When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: ‘If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if e

Agencies are psychological hothouses. You will never be bored.

DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising.

WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA? You can do homework from now until doomsday, but you will never win fame and fortune unless you also invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.

The man who said the wisest things about leadership was Field Marshal Montgomery: ‘The leader must have infectious optimism, and the determination to persevere in the face of difficulties. He must also radiate confidence, even when he himself is not too certain of the outcome. ‘The final test of a leader is the feeling you have when you leave his p

‘Most good copywriters’, says William Maynard of the Bates agency, ‘fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end.’ If you are both killer and poet, you get rich.

Your next chore is to find out what kind of advertising your competitors have been doing for similar products, and with what success. This will give you your bearings. Now comes research among consumers. Find out how they think about your kind of product, what language they use when they discuss the subject, what attributes are important to them, a

POSITIONING Now consider how you want to ‘position’ your product. This curious verb is in great favor among marketing experts, but no two of them agree what it means. My own definition is ‘what the product does, and who it is for’. I could have positioned Dove as a detergent bar for men with dirty hands, but chose instead to position it as a toilet