If you’re a copywriter or marketer but don’t know who David Ogilvy is, then cast your eyes downward in abject shame; he basically wrote the book on modern advertising.
The Letters of Note blog just published his rightly famous “I am a lousy copywriter” letter detailing his twelve step process for writing an ad — something I’d read years ago in a book secretly assembled by Ogilvy’s colleagues without his knowledge (The Unpublished David Ogilvy).
I basically fell in love (again) with #7 and #12 (you can see all 12 here):
At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)
I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.
Ogilvy inveighed against irrelevant, shallow, underperforming ad campaigns, and his penchant for research — and for finding the drama inherent in every product — served an an able primer when I charged headlong into the advertising world of the 1980s.
Keep writing, Tom Chandler
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