This review was published in German language, and in a slightly enhanced & more comfortable format, at my blog between drafts.

This is an excellent companion piece to Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. Quite frank and critical but not without self-irony, Ogilvy combines his personal experience with a vast knowledge into a primer on the advertising business—from getting a job to producing a tv commercial. What I like so much about Ogilvy is that he never tires to stress knowledge, research, testing, meticulousness, precision, and integrity—instead of “creativity,” on which the advertising industry relentlessly puts its focus. Of course, successful campaigns are highly creative, but, according to Ogilvy, creativity is a function of knowledge (not his words), to put it in a nutshell, and if it doesn’t sell the product, creativity doesn’t mean a thing in advertising. In several respects, moreover, Ogilvy’s texts are less “dated” than one should think. Firstly, although technology and the media have advanced beyond imagination since the early ’80s, Ogilvy has always focused on strategies that pretty much always apply because humans don’t change as fast as technology or the media. Secondly, although advertising back then was still “a man’s world,” as it were, Ogilvy touches upon women in advertising in ways that are way more positive and way less paternalistic than anything I have read so far from 20th century’s “advertising giants.”