Almost forty years ago, storied ad man David Ogilvy sat down in an office somewhere in India and recorded a small film confessing the — as he put it — “secret weapon” of the advertising world.
It was a hot day, so he took off his jacket, exposing his infamous red suspenders.
Ogilvy spoke basically and directly to his audience on the other side of the camera.
The prophecy he uttered in that grainy 7-minute film all those years ago has come to pass, with a bullet.
Though visionary, Ogilvy could not have imagined just how potent his “secret weapon” would grow to be in the age of the internet, or how it would ultimately be wielded by people building media organizations with nothing much more than a laptop and sufficient quantities of sweat.
Watch the grand old man below. If you feel his suggestions outdated, you’re simply not thinking.
Make the connection between Ogilvy’s 80-year-old secret and the principles we talk about around here week in and week out.
There is nothing new under the sun, we need only the humility and wisdom to properly apply and re-apply what has come just before.
(And in case you’re afraid that Ogilvy’s legendary impatience with “creativity” means you have to be a hack, nothing could be further from the truth. Ogilvy wrote about the benefit of an ad writer being both a killer and a poet, and the ads he wrote showed he was a master of both.)
Ladies and Gentlemen, I envy you. For forty years, I’ve been a voice crying in the wilderness. These days, my first love is coming to its own. You face a golden future. ~ David Ogilvy
About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s resident raconteur and copywriter.
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