This is also what led David to only accept accounts for which he truly believed he could outperform the previous agency. In marketing, it might be more important than anywhere else that your north star is integrity. That, of course, means you have to stand 100% behind the product in question, whether it’s soap, a soft drink or an airline, so you can write ads without lying – ads that you’d be comfortable with, even if your own family read them. He believed in soft-spoken advertisements, delivering the facts, not the fiction and never ever lying to people in your advertisements. One of David’s most famous quotes is this: In marketing as in any other industry, the vast majority of players is looking for the quick fix, the sale today, instead of playing the long game, which results in a lot of ads for products, which probably shouldn’t be sold at all. If all marketers lived by this mantra, and nothing else, I 100% believe we would not live in a world where marketing is considered as sleazy and has a negative connotation right from the get-go. If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.ĭownload PDF Lesson 1: Only sell stuff you believe in. Ready for a dose of ethic marketing? Here we go!

Use facts, mystery and the latest research to create good advertisements.

Advertising is meant to sell, not to entertain.

That’s why I’m excited to share 3 lessons from Confessions Of An Advertising Man with you:

I love marketing, but I do believe there’s a lot to be done to bring these exact values back to it in 2016 and beyond, especially considering that today, every single one of us is a media company. Ogilvy is known as the “father of advertising” and had a huge impact on the industry during his lifetime, especially in the 60s, promoting honesty, ethics and hard work as a philosophy for marketers. In Germany (and across the globe) Ogilvy & Mather is one of the most famous ones, and it was founded by the author of Confessions Of An Advertising Man, David Ogilvy, in 1948. Like this speed-reading train ride video for Deutsche Bahn, or this moving story of a truck driver coming home for Christmas from Coca-Cola. I soon learned that these rare exemptions weren’t due to a sudden spark of genius in those companies’ PR departments, but because they hired advertising agencies. But every once in a while, a really interesting spot pops up. They either lack creativity, miss the point or the target audience, are sloppily executed or downright confusing. As in the US, most ads run by big corporations are bad.

When I started getting more interested in marketing in late 2012, I began to pay more attention to the advertisements I saw on TV, billboards and around the web. Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account*:

The confessions of an advertising man