My highlights from Confessions of an Advertising Man:
1. 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. I cannot read a balance sheet, work a computer, ski, sail, play golf, or paint.
2. Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees.
3. Unless your campaign contains a Big Idea, it will pass a ship in the night. (I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.)
4. 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 fifteen per cent, they should concentrate on getting more sales results from the eighty-five per cent they spend on time and space. That is where the leverage is. No manufacturer ever got rich by underpaying his agency.
5. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.
6. During a ten-hour train ride, I read 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. 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?
7. 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.
8. The difference between one advertisement and another, when measured in terms of sales, can be as much as nineteen to one.
9. It pays to study the product before writing your advertisements.
10. The key to success is to promise the consumer a benefit like better flavor, whiter wash, more miles per gallon, a better complexion.
11. What works in one country almost always works in other countries.
12. Good campaigns can run for many years without losing their selling power. My eyepatch campaign for Hathaway shirts ran for twenty-one years. My campaign for Dove soap has been running for thirty-one years, and Dove is now the best seller.
13. 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 to Sir William Stephenson in British Security Co-ordination, and a farmer in Pennsylvania.
14. 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.
15. M. Pitard did not tolerate incompetence. He knew that it is demoralising for professionals to work alongside incompetent amateurs.
16. M. Pitard taught me exorbitant standards of service. For example, he once heard me tell a waiter that we were fresh out of the plat du jour – and almost fired me for it. In a great kitchen, he said, one must always honor what one has promised on the menu.
17. I admire people who work with gusto. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing, I beg you to find another job.
18. Remember the Scottish proverb, “Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead.”
19. I admire people who work hard, who bite the bullet. I dislike passengers who don’t pull their weight in the boat.
20. It is more fun to be overworked than to be underworked. There is an economic factor built into hard work. The harder you work, the fewer employees we need, the more profit we make.
21. I have no ambition to preside over a vast bureaucracy. The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.
22. Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.
23. The majority of businessmen are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.
24. 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. I hear a great deal of music. I take long hot baths. I garden. I go into retreat among the Amish. I watch birds. I go for long walks in the country. And I take frequent vacations, so that brain can lie fallow – no golf, no cocktail parties, no tennis, no bridge, no concentration; only a bicycle. While thus employed in doing nothing, I receive a constant stream of telegrams from my unconscious, and these become my the raw material for advertisements.
25. But more is required: my hard work, an open mind, and ungovernable curiosity.
26. I have observed that no creative organisation, whether it is a research laboratory, a magazine, a Paris kitchen, or an advertising agency, will produce a great body of work unless it is led by a formidable individual.
27. Once every few years a great new agency is born. 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. They become extinct volcanoes.
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 put all their dynamite into their advertisements.
We can all name famous agencies which are moribund. You hear demoralising whispers in their corridors, long before the truth dawns on their clients.
28. Following Henry Ford's advice to his dealers that they should "solicit by personal visitation," I started by soliciting advertisers who did not employ an agency at all.
29. I sent frequent progress reports to 600 people in every walk of life. This barrage of direct mail was read by the most august advertisers. For example, when I solicited part of the Seagram account, Sam Bronfman played back to me the last two paragraphs of a sixteen-page speech I had sent him shortly before; and he hired us.
30. Gentle reader, if you are shocked by these confessions of self-advertisement, I can only plead that if I had behaved in a more professional way, it would have taken me twenty years to arrive. I had neither the time nor the money to wait. I was poor, unknown, and in a hurry.
31. I regard the hunt for new clients as a sport. If you play it grimly, you will die of ulcers. If you play it with lighthearted gusto, you will survive your failures without losing sleep. Play to win, but enjoy the fun.
32. If you set high standards in one department, you are likely to set high standards in every department.
33. I always tell prospective clients about the chinks in our armour. I have noticed that when an antique dealer draws my attention to flaws in a piece of furniture, he wins my confidence.
34. He was not aware that a million dollars' worth of effective advertising can sell more than ten million dollars' worth of ineffective advertising.
35. Mail-order advertisers have found that a mere change of headline can increase sales ten times; and I have seen television commercials sell five times as much of a product as other commercials written by the same man.
36. I know of a brewer who sells more of his beer to the people who never see his advertising than to the people who see it every week. Bad advertising can unsell a product.
37. 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.
38. Tolerate genius.
Conan Doyle wrote that “mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself." My observation has been that mediocre men recognise genius, resent it, and feel compelled to destroy it.
There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them. They lay golden eggs.
39. The recruits react to my lecture in different ways. Some find comfort and security under the command of a chief who seems to know what he is talking about. Some are uneasy at the prospect of working within such rigid disciplines.
"Surely," they say, “these rules and regulations must result in dull advertising?"
“Not so far," I reply. And I go on to preach the importance of discipline in art. Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline – exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?
40. I am an inveterate brainpicker, and the most rewarding brains I have picked are the brains of my predecessors and my competitors. I have learned much from studying the successful campaigns.
41. Your most important job is to decide what you are going to say about your product, what benefit you are going to promise.
42. 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 made the same discovery about advertising, fifty years ago. But most modern copywriters find it easier to write short, lazy advertisements. Collecting facts is hard work.
43. You aren't advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.
44. Set yourself to becoming the best-informed man in the agency on the account to which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read text books 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.
Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, pumping gasoline and talking to motorists. Visit your client's 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; you will then be ready to succeed him.
Most of the young men in agencies are too lazy to do this kind of homework. They remain permanently superficial.
45. 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.
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