Why I call myself ‘extinct volcano’
• David Ogilvy, the advertising legend shares his secrets
By Sun News Publishing
Monday, May 28, 2007

David Ogilvy Pix: Sun Publishing

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David Ogilvy opens the door to his old brownstone house on New York’s 84th St. and, moving slowly and painfully, ushers his visitor into a sitting room in the rear of the house.

The room is furnished in the manner of an English town house. Two walls are covered with bright tiers of books, many of them in their dust jackets, while a third side supports three oil paintings and a handsomely manteled fireplace.

Mr. Ogilvy explains that he has been home from the office for several days with an assortment of "minor ailments, "including a sore back and a virus. "Like Job, I suffer at least three afflictions," he apologizes wryly. "Why don’t we sit over here?"
The agency man leads the visitor across the room to a wide, flat desk by high French windows.

Outside is a bleak landscape of narrow city yards. The desk is strewn with a litter of papers, pencils, odds and ends, a wide ash tray for the scorched Ogilvy pipe, and assorted corporate confetti sent over from his agency. Half buried in the pile is a copy of the expatriated Scotsman’s best-selling "Confessions of an Advertising Man."

Mr. Ogilvy motions for his visitor to be seated and then, like a man immersing himself in a hot bath, he lowers himself into his desk chair. The interview begins…
A lot of people have talked about devising formulas for creating ideas. Have you such a formula?
Well, we have had a few ideas and I’ve also got the rudiments of a method for getting the ideas, so I suppose I have to say yes.

Do you think advertising writing is more difficult than other kinds of factual writing?
One of the difficult things about writing advertising copy is that it is so short. Print ads are short and tv commercials are short. You can’t write much more than 100 words in a tv commercial, and that in itself, the brevity of the form, doesn’t make it any easier to do. If you’ve written a lot advertisements, you train yourself to write very short and tight, so if you try to write a longer thing it’s difficult to do.

Have you ever tried?
I wrote a book a couple of years ago – I wanted to see if I could – there was a matter of some doubt in my mind, and when I had written 800 words I had just about finished the book. Then I had to sit down and learn to write longer. Of course, some very good writers have tried their hands at writing advertising and have failed. Marquand tried to write advertisements and so did Stephen Vincent Benet. And then Hemingway and Shaw tried it and they couldn’t do it. Of course, it isn’t every competent writer who wants to write ads in the first place. Writing good advertisements is very difficult indeed. But writing good anything is very difficult. I think it was Aldous Huxley who said it is easier to write a passable sonnet than a passable advertisement. I couldn’t write a sonnet to save my life, sot that’s not the case with me.
Generally speaking, would you rather write ads with "ground rules" established by the advertiser, or by your plans board, or whomever? Or would you rather have carte blanche?
I couldn’t write anything without ground rules, but I must confess I prefer to make my own ground rules. We’re getting more and more ground rules in the writing of advertising as the corpus of knowledge builds up. I know much more today about how to write good advertising than I did 25 years ago, partly because I studied the subject and partly because so much research has been done about what makes an effective advertisement in any medium. I don’t see how you can write anything without a good deal of disciplines, and we’re getting more and more of that disciplines.

Is this discipline self-imposed? Or imposed from the outside?
Both. I am in a rather fortunate position in some ways, because I didn’t write my first advertisement until I was 39. before I became a copywriter, I was in the research business – I worked with Dr. Gallup in Princeton – and I did a great dead of research. So I approached advertising from the viewpoint of the research. In the early days of our agency, I was the research director (among other things) and I used to write research memoranda to myself, to the copywriter, on a Friday. On Monday morning I would come into the office, read the memo, and have to write the advertisement related to the research.
So you see, I fought this battle, as it were, within myself. But of course, that doesn’t mean that if you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data – it doesn’t mean the ad is written. Then you’ve got to close the door and write something – that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.

Why do you say that?
I suppose with every passing year it gets harder for me to write any advertisement, because I never think I can do it. Sometimes I do write quite a good as, but whenever I’m faced with having to do one, I have absolutely no confidence in myself at all, and feel sure that I’m going to fail, that I’m never going to have an idea, and that I’m not going to be able to do it. This is quite a serious block. It’s made worse for me because I’ve written some quite well-known advertisements, and I love reading in the press about what a good copywriter I am. But that creates quite a problem for me because I think I used to be a very good copywriter – very good, but I don’t think I’m nearly as good today and I don’t think I can live up to my record.
You once described yourself as an "extinct volcano." I believe that was the phrase you used.
Yes, it was.

Why do you think of yourself that way? And why do you think you’re losing your touch?
Well, first of all, it’s a fact that I may not be completely extinct, I’m not erupting with the frequency that I used to erupt (laughter). I look back longingly on a period of about seven years when I was a real gusher of good ideas – I had good ideas all the time – quite a lot of them found their way into print, and some went into advertising history. Seems to me looking back at those days that I was a very fertile writer, but I’m not nearly so fertile today. I like to comfort myself by pretending that the reason is that I’m too preoccupied with management responsibilities and that I have no time for good ideas. But that’s really bunkum. I just don’t have them… but I do, sometimes …..

Do you have the time?
I really have plenty of time to have lots of ideas and do lots of copywriting, but I don’t do it because I can’t do it so well as I used to – or so frequently. There are various reasons for this. One is, when I started off copywriting at the age of 39, I didn’t know really as much as I know now about advertising; I was less disciplined and it was more or less a case of "a fool rushing in where angels fear to tread." Also, I didn’t know the conventions that arise out of research.

