Icon Scraping and Empathy
Part of my ongoing education/entertainment menu has always been dedicated to consuming the biographies, interviews and biopics of people in the areas I’m fascinated with: automobiles, design, leadership, war strategy, marketing, technology and innovation. Do you do this, too? I do it because somehow I believe I’ll be able to walk away with a small piece of them. My artist and photographer friend Ksenija has a different version of this where she touches works of art at museums (secretly, of course), hoping like I do that there might be some cosmic electron transfer in the act.
The type of material I love to consume from my hero list typically has two key elements: practical, use-this-today-in-your-life knowledge as well as a peek into personality of the person herself. Unfortunately most business books don’t give you the latter, so if you want to sink your teeth into your heroes you have to do a little bit of digging, collecting fragments here and there and compiling your own study course along the way. The above 1983 interview with David Ogilvy, however, gives you both practical know-how and a sepia-toned view into what it would be like to spend a dinner with him. It’s certainly worth your hour, if for nothing else to get a sense of how different the television interview is now from then.
Ogilvy is known as the pope of modern advertising and he’s comfortable at his pulpit here, even though David Susskind isn’t the smoothest interview (making him charming in his own un-polished way). It feels more like raw footage than the sort of thing we’d see from Barbara Walters. (Old-timey mark of excellence: both interviewer and subject are shifting around and leaning over and down constantly, something that that a modern day talking head has beaten out of him in media training). Perhaps because of that it’s one of the best things I’ve seen in a while.
Although Ogilvy and his team created works of art, he a staunch function-over-form-ist, relying on his clients’ market success as his preferred reporting system. My favorite part of this interview comes at 28:10, where Ogilvy defends his preference for writing long copy (industry jargon for, simply, a lot of words).
Ogilvy: “I can make you read an ad with 5,000 words in it. I can make you read any number of words by the headline. Do you know what the headline is?”
Susskind: “No. What?”
Ogilvy: “This ad is all about David Susskind. You’ll read it. The closer I come to that in the headline, the more people will read the ad.”
Empathy, as it turns out, is one powerful tool. It’s something that the best kindergarten teachers, moms and managers have known for generations.
Thanks to Miguel and Sam for sending this along to me.
