who most combines professionalism with civility. Another part of it is that we tell all our clients what we would do if we were in their company. And not what is best for us. If we think that their brand of chocolate will never sell, we say so to a client and say: stop advertising.
How does O & M develop people once they join the agency? I’m talking of a fresh recruit who has just graduated from school or university. What would you do with such a person?
We start them, as you might say, at the professional level. They’re mostly MBAs but we do train them … we’re bloody good at training. We’re far better trainers than any other agency. We spend more money on it and it’s become a perfect pain in the neck. It’s not only expensive, it takes so much time of our best people, who cannot be available to meet their clients because they happen to be in Kathmandu this week for some training programme. But I don’t regret it. I always say it’s not an advertising agency, it’s a teaching hospital. We’ve got the patients for clients, but we’re also teaching the young interns medicine. We’re very good at that. You pay a penalty for that because the better your training, the more you get raided by other agencies for staff. It’s like Hindustan Lever -- they’re a very hot marketing company and people leave them in droves. The same thing happens to Procter & Gamble in the US.
You had said on an earlier occasion that “Indian agency people have a tremendous theoretical knowledge that seldom shows in their output”. Do you think Indian advertising has changed since then?
It’s changing. You live here, you don’t notice the change. But believe me, the authority and the professional standards of Indian advertising have improved in these last four years. It’s got quite a way to go, still it’s got much better.
What has impressed you most about Indian advertising? And for what reason?
The fact that Indian advertising seems to have a purpose, which you would think is universal, which it isn’t. Indian advertising almost always seems to be designed to sell products.
In certain other countries of the world, notably France, England and the US, more and more of advertising doesn’t seem to be selling the product. It’s selling the person who created it. It’s done so that he can win an award for what’s called creativity and get famous, get higher pay and get fashionable. This is a horrible disease. It hasn’t reached India, it will reach India -- I bet you it will -- and I hope that you Indians will resist it.
I look at the commercials and the ads you do here and I heave a sigh of relief, because I look at some of the advertising that’s coming out of some of our offices and I tear my hair out. Incomprehensible, highbrow, pretentious, obscure. Well, that’s the biggest difference between advertising in India and advertising abroad, in India’s favour.
I also think that most of the commercials I see here are terribly overloaded, that there’s too much in them, too many changes of scene, too many copy points, too much going on. Most commercials are looked at by agencies and clients one at a time -- that’s not the way the public sees them.
The public sees them as a strip of commercials, a band. I look at these strips and I can’t tell when one commercial ends and the next begins. I long for a commercial which will hold still on one thing, even if it’s just holding up the package on the screen for 30 seconds and saying something good about it.
Is there any particular commercial that you’ve been particularly impressed with, any campaign that has caught your attention in India?
There’s a chocolate company which has been doing a campaign in Kerala to get farmers to grow more cocoa. I’m terribly impressed by that. Incidentally, I think that in the next 10 years -- may be not in my lifetime -- you’re going to see more and more advertising being used for purposes other than selling a product.
We did a campaign for the Indian Cancer Society about six years ago, to get people to go and have check-ups. Why shouldn’t we use advertising for all these things? I hope and believe that one day advertising can be used to contribute something to population control in India.
We’ve also got a small campaign we’re handling for free in Bangalore, in favour of immunising children against polio. I think, there’s going to be a lot more of this sort of thing in India. Costs money, but in some cases the stakes are so high it doesn’t matter what it costs.
India has a terrible image in the outside world today because of the way India is presented in the foreign media. You almost never see anything about India on television in France or England or America and almost nothing in the press. When you do see it, it’s something horrible: 40 people have been murdered somewhere, that’s all you see and you think, what a ghastly country, horrible place, I don’t want to go there.
This has got to be fixed and I think advertising can fix it. I’ve done it once, for a very small island in the Caribbean called Purerto Rico. I think you could do it for India --- there’s no other way to fix it, as far I know.
What were your impressions of India before you came here?
The last thing I ever wanted to do was to come to India of all places. When I was 70, at last I came. Good God, I’d never had such a big surprise in my life. Fell in love with every woman I saw -- I’d never seen so much beauty. I fell in love with everything I saw -- it was really absolutely undiscriminating.
One last question: You did talk a little bit about the social responsibility of advertising --- would you say that advertising can contribute in any way to changing basic attitudes?
It’s a big question, isn’t it? For example, could advertising have any influence in raising the age of marriage? If it could, it might save India. You know your population has doubled since 1947 in 35 years, from 350 million to 700 million. If it doubles again in the next 35 years, God help you. If we could -- I don’t know if advertising could do it, probably not -- get people not to marry so young -- that would help.
Forget Pakistan, it’s a ridiculous obsession. It’s the population you have to worry about. How many Indians have even mentioned it to me? Not a single one. You’re fiddling while Rome burns.