📚Book Club - Confessions Of An Advertising Man Part 1
Or: Why a 60-year-old book is still the best guide to the advertising world.
Hey! So we’re trying something new for the newsletter. Every Friday, we’re going to do a Book Club - a weekly post and thread about the book we’re reading at the moment. Let’s do this!
First up, David Ogilvy’s iconic Confessions of an Advertising Man.
So, first, a personal story: I switched over from journalism to advertising in 2017 or so. There were lots of industry similarities (love of the written word and storytelling!) and lots of differences (the client/account-first mentality, the holding company ecosystem, the generous expense accounts for medium- and high-level employees, etc.).
I first read Confessions in that context. It’s an older book, originally written in 1962. Author David Ogilvy founded Ogilvy and Mather and played a hand in many ad campaigns you know of today.
Anyway, his book helped simplify a lot of the industry stuff I saw firsthand--how agencies work, client-agency relationships, how agencies generate revenue and profit, and how the advertising industry views itse…
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