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Ogilvy on Advertising — Chapter-03: Jobs in advertising – and how to get them

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3 JOBS IN ADVERTISING – AND HOW TO GET THEM Cosimo de Medici persuaded Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine sculptor, to enter his service by writing him a letter which concluded, ‘Come, I will choke you with gold.’ Advertising offers four different career paths:  

1. You can join a television network, a radio station, a magazine or a newspaper and sell time or space to advertisers and their agencies.
2. You can join a retailer like Sears Roebuck, and work as a copywriter, art director or advertising manager.
3. You can join a manufacturing company like Procter & Gamble, and work as a brand manager.
4. You can join an advertising agency.   These are not watertight compartments. Copywriters trained at Sears Roebuck sometimes migrate to agencies. Brand managers escape from Procter & Gamble to join agencies. Time-buyers at agencies move to broadcasting networks. I am competent to write only about jobs in agencies. I don’t know any other trade which offers such variety. The atmosphere is extraordinarily stimulating. Agencies are psychological hothouses. You will never be bored. All the big agencies are international and offer job opportunities in Europe, Asia and Latin America. If you are fluent in a foreign language, it helps.

At the start of your career in advertising, what you learn is more important than what you earn. Some agencies take great pains to train their people. As in teaching hospitals, their top people devote an enormous amount of time to teaching the interns. Agency employees in countries where advertising is relatively mature do not always welcome attempts to teach them. However wet behind the ears, they believe that they have nothing to learn. But in Asia and other developing areas, they welcome lecturers with open arms and hang on their every word. I now see campaigns in India, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia which are better than many campaigns coming out of Europe and the United States. (See Chapter 17.) COPYWRITERS Like all trades and professions, advertising has its establishment. You will find the names in the roster of 84 men and four women who have been elected to the Advertising Hall of Fame since its foundation 32 years ago. I regret to say that only 13 of them are copywriters. Copywriters may not be the most visible people in agencies, but they are the most important. The hallmarks of a potentially successful copywriter include:   • Obsessive curiosity about products, people and advertising. • A sense of humor. • A habit of hard work. • The ability to write interesting prose for printed media, and natural dialogue for television. • The ability to think visually. Television commercials depend more on pictures than words. • The ambition to write better campaigns than anyone has ever written before.   ‘Most good copywriters’, says William Maynard of the Bates agency, ‘fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end.’ If you are both killer and poet, you get rich. ART DIRECTORS You cannot get a job as an art director unless you have had some training in film, layout, photography and typography. It helps to be endowed with good taste.

Since print went out of fashion, many art directors have turned themselves into television producers. Television, being a visual medium, is a natural outlet for their talents. Art directors used to be the handmaidens of copywriters, but they have now gone up in the world. Indeed, some art directors have risen to become distinguished Creative Directors – notably Bob Gage at Doyle Dane Bernbach, Hal Riney at Ogilvy & Mather, and Keith Reinhard at Needham, Harper & Steers. ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES The chief role of account executives is to extract the best possible work from the other departments of the agency. They are in daily touch with clients. If I wanted to become an account executive, I would first spend a couple of years at Procter & Gamble in brand management, followed by a year in a consumer research company, learning what makes people tick – particularly people who are less well educated than I am. Some agencies now hire more women account executives than men. In the New York office of Ogilvy & Mather, 69 per cent of the account executives are women. It used to be that account executives were better paid than the brand managers who were their opposite numbers on the client side, and were often responsible not only for the advertising, but for the total marketing plan. But those days are over. The clients now recruit at the same business schools, and pay higher salaries than agencies. As a result, the role of the account executive at many agencies has been reduced to one of co-ordination. On an airplane not long ago, I overheard the following conversation:   ‘What business are you in?’ ‘Engineer. You?’ ‘I’m an account executive in an ad agency.’ ‘You write the ads?’ ‘No, copywriters do that.’ ‘That must be a fun job.’ ‘It’s not that easy. We do a lot of research.’ ‘You do the research?’ ‘No, we have research people for that.’ ‘Do you bring in the new clients?’

