A Legendary Ad Man’s Rules for Creative Success

Today's blog post is based on an article from The Art of Manliness:

Today, the Ogilvy agency is one of the largest advertising and public relations companies in the world.

It was founded by a man who didn’t have an MBA, or even a college degree.

Before he became the King of Madison Avenue, Englishman David Ogilvy was an Oxford dropout who worked as a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a researcher for George Gallup, an agent of the British Intelligence Service during WWII, and a farmer in Pennsylvania.

In 1948, with only $6,000 in funds, he founded a new advertising agency — Ogilvy & Mather — which became, in his words, “an immediate and meteoric success.” Ogilvy landed some of the world’s biggest corporate accounts, and helped create some of the most iconic (and manliest) ad campaigns, from introducing the eye-patched “man in the Hathaway shirt” to making Commander Whitehead (he who waxed poetic on the three qualities of an educated man) the face of Schweppes.

In bringing originality and innovation to a long-stagnant industry, Ogilvy would become known as the “Father of Advertising.” Though he was annoyed by the term “creativity,” which in the mid-20th century was ascending into an overused buzzword, yet he recognized the quality as the very lifeblood of a successful ad agency. In his bestselling book Confessions of an Advertising Man, published in 1963, he cites the work of personality researcher Dr. Frank Barron, whose conclusions on the nature of creative individuals, Ogilvy said, aligned with his own:

Creative people are especially observant, and they value accurate observation (telling themselves the truth) more than other people do.

They often express part-truths, but this they do vividly; the part they express is the generally unrecognized; by displacement of accent and apparent disproportion in statement they seek to point to the usually unobserved.

They see things as others do, but also as others do not.

They are born with greater brain capacity; they have more ability to hold many ideas at once, and to compare more ideas with one another — hence to make a richer synthesis.

They are by constitution more vigorous, and have available to them an exceptional fund of psychic and physical energy.

Their universe is thus more complex, and in addition they usually lead more complex lives.

They have more contact than most people do with the unconscious — with fantasy, reverie, the world of imagination.

Ogilvy strove to hire employees who possessed the qualities of creativity — which he said were most apt to be found amongst the “nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels” of the world — and to create an environment at his agency in which creativity could flourish.

To this end, he enacted certain rules that structured the culture of Ogilvy & Mather (though as he notes in the updated preface to the 1988 edition of Confessions, the idea of “corporate culture” didn’t exist during his tenure as chairman). Below we highlight some of the best pearls of wisdom Ogilvy lays out in the book; these rules for creative success still apply today, both to solo entrepreneurs, and to those who are managing teams of people and overseeing large-scale operations.

• Wed the Novel to the Familiar, the Artistic to the Practical
• Don’t (Overly) Delegate; Stay (Relatively) Small
• Keep Your Hand on the Creative Tiller
• Don’t Make Decisions By Committee
• Use Constraints to Release Creativity
• Stay Hungry

Be sure to read the article to find out more about Ogilvy's rules!

If you're in business, it's important to have an online presence. And whether you're creative or not, you can build your own websites. Check out this past Monday's blog post to find out how.

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