Investment Executive | How to Spend Your Summer Vacation
Good advice, it can be said, is timeless. Confessions of an Advertising Man (Southbank Publishing, 190 pages, $21.95), written in 1963 by iconic ad man David Ogilvy, contains plenty of tips and guidance about business and life in general. Much of this book is as relevant today as it was when Ogilvy first banged it out on his Olivetti typewriter five decades ago.
Ogilvy played a major part in launching the “golden age of advertising,” a phenomenon of 1960s corporate and social culture that serves as the backdrop for baby boomers’ fondest memories. It’s the zeitgeist of three-martini lunches and glitzy cigarette commercials that inspired the TV seriesMad Men. But Ogilvy was the real thing. He built from scratch one of the world’s largest ad agencies and was already a titan of Madison Ave. when he wrote Confessions — a delightful read that is still, deservedly, in print.
The book presents itself as a guide for those who aspire to achieve Ogilvy’s lofty success in the advertising business. But, with chapter titles like “How to get clients,” “How keep clients” and “How to rise to the top of the tree,” it contains a wealth of advice that could be applied directly to a financial advisory practice in the 21st century.
“If you make yourself indispensable to a client,” Ogilvy wrote, “you will never be fired.” Great advice for advertising agents — and financial advisors — that Ogilvy discovered while working as a chef in Paris.
Other quotable gems: “What you say is more important than how you say it.” “You cannot bore people into buying.”
Yet some passages in the book remind us how much the world has changed in the past 50 years. Ogilvy’s advice on how to get the most from a vacation, quoted below, swings from the wise to the wacky: