“Big Ideas In All Fields Come From Only One Place–They Come From The Unconscious”

Advertising legend David Ogilvy (of Ogilvy & Mather, of course) shares trade secrets with David Susskind in 1974. For better or worse, Ogilvy introduced market research to the movie business, which began way back in the days of Gary Cooper and Betty Grable.

From a Time magazine article about advertising in 1962: “Advertising is salesmanship—it is not fine art, literature or entertainment,’ insists David Mackenzie Ogilvy, 51, chairman of Manhattan’s Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. Yet it is Ogilvy’s flair for creating ads that are literate and entertaining while tugging at the purse strings that has made him the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry. It was Ogilvy who immortalized Hathaway shirts with Baron Wrangel’s eyepatch and bearded Commander Whitehead for Schweppes. Cultivated, charming and handsome enough to model occasionally in his own ads, British-born David Ogilvy studied history at Oxford, served a Depression stint as a chef in a Paris hotel, and sold stoves door to door in Scotland before coming to the U.S. to work for Pollster George Gallup. When he set up his agency in 1948, Ogilvy made a private list of the five clients he wanted most: General Foods, Bristol-Myers, Campbell Soup, Lever Bros, and Shell. Today he has some business from all five, and his agency’s billings ($47.5 million last year) are almost eight times greater than a decade ago. Recently he was selected by Washington to sing the charms of the U.S. to prospective tourists from Britain, France and West Germany. ‘Every advertisement I write for the U.S. Travel Service,’ he muses, ‘is a bread-and-butter letter from a grateful immigrant.'”

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