When I’m stuck on a campaign strategy or struggling to write sample ad copy, I go to my little home library and often pick up Ogilvy on Advertising. It has guided me through all the latest marketing trends, algorithm updates, popular brand aesthetics, and whatever new platform promised to revolutionize how we reach customers.

What strikes me every time I read it is how complicated we’ve made advertising (and, by extension, marketing and brand).

We have more data available to us than ever before, and yet we collectively produce more content that only seems to spin our wheels. Meanwhile, David Ogilvy figured out how to sell stuff decades and decades ago using principles that many have completely forgotten or never bothered to learn. (How many of us have said or heard some sophomoric version of, “I prefer to work on intuition” from someone who refuses to learn from the masters?)

Most, if not all, of what Ogilvy wrote in 1983 is more relevant today than half the marketing advice cluttering up LinkedIn. Not because advertising hasn’t changed – of course it has – but because in the chaos of our modern world and limitless channels and placements to choose from, we’ve forgotten that success is often dependent on just a few basic, timeless principles.

So here are just some of the lessons from Ogilvy that not only stick out to me, but also still work. No fluff, no new frameworks.

There is such a thing as bad advertising

Let’s start with the scariest insight in the book. Ogilvy mentions a study where Ford put ads in every other copy of Reader’s Digest (pg 9). At the end of the year, the people who hadn’t seen the ads bought more Fords than those who had.

The advertising didn’t just fail, it actually made things worse. Ogilvy also mentioned a beer brand where consumption was lower among people who remembered the ads. The brewer essentially spent their ad dollars un-selling his own product.

This is terrifying! (Especially since there is a risk of not advertising at all.) We tend to assume that even mediocre advertising is neutral – that it just doesn’t work if it’s bad. But that’s not true. Bad advertising can damage your brand, confuse your customers, or annoy them so much they actively avoid you.

The question isn’t “should we advertise?” It’s “are we confident this advertising will help, not hurt?” If you can’t answer that with confidence, you may be gambling with your company’s money and reputation. Let’s raise our confidence with direction from Ogilvy himself.

Do Your Homework

A colleague of mine once joked that the title of my memoir should be Do Your Homework. Partly because I like to be prepared and expect everyone else to be, and partly because I tend to get on my soapbox about how homework is an essential part of doing good work. 

Ogilvy was pretty blunt about this, “You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework…there is no substitute for it.” (pg 11)

He didn’t mean skimming the brief or looking at last quarter’s analytics. He meant really learning the product. When he got the Rolls-Royce account, he spent three weeks reading about the car. That’s where he found the line about the loudest noise at 60 mph being the electric clock. It became one of the most famous headlines in advertising history.

“Before I wrote this – the most famous of all automobile ads – I did my homework. It ran only in two newspapers and two magazines, at a cost of $25,000. The following year, Ford based their multi-million dollar campaign on the claim that their car was even quieter than a Rolls.” (pg 10)


Here’s two more examples: 

  • When he got Mercedes, he sent a team to Germany for three weeks to interview engineers. The resulting campaign of long, factual ads increased U.S. sales from 10,000 to 40,000 cars a year.
  • For Shell, he discovered that gasoline had multiple ingredients including something called Platformate that increased mileage. That campaign reversed a seven-year decline in market share.

Here’s what kills me about this: how many of you would consider spending three weeks learning about a product to be excessive? “We don’t have the time. We need to move fast.” But Ogilvy’s point is that without this deep knowledge, you’re just skating on what his brother called “the slippery surface of irrelevant brilliance.” Sure, you might luck into something that works, but probably not.

The homework doesn’t stop with the product. You need to study your competitors. You need to understand how consumers actually think and talk about your offering. What language do they use? What matters to them? What would make them buy? Do they ever use the product in ways that are different than its intended use? 

The irony is that we have more data and research tools available than Ogilvy ever had, but I’d bet most of us know our products less deeply than he knew his. Without doing our homework, we’re just shouting about what we think the customer cares about – not what is going to motivate them. 

I would like to note that there are certain situations in which time is of the essence and there simply isn’t three weeks to spend on homework. I implore you to consider these two things:

  • In the motorcycle racing world we have a saying, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” To go fast, you don’t just yank on the throttle. You apply slow, smooth, steady pressure from the moment you crack it open to when you have it fully pinned open. Perhaps you should consider slowing down in order to go fast. 
  • If you truly don’t have weeks to spend on homework, you likely do have a day. Spending the morning reading as much as possible and the afternoon working toward that Big Idea is time worth spending. It will still get you further than if you did no homework at all.