‘That’s not my job.’ ‘Forgive me, but what is your job?’ ‘Marketing.’ ‘You do the marketing for the clients?’ ‘No, they do it themselves.’ ‘Are you in management?’ ‘No, but I soon will be.’   If this dismal dialogue does not put you off, and you still want to start your career as an account executive, I repeat the advice I offered in my Confessions. Set yourself to becoming the best-informed person in the agency on the account to which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations, talking to motorists. Visit your client’s refineries and research laboratories. At the end of your first year, you will know more about the oil business than your boss, and be ready to succeed him. Most of the work you do will be routine maintenance. Your golden opportunity will come when you rise to a great occasion. Some years ago, Lever Brothers asked their seven agencies to submit policy papers on the television medium, which was then quite new. 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. The following year he was elected to our board of directors. Some young men and women are attracted by the travel and entertainment which attach to the work of an account executive. They soon find that lunching in expensive restaurants is no fun if you have to explain a declining share-of-market while eating the soufflé. Riding the circuit of test markets can be a nightmare if one of your children is in hospital. Account executives can be divided into custodians and contributors. You can probably get by if you never function as more than a channel of communication between your client and your service departments, like a waiter who shuttles between the chefs in the kitchen and the customers in the dining room. No doubt you will perform this function with aplomb, but I hope you will contribute more than that. Like inventing big ideas for selling the product. However hard you work, and however knowledgeable you become, you will be unable to represent your agency at the client’s policy levels until you are at least 30

years old. One of my partners owes the rapidity of his ascent to the fact that he had the good fortune to have his hair turn white at 27. You will never become a successful account executive unless you learn to make good presentations. Most of your clients will be corporations, and you must be able to sell campaigns to their committees. Your presentations must be well written, and well delivered. Do not make the common mistake of regarding your clients as dopes. Make friends with them. Buy shares in their companies. But try not to become entangled in their politics. Emulate Talleyrand, who served France through seven regimes. Always tell your client what you would do if you were in his shoes, but don’t grudge him the prerogative of deciding what advertising to run. It is his product, his money, and ultimately his responsibility. In your day-to-day dealings with clients and colleagues, fight for the kings, queens and bishops, but throw away the pawns. A habit of graceful surrender on trivial issues will make you difficult to resist when you stand and fight on a major issue. Don’t discuss your clients’ business in public places. Keep their secrets under lock and key. A reputation for leaking can ruin you. Learn to write lucid memoranda. The senior people to whom they are addressed have more homework than you do. The longer and more turgid your memos, the less likely they are to be read by executives who have the power to act on them. In 1941, Winston Churchill sent the following memo to the First Lord of the Admiralty: ‘Pray state this day, on one side of a sheet of paper, how the Royal Navy is being adapted to meet the conditions of modern warfare.’ RESEARCHERS To get a job in the Research Department of a good agency, you probably need a degree in statistics or psychology. You also need an analytical mind, and the ability to write readable reports. You must also be able to work sympathetically with creative people, most of whom are stubbornly allergic to research. Above all you must be intellectually honest. A researcher who injects bias into his reports does awful damage. Grateful as I am to the researchers who have helped me to produce effective advertising, I have nine bones to pick with them:

1. They take three months when I only have three weeks. When Eisenhower was President, the White House called Dr. Gallup one evening at six o’clock. Eisenhower wanted to know the state of public opinion on an important issue of foreign policy. The report had to be on the President’s desk at eight o’clock the next morning. Gallup sent for six of his henchmen and dictated three questions. Then each of the henchmen telephoned six interviewers in different parts of the country, and they interviewed ten people each. By midnight they had called in their results. Gallup tabulated them, wrote his report and dictated it to a White House stenographer. The report was on Eisenhower’s desk two hours before it was due. Nor is this merely an example of presidential clout. When Robert Kennedy lost the Oregon primary in 1968, his campaign manager had a research report on his desk 18 hours after the polls closed, analysing the reasons for his defeat. When I first went to run the Audience Research Institute for Dr. Gallup, it took our statisticians two months to deliver their reports. I bullied them into telescoping the work into two days, thereby making the reports of much greater value to the Hollywood executives who were our clients. So why does it take agency researchers three months to answer a few simple questions? They are natural slowpokes, and too frightened of making mistakes. 2. They cannot agree among themselves on methodology. It recently took the Research Directors of the 21 biggest agencies two years to reach agreement on the principles which should govern copy-testing. Now they have started to debate methodology. Five years? 3. It is in research departments that you find the eggheads of the agency business. Too many of them are more interested in sociology and economics than advertising. They concentrate their attention on subjects which are only peripherally related to advertising. 4. They have little or no system for retrieving research which has already been conducted. Reports are read, sometimes acted on, and filed. Two years later, the researcher, the account executive, the copywriter and the