Therefore, I did a lot of work that was original. I didn’t know enough to be unoriginal. But the main thing is most copywriters, including me, are better in their 30s than they are in their 40s and better in their 40s than they are in their 50s. It is very, very rare for a copywriter to remain fertile after he’s 50 – and I’m 53.

(Mr. Ogilvy paused here and blew his nose in a red handkerchief of the sort one usually sees knotted around the neck of an Apache Indian. Under his conservatively-cut grey tweed suit he wore bright red suspenders to match.)

Mind you, there are some things you can do, and I do, to try and loosen yourself up if you’ve got to write an advertisement or get some ideas for some ads or tv commercials, and you feel empty or sterile and uninventive. There are some things you can do about it. Many people, and I think I’m one of them, are more productive and more fertile when they’ve has a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, or a good bottle of claret, I’m far better able to write. I also find that if I listen to music, this loosens me up. I also find if I read the "Oxford Dictionary of Quotations" for 15 minutes, this may start trains of thought.

Some writers have little rituals they perform before writing – like putting on a railroad conductor’s cap, for instance, and staring out a window before starting to write. You mentioned music and one or two brandies as aids in starting the creative juices flowing. Do you use these devices in a ritualistic way, at all?
No, I don’t as a ritual, by they way, I’m entirely unable to write anything – even so much as a simple letter – in my office. All I seem to be able to do is answer the telephone, have meetings and look at other people’s work. If I have to do some writing, I have to do it at home here in my office. At nights, or on weekends or in the early mornings.

I sometimes have been able to write some good ads by getting up at five or six o’clock and working through to breakfast. Mind you, for some years now I’ve been head of an agency and not really employed primarily as a working copywriter. We’ve got 50 working copywriters in our agency today and I have to be very careful. I suppose one of my chief jobs is to get good writing out of other people, and if I frequently enter the fray myself, and write a campaign, I’m placing myself in competition with one of the writers in the agency, and this doesn’t have a very good effect on that writer.

(At this point, Mr. Ogilvy digressed a little, to comment about award-winning copywriters and their reputations.)
Of course, by the time you win an award like the Hall of Fame, you have got to be well known as a writer. That generally means that you have had to graduate from the copy department into management and have got your name on the door, or else become famous in the advertising business for some reason besides writing. And I think you’ll find, in talking to most of the people who have won this award, that they are not really copywriters any more (if indeed, we ever were). I like to pretend I’m a copywriter and if you look me up in that reference work, "Who’s Who in Advertising," where everybody gets the chance to write his own biography, you’ll see I list myself not as David Ogilvy, "chairman of the board," but as "David Ogilvy, copywriter." I like to pretend I’m a copy writer and I hope I still am, after a fashion.

By the way, there’s another thing that happens to me and no doubt happens to other people in my position. We are constantly being given credit for advertisements which came out of our agencies hat we have had nothing to do with. Somebody will say, "Isn’t that a marvelous ad. Who did it?" And somebody will answer, "Ogilvy." Or "Burnett." Or "Bernbach." Well, what do they mean? What do they know? Nine times out of ten I personally didn’t do it, or, I expect, did Leo or Grib or Bill Bernbach. It was done by somebody in our agency, and this makes me feel like am awful fraud. Somebody who takes credit for other people’s ideas. I don’t do it on purpose, but it does happen in the course of events and I wish I knew how to stop it.

And sometimes, I’m beginning to think, too, that when you become the head of an agency, perhaps you’d better stop writing advertising completely. Raymond Rubicam, who was an extremely good copywriter, told me, in the early days of our agency, that I should never write another advertisement as long as I live. That I should leave that to others. And he could just be right.
(Mr. Ogilvy stood up gingerly, moved slowly across the room, savagely jabbed a smouldering log in the grate, returned and lowered himself back into his chair.)

I am…. Uh … rather depressed at the moment because I wrote an ad about a month ago that I thought was a very good one. I took a lot of trouble with it and stayed up half the night writing it, and I thought it was an absolute smash. And now, it’s beginning to dawn on mw that it’s not going to be okayed and it’s not going to run. I suppose this is something that most copywriters have to get used to and have to live with every day. But it’s quite a novel experience with me because I think I can say that up to this point every ad I’ve ever written has run, which I like. This one hasn’t run and I guess isn’t going to. And this makes me wonder whether I really ought to go on writing.

Do you think it’s not going to run because it’s too good or too bad?
It’s just because the client thinks it’s not appropriate to his company. And it may be that he’s right. I can’t possibly judge. Nobody can judge his own work. Incidentally, whenever I do write ads, I never submit them to the client, or allow them to be submitted to client, until they have been heavily edited by at least one other person. For example, when I wrote that advertisement for Rolls-Royce, which you may remember, I wrote 26 different headlines for it and then I go half a dozen other writers from the agency to go over them and pick out the best one. Then I wrote the copy (about 3,500 words) and then got three or four other writers to go over it and cut out the dull and obscure parts and reduce it down. I have to sit in judgement on a lot of copywriters’ work nowadays and I’m always irritated when they bring me just one headline. Why can’t they bring me one dozen, or two dozen? Anyway, I’m unable to judge the quality of my own work and I don’t see how any copywriter can. A lot of copywriters think they’re good judges of their own work. I know I’m not.