In 1960, I saw an ad that I never forgot. It was an ad for a Rolls-Royce. The ad made a spectacular implied promise: a high-quality automobile. Here is what the ad said:
That ad became legendary. It became legendary as an ad, and it became legendary as the most creative ad ever written by one of the great creative ad writers of the 20th century, David Ogilvy. his website reports the following:
This ad did more than sell a lot of Rolls-Royce cars; in a way, it sold a profession. When the ad came out, young copywriter Thomas Watkins wrote, "You tore it down and pinned it to your wall, and stole a look at it every once in a while, and hoped like hell you could do something near as well." It only ran in two newspapers and two magazines, yet was so widely known and admired that its headline – "At Sixty Miles an Hour, the Loudest Noise in this New Rolls-Royce Comes from the Electric Clock" – now represents David Ogilvy in the Oxford Book of Quotations."The Rolls-Royce budget was less than two percent of the Cadillac budget," reported Ogilvy. "We were asked to perform a miracle analogous to the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. This called for copy everyone would read and never forget."
Then comes the Pinocchio moment in his career.
Ogilvy immersed himself in Rolls-Royce data, which came to constitute nearly the whole of the body copy ("the coachwork is given five coats of primer paint, and hand-rubbed between each coat, before nine coats of finishing paint go on"). The famous headline came from a specific, obscure piece of testing data from the factory – a triumph, despite the ad's reputation as a creative milestone, of Ogilvy's faith in research.
Here is the truth.
It all began with this comment from direct response copywriter Bob Bly to Euro RSCG co-founder Tom Messner on Bly's blog:"David Ogilvy wrote: 'At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.' Madison Avenue wrote: 'At Ford, Quality is Job One.' Case closed."
Actually, things were just getting started. In the same string of comments tied to Bly's post, "Why I Don't Admire Jerry Della Femina," Messner dropped this bombshell:
"A guy I knew at BBDO had an ad for Pierce-Arrow circa 1932 in his office. (Jerry Gerber was his name.) Framed. It was the Rolls-Royce headline done for that company, Pierce-Arrow."
What you see at the top is a Pierce-Arrow ad that ran in the February 27, 1933 issue of Time. I believe it's the only image of the ad presently available on the Internet. My daughter and I retrieved it from microfilm with the help of the reference librarians at the Wellesley Free Library. The ad contained this headline:
"The only sound one can hear in the new Pierce-Arrows is the ticking of the electric clock."
Obviously, Tom Messner was right. But did David Ogilvy do anything wrong? Since Ogilvy was a proponent of fact-based communication, let's sort out some of the questions and facts.
What I find utterly astounding is that the man who posted this summary then goes on to defend Ogilvy.
Does this diminish the Ogilvy legend? No. If anything, it humanizes Sir David. We see a man operating on all cylinders (pun intended) to deliver the best possible outcome for his client. Ogilvy, through his agency work, lectures and books, probably did more to make clients and agency people successful than anyone who ever stepped into a Madison Avenue elevator. His agency remains at the top of the advertising game nearly 50 years after the Roll-Royce ad originally ran.
The advertising industry is already regarded by the general public as not significantly more moral than the used car market. In other words, the public regards the advertising industry as more trustworthy than Congress, but not much more trustworthy.
David Ogilvy was a thief. Let's not sugarcoat this. Here is what I think happened. He stole the ad's headline, and it ran in only two magazines. He figured he would get away with it. What happened was this: it became a legendary ad. Then he had to lie through his teeth about how he did it. He wanted to build his reputation as a great researcher. He really was a great researcher. He really was a creative person who came up with great headlines and great copy based on detailed research. But in his most legendary ad, he stole the headline, which is 80% of a direct-response ad's power.
There is a movie about this. Actually, there are two versions of the movie: The Producers. It's a story about a pair of previously honest men who go crooked. They sell co-ownership of a terrible play to a lot of old ladies. They sell more shares than 100% ownership. They take in a lot of money. This is theft. It is like fractional reserve banking. Their plan hinges on the play being a complete flop, which would close the first night. But the play becomes a sensation. It becomes the show everybody important has to see. So, they get caught. They go to jail.
He did not get caught in his lifetime, but his good reputation was never the same. Anyway, that's my hope. I really have seen no one come out and say this was a huge moral failure on his part. It was a moral failure to steal the ad, and it was a bigger moral failure to cover up the theft by a bunch of nonsense about his detailed research.
In 1960, there was no way that a long bankrupt automobile company was going to sue him for having stolen the headline. Hardly anybody would have known about it. So, he covered up the theft, not in order to save himself a lawsuit, but to save himself from public embarrassment among his peers.
He was creative. He was a good researcher. But he succumbed to temptation. He risked getting caught. So, he muddied the waters by inventing a tall tale about his detailed research as the origin of the headline. He died before anybody found out about it, and even today, not many people know the story.
Here's the lesson I took away from this: don't do something immoral in secret that you would not want to see broadcast on the evening news.
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