Confession of an Advertising Man

The Man Who Wanted to Buy Everything

Max Beerbohm once leaned in to S. N. Behrman and said, "My dear, nothing in this world is worth buying." David Ogilvy spent his life proving the opposite. He wanted to buy almost everything he saw advertised — Hathaway shirts, Steuben candlesticks, Rolls-Royces fueled with Super Shell, Schweppes tonic mixed with Puerto Rican rum — and he believed it was his job to make you want them too.

That belief, more than anything else, is what Confessions of an Advertising Man is about. The book came out in 1963, when Ogilvy had built one of the great agencies of the postwar era out of a shoestring, a borrowed name, and his own ferocious appetite for work. By the time he sat down to write it he had nineteen clients, fifty-five million dollars in yearly billings, and nearly five hundred employees. He also had an opinion about almost everything that crossed the desk on Madison Avenue. He had lived enough lives to write the book honestly. He had cooked in a Paris hotel kitchen, sold stoves door-to-door in Edinburgh, done social work in slums, conducted polling for Dr. Gallup, worked for British intelligence under Sir William Stephenson, and farmed tobacco in Pennsylvania with the Amish. When he opened his agency in 1948 he was, as he liked to say, an obscure tobacco farmer in his late thirties with no American clients, no American capital, and no good reason to expect anyone to hire him.

The day after he opened, he wrote down five blue-chip targets — General Foods, Bristol-Myers, Campbell Soup, Lever Brothers, Shell — and went after them with what he called an act of mad presumption. All five eventually became clients. The book is, in part, the story of how that happened. It is also the story of what Ogilvy learned along the way about managing creative people, keeping demanding clients, writing copy that sells, illustrating advertisements, making television commercials, and growing old in a business that consumes its young. Above all it is a confession in the original sense: a profession of faith, by a man who believed advertising could be honest, useful, occasionally beautiful, and almost always profitable if you took the trouble to do it properly.