brand manager have moved to fresh pastures. Even if somebody remembers that the research was done, nobody can find it. So we re-invent the wheel, year after year. 5. Advertising research is full of fads. In the sixties we saw Eye Cameras, Latin Squares, Facturals, Randomized Blocks, Greco-Latin Squares. Some of them were useful, but all went out of fashion. 6. Researchers use graphs which are incomprehensible to laymen. And their reports are too long. When he was an executive at Procter & Gamble, Ralph Glendinning refused to read any research report which was more than a quarter of an inch thick. 7. Researchers have a maddening way of refusing to undertake projects which they consider imperfect by their perfectionist standards, even when the project would produce actionable results. Said Winston Churchill, ‘PERFECTIONISM is spelled PARALYSIS.’ 8. Ninety-nine researchers out of a hundred content themselves with conducting surveys for which they are asked, but seldom take initiative. Stop asking them questions, and they grind to a halt. 9. Worst of all, researchers use pretentious jargon – such as attitudinal paradigms, judgmentally, demassification, reconceptualize, sub-optimal, symbiotic linkage, splinterization. Come off it, professor. MEDIA I have never worked in the media department of an agency, but observation of those who have been successful in this field leads me to think they need an analytical mind, the ability to communicate numerical data in non-numerical formats, stability under pressure and a taste for negotiation with owners of media. CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

The most difficult job in an agency is Chief Executive Officer. He (or she) must be a good leader of frightened people. He must have financial acumen, administrative skill, thrust, and the courage to fire non-performers. He must be a good salesman, because he is responsible for bringing in new clients. He must be resilient in adversity. Above all, he must have the physical stamina to work 12 hours a day, dine out several times a week, and spend half his time in airplanes.* A recent study reveals that the death rate from stress-related causes is 14 per cent higher among senior advertising executives than their counterparts in other white-collar occupations. CREATIVE DIRECTOR As a Creative Director myself, I dare to list the attributes needed for this back- breaking job. You must be:  

1. A good psychologist.
2. Willing and able to set high standards.
3. An efficient administrator.
4. Capable of strategic thinking – ‘positioning’ and all that.
5. Research-minded.
6. Equally good at television and print.
7. Equally good at package goods and other kinds of accounts.
8. Well versed in graphics and typography.
9. A hard worker – and fast.
10. Slow to quarrel.
11. Prepared to share credit for good work, and accept blame for bad work.
12. A good presenter.
13. A good teacher and a good recruiter.
14. Full of infectious joie de vivre.   Notice that I put ‘good psychologist’ at the top of the list. Albert Lasker, who made the largest fortune in the history of the advertising business, once told a group of copywriters, ‘You think managing copywriters is a snap? You have taken some hairs out of me. I had a breakdown that kept me five and one-half months. I couldn’t talk for five minutes without starting to weep.’ WOMEN IN ADVERTISING

