Transcript
Introduction
"My mother was a beautiful and eccentric Irishwoman. She disinherited me on the ground that I was likely to acquire more money than was good for me without any help from her. I could not disagree. At the age of nine, I was sent to board at an aristocratic school in Eastbourne. The headmaster wrote of me, he has a distinctly original mind, inclined to argue with his teachers and to try and convince them that he is right and the books are wrong; but this perhaps is further proof of his originality.
At the age of 13, I went to a Scottish school whose Spartan disciplines had been established by my great uncle. I went to college at Oxford, but I was too preoccupied to do any work, and was duly expelled. That was in 1931, the bottom of the depression. For the next 17 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 in British Security Coordination, and a farmer in Pennsylvania.
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 19 clients are now greater than the revenue of her Majesty's Government. My father used to say of a product that it was 'very well spoken of in the advertisements.' I spend my life speaking well of products in advertisements. By writing this book in the old-fashioned first-person singular, I have committed an offense against a convention of contemporary American manners. But I think it artificial to write we when I'm confessing my sins and describing my adventures."
That is an excerpt from the book that I read this week and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. And before I jump into the rest of the book, I just want to let you know why I chose to do -- to cover this book this week. I had previously done, if you've listened to all the episodes I have done so far, you already know this, but on Founders podcasts #82, I went over what I learned from David's book, Ogilvy on Advertising, which is less biographical and more like explicit advice on how to improve your company's advertising. So if that subject interest you and you have not listened to that, I'd highly recommend listening to Founders #82. He does a little bit of that in this book as well, but this is more of like a narrative as opposed to the way that he organized the other book. They're also written about 2 decades apart. If I'm not mistaken, he wrote Ogilvy and Advertising like in the '80s, and the book I have on my hand was first published in 1963.