“Good ideas come from the unconscious. The author dreamed about an old baker driving his horse and wagon along a country lane on his way to deliver Pepperidge Farm bread. Twenty-five years later the horse and wagon are still in the commercials.” (pg 19)


Positioning is Still a Big Deal

Ogilvy had a wonderfully simple definition of positioning: what the product does, and who it is for. That’s it! Not a complex framework. Not a positioning matrix with fifteen dimensions. Just: what does it do, and who is it for?

Here’s a classic example: He was the person who positioned Dove as a toilet bar for women with dry skin instead of a detergent bar for men with dirty hands. That positioning was still working 25 years later when he wrote the book, and it’s still working today, more than 40 years after that.

How many of us could state our product’s positioning that clearly? And if we can, have we stuck with it, or have we repositioned three times in the last five years because we got bored or a new CMO came in?

The Brand is Your Boss

Products are like people – they have personalities. The personality comes from everything: the name, the packaging, the price, the advertising style, and most importantly, the product itself.

Ogilvy’s rule: every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image, and your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year.

He acknowledges that this is incredibly difficult because there are always forces pushing for change, like a new marketing director who wants to prove their worth. However, I like to think of our roles in marketing as the guardians of the brand. Everyone else gets bored long before the customer does, and it’s our job to push back against internal pressure and our own subjective preferences out of deference to what the brand needs. 

The brand you work for is your true boss, not your manager. Consistency is how you build a brand that lasts – not by reinventing it every 18 months – and it’s your job to protect it from whims, boredom, and ever-changing tides.

“Leo Burnett’s campaign for Marlboro projects an image which has made it the biggest-selling cigarette in the world. It has been running, almost without change, for 25 years.” (pg 15)


Consistency ≠ Boring (You Still Need a Big Idea)

Big ideas come from the unconscious, Ogilvy says (pg 16). But your unconscious has to be well-informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. So you stuff your conscious mind with information (ahem, do your homework), then you unhook your rational thought process. Go for a walk. Take a hot bath. Drink half a pint of wine. And if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up.

I love this because it’s the opposite of the way most creative work happens now. We sit in conference rooms having “ideation sessions” based on nothing but a 34-page “brief” where we force ideas out, usually while staring at laptops and phones.

Ogilvy’s approach requires patience and solitude. Two things in very short supply.

But he also gave us a test for recognizing a big idea:

  • Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?
  • Do I wish I had thought of it myself?
  • Is it unique?
  • Does it fit the strategy to perfection?
  • Could it be used for 30 years?

Thirty years – not thirty days, not even thirty months.

“Sometimes, the best idea of all is to show the product – with utter simplicity. This takes courage, because you will be accused of not being ‘creative.’” (pg 16-17)


“Creativity” That Doesn’t Sell Isn’t Creative

Here’s Ogilvy’s definition of good advertising: an advertisement that sells the most, not one that pleases you because of its style. (pg 23)

The ad industry has always had this tension between art and commerce, but we’ve swung too far toward celebrating work that gets attention yet doesn’t move business. We’ve convinced ourselves that if something goes viral or wins awards, it must be working. Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t.

The goal isn’t originality for its own sake. It’s to sell.


You’re Not Advertising to a Standing Army

“You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. The advertisement that sold a refrigerator to couples who got married last year will probably be just as successful with couples who get married this year. A good advertisement can be thought of as a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping…measure the selling effectiveness of your campaign at regular intervals, and [to] go on running it until the research shows that it has worn out.” (pg 20)

Translation: when you get tired of your campaign, your customer is just seeing it for the first time. We kill campaigns because we’re sick of them, not because they’ve stopped working. Don’t stop the campaign when you’re bored, stop it when it actually stops working. A simple principle that deep down we all know, but rarely follow. 

Ogilvy covered Procter & Gamble and their approach at length. “They use research to determine the most effective strategy, and never change a successful strategy… Once they have evolved a campaign that works, they keep it running for a long time, in many cases for ten years or more. But they continually test new executions of the ongoing strategy. Once they establish an advertising budget, they continually test higher levels of expenditure.” (pg 156)

They’re not being lazy or repetitive. They’re being disciplined, and I think many of us have lost this discipline (if we ever had it in the first place). We’re constantly starting over, chasing new trends, reinventing the wheel while abandoning the foundational strategy that made the brand successful in the first place. And every time we do, we’re starting back from zero with our audience.


