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Staff post about: David Ogilvy Become an Author

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Ogilvy came from a background in research; in his early years he had worked for the world-renowned George Gallup Audience Research Institute, which he later called “the luckiest break of my life.” It was at Gallup that Ogilvy learned about research and its importance in advertising. In fact, research became so central to Ogilvy’s philosophy of creating advertising that when he opened his own agency in 1952, Ogilvy billed himself as Research Director.

“The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST,” Ogilvy once wrote. “Test your promise. Test your media. Test your headlines and your illustrations. Test the size of your advertisements. Test your frequency. Test your level of expenditure. Test your commercials. Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.” Ogilvy believed in the maxim of looking before you leap, never releasing an ad without first putting it through severe scrutiny and several levels of testing. “If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.”

Ogilvy’s success stemmed from the fact that he understood the changing nature of his market. The same people he advertised to yesterday would not be the same ones he would be trying to reach tomorrow. “You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade,” he wrote, comparing an advertisement to “a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market.” Thus, in order to gain an accurate picture of the market, one had to “get a good radar and keep it sweeping.”

It was only through doing his research that Ogilvy believed his ads would be successful and generate sales. But, the importance of research wasn’t limited to advertising. Indeed, Ogilvy likened his industry to the medical industry: “Supposing you've got an acute appendicitis,” he wrote. “You've got to be operated on tonight. Would you like to have a surgeon who’s read some books of anatomy and knows how to do that operation - or would you prefer to have a surgeon who refused to read all books about anatomy and relied on his own instinct?”

Ogilvy knew that it was only knowledge that distinguished a great surgeon from others. Thus, on a similar note, Ogilvy asks why a manufacturer would stake his account and the entire future of his company on an advertiser’s instinct? He shouldn’t, and that is why Ogilvy turned to research – research about the product and the market. Research would tell him what he needed to know about what worked and what didn’t.

There were indeed times when Ogilvy trusted his instinct, such as in his dislike of the use of jingles in advertising campaigns. “Candor compels me to admit that I have no conclusive research to support my view that jingles are less persuasive than the spoken word,” he said. However, this was one time when Ogilvy was willing to let common sense dictate his actions. “You’d run like hell if a salesman came to your door and began singing at you. Why do it in advertising?”

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