Like most boys of my generation, I started life believing that women belonged in the home, until I noticed how much happier my mother was when she went out to work. My first woman Vice-President was Reva Korda, a brilliant copywriter who later became head of the Creative Department. For all her brains and ability, even Reva encountered male copywriters and art directors who felt uncomfortable working under any woman. But there are now 52 women Vice-Presidents in the New York office of Ogilvy & Mather, and there appears to be no resentment of them among the male staff. The majority of people now being recruited by advertising agencies in the United States for so-called ‘professional’ jobs are women. FIRING AND HIRING Agencies used to fire people at the drop of a hat. Stirling Getchel’s otherwise admirable agency had a turnover in staff of 137 per cent in one year. Another agency fired a copywriter because he dared to talk to the boss in the men’s room. Today the boot is on the other foot. The people who work in agencies are lamentably nomadic. I recently hired a 40-year-old copywriter who had already changed jobs 11 times. You might suppose that a business which depends entirely on the talent of its people would take recruiting seriously, but that is not yet the case. In most agencies, the recruiting is still sloppy and haphazard. Even today, it is rare for any agency to ask an applicant’s former employers what they think of him. I know two men who were hired and fired as Presidents of three agencies – without their references being checked. EDUCATION FOR ADVERTISING Eighty-seven American universities offer undergraduate courses in advertising, and some even give degrees in it. With a few conspicuous exceptions, the teachers lack the practical experience to be relevant. All of them are handicapped by the poor quality of the textbooks, and very few do research of their own. Most of their graduates get jobs with small agencies, the big agencies preferring to recruit people who have furnished their minds by studying history, languages, economics and so forth. The fashion for recruiting at schools of business administration seems to have passed its peak. Give or take a few stars like the Baker Scholars at the Harvard

Business School, their alumni are more remarkable for stodginess and arrogance than imagination. SOCIAL STATUS When I was a door-to-door salesman for Aga cooking stoves in Scotland, I paid a cold call on an aristocrat. He threw me out. What right had I to invade his privacy? ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘you are a Director of two companies which sell their products door to door. How dare you insult me for doing something which your own salesmen do every day?’ His disdain for salesmen is mirrored in the snobbish attitude of the British establishment towards advertising. Not so in the United States. MOONLIGHTING If you need more income than your agency is willing to pay you, make up the difference by moonlighting. I have been moonlighting for 30 years. The Curtis Publishing Company gave me two magnificent china lamps for writing an advertisement for Holiday magazine. They had been bullying their editors and I had reason to believe that they were about to fire Ted Patrick, the marvelous editor of Holiday. So I persuaded the heads of the 12 biggest agencies to join me in a testimonial to Ted, applauding him for his ‘indifference to the heckling of publishers’. The Curtis people were too dumb to realize that this would make it impossible for them to fire Ted, and ran my advertisement. The Reader’s Digest gave $10,000 to the Scottish school which had educated ne, in return for an advertisement I wrote for them. Omega, the watch company, paid me $25,000 to spend four days at their headquarters in Switzerland, advising them how to improve their advertising. To my surprise, they got their money’s worth. Even today, I am retained by the Campbell Soup Company as their consultant on marketing. ‘BE HAPPY WHILE YOU’RE LIVING’ ‘Chess’, wrote Raymond Chandler, ‘is about as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.’ If advertising is a waste of intelligence, it isn’t a very serious one. Not more than 100,000 men and women work in advertising agencies in the United States – less

than 0.1 per cent of the working population. About 15,000 work in British agencies. Most of the people I know in agencies strike me as well cast for their work and reasonably happy in it. Whenever I think that someone is wasting his talents in advertising, I tell him so. One of my partners is a superb naturalist, and secretly resented every day he spent in the agency. On my advice he retired – and went on to save endangered species of fauna from extinction. In the words of the Scottish proverb, ‘Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead.’ A few advertising people regard advertising as an unworthy occupation. Thus the head of the agency in Paris that helped François Mitterrand become President of France called his autobiography: Don’t tell my mother I work in an advertising agency – she thinks I play the piano in a whorehouse. Poor chap. Those of us who study public opinion surveys are aware that the lay public thinks we admen are rascals. Dr. Gallup recently asked people to rate 24 professions for honesty. Top marks went to clergymen, bottom marks to trade- union leaders, car salesmen and advertising practitioners. The stereotype of the ‘huckster’ dies hard. But I don’t think our poor image keeps many of us awake at night. I have never felt any inclination to give up my job and become a clergyman. I enjoy my work, and sometimes feel proud of its results. HOW TO APPLY FOR A JOB Don’t telephone – write to three or four agencies, and enclose your curriculum vitae. Be sure to type your letter, and take a lot of trouble with it. In their book Writing that Works,* my partners Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson offer this golden advice:  