More Ogilvy Truths About B2B That Still Matter Today

Let me get down from my soapbox and rapid-fire a few more principles that still directly apply to what we’re doing today:

Headlines matter more than anything. (pg 39) In a typical print ad (remember those?), they get five times the readership of body copy. If your headline doesn’t sell, you’ve wasted your money. This applies to email subject lines, social posts, landing page headers, LinkedIn document covers, programmatic ads, everything. (And, if you find a headline that works – keep using it.)

Long copy works when you have something to say. (pg 139) Ogilvy found that long copy (more than 350 words) attracts more readers than short copy for products that require explanation. Products that require explanation… doesn’t that sound an awful lot like most B2B products and services? Short-form content has a time and place, but sometimes your customer actually wants detailed information, especially in B2B. 

Make your promises specific. (pg 137) Instead of generalities, use percentages, time elapsed, dollars saved. This is even more important now that everyone’s making vague claims about being “best-in-class” or “industry-leading.” Note how, among all of these tips and principles, this is one that you have likely grown tired of hearing and yet we all need this reminder. 

And related to this, be straightforward. Ogilvy says, “Some copywriters, assuming that the reader will find the product as boring as they do, try to inveigle him into their ads with pictures of babies, beagles and bosoms. This is a mistake. A buyer of flexible pipe for offshore oil rigs is more interested in pipe than anything else in the world. So play it straight.”

An example of a bad ad, trying to be clever and grab attention but instead being unclear and confusing. (pg 139)


There’s no such thing as a simple commodity. (pg 140) If you think you’re selling a commodity that can’t be differentiated, you haven’t done enough homework. The most successful commodity products still differentiate on either low cost or best reputation for quality and/or service. 

Measure everything that matters. (pg 141) Ogilvy recommends tracking inquiries religiously. Survey a sample of inquirers about their intent. Question salespeople about what happened after leads came in. Relate inquiries to the media that produced them. Ogilvy shared that one manufacturer reduced his ad budget by 25% just by figuring out what was actually working.

This is where modern analytics should be helping us, but instead, we’re often drowning in vanity metrics that don’t necessarily connect to revenue. Lead scoring is a basic, foundational tactic that everyone should be doing.


What This Means for You

The ad examples that Ogilvy shares do look very old-school – they probably wouldn’t cut it today. Tools change, platforms change, attention spans change, media changes. A TV advertisement in 1963 doesn’t necessarily work on TikTok.

But the fundamental principles of persuasion haven’t changed. People still want to know what’s in it for them, and they still respond to clear benefits, specific claims, and authentic testimonials. They still buy from brands they trust, and trust is built through consistency over time.

What’s changed is that we’ve made it all so much more complicated than it needs to be. Ogilvy’s genius was his ability to cut through all that: 

  1. Learn the product. 
  2. Understand the customer. 
  3. Find a clear positioning. 
  4. Come up with a big idea. 
  5. Test to make sure it works. 
  6. Then run it until it stops working.

That is not sexy advice that will get you speaking gigs about the future of marketing. But it will sell your product.

It’s tempting to think about what Ogilvy would do in the age of digital marketing – I’ve wondered what tips he might have, as well. The question we should be asking, however, is what timeless principles are we ignoring because we’re too busy chasing the next shiny thing? 

If your advertising isn’t working, it’s probably not because you need a newer tactic or a cooler technology. It’s likely because you skipped the homework or changed strategies before you even knew how the first one did.

The answers are usually simpler than we want them to be. They’re just not as exciting as we want. But exciting doesn’t pay the bills – effective does.


Still Not Convinced that Ogilvy Applies to You?

Let me leave you with two more quotes, directly from Ogilvy himself on B2B advertising:

“Admittedly an advertisement, however efficient, can seldom close a sale itself. Its function is to pave the way for salesmen, by pre-selling your product and attracting leads. In industrial companies there are an average of four ‘buying influences.’ Your sales force is unlikely to know all four. Sixty percent of ‘specifiers’ – people who set down the specifications that must be met – read advertisements to learn what’s on the market.” (pg 137)

“Many business purchases require approval from top management as well as the purchasing agent. Top managers may not respond to, or even understand, the details that are important to the specifiers. They are only interested in the broad benefits – particularly cost savings. It sometimes pays to run separate campaigns – one addressed to top management, the other to the specialists who read trade publications.” (pg 142)

Do “top managers” sound like what we call Decision Makers? Do “specialists” and “specificers” sound like what we call Influencers? I thought so.