1. Spell all names right It’s astonishing how often job applicants misspell the names of the agencies they want to work for. The message that gets through, right off the bat, is: ‘This applicant can’t be seriously interested in working here; he didn’t even take the trouble to find out how to spell our name.’  
2. Identify the sort of job you’re applying for State it clearly and at once. Say what led you to apply – a want ad, a recommendation from a friend, whatever. A letter applying for a job as a research analyst started in this mysterious way:

Dear Ms. Smith: It’s spring already – a time to think about planting seeds. Some seeds are small, like apple seeds. Others are bigger. Coconuts, for example. But big or little, a seed can grow and flourish if it’s planted in proper soil.   The applicant would have done better to start like this:   Dear Ms. Smith: I understand that you are looking for a research analyst.   Ms. Smith doesn’t have time to play guessing games with her mail.   3. Be specific and factual Once you’ve made clear what job you want, then touch on your chief qualifications. Avoid egotistical abstractions like: ‘Ambition mixed with a striving for excellence is one of my strongest assets.’   4. Be personal, direct and natural You are a human being writing to another human being. Neither of you is an institution. You should be businesslike and courteous, but never stiff and impersonal. The more your letter sounds like you, the more it will stand apart from the letters of your competitors. But don’t try to dazzle your reader with your sparkling personality. You wouldn’t show off in an interview, so why show off in a letter? If you make each sentence sound the way you would say it across a desk, there will be plenty of personality in your letter.   5. Propose a specific next stop Close your letter with a clear and precise statement of how you wish to proceed toward an interview. Avoid such mumblings as: ‘Hoping to hear from you soon.’ ‘Thank you for your time and consideration.’

‘I’m looking forward to the opportunity of discussing a position with you.’ All such conclusions place the burden of the next step on your busy prospective employer. Why make him work in your interest? Do the job yourself, like this: ‘I’ll call your office on Wednesday afternoon to see if you’d like me to come in for an interview.’ ‘I’m free for an interview every morning until 8:45, and Thursday after 2:30. I’ll call your office on Wednesday afternoon to find out if you would like to get together at any of those times.’ At this stage a phone call makes things easy for the person at the other end. If you don’t call him, he has to go to the trouble of calling or writing to you. The idea is to make it as simple as you possibly can for your prospective employer to set up an appointment at a time that’s convenient to you. I am always surprised by the illiteracy of men and women who look for jobs in advertising. I am bombarded with applications like this recent lulu: ‘My goal is to seek more challenging experiences to further develop my skills in marketing and advertising. I feel I have reached a plateau in my education. My objective is to obtain a top-level management position utilizing extensive experiences in marketing communications areas as a viable contribution to corporate objectives. My creative background and expertise involves a wide range of areas in the development of objectives, strategies and marketing communications programs to meet these goals.’ If you will take my advice, don’t get a job in advertising unless it interests you more than anything in the world. There are many different kinds of jobs, calling for very different skills, all the way from art direction to statistics. The pay is good, but don’t expect the gold that Cosimo de Medici promised Cellini. There are easier ways to get rich.

Curtis Publishing paid me two antique china lamps for writing this advertisement in my spare time. They did not guess my real motive: to make it impossible for them to fire the editor of Holiday magazine. The signatories were the heads of the 12 biggest agencies – Holiday’s customers.

In gratitude for my writing this advertisement, Reader’s Digest gave $10,000 to

the Scottish school where I was educated. Because it was to appear over my signature, I took great pains to write it well – well enough for Raymond Rubicam to call it ‘a masterpiece’. If all clients insisted on their agencies signing their ads, they would get better ads.

This is the first advertisement I wrote as the head of own agency – at the age of

Notes * Last year my partner Michael Ball flew 300,000 miles and spent 131 nights in hotels. * Harper & Row, New York, 1981.