Lois and Ogilvy on The Big Idea
As a panelist on a TV talk show, ad man and creative revolutionary George Lois was once asked to define advertising. After listening to the more scholarly definitions offered up the other ad execs on the panel, George commented, “I think these guys and me are in a different business,” and offered a more blunt, visceral definition.
Lois: “Advertising is poison gas. It should bring tears to your eyes. It should unhinge your nervous system. It should knock you out.”1
That’s George in a nutshell. Visceral. Bombastic. But in a less provocative mood, he summed his approach up this way:
Lois: “The common denominator of all my work is the unremitting quest for The Big Idea, because The Big Idea – a surprising solution to a marketing problem, expressed in memorable verbal and/or graphic imagery – is the authentic source of communicative power … [and] picks up force and speed because its element of surprise changes a habit or point of view.”2
He capitalized the term quite intentionally. Ever the branding guru (and self-promoter), Lois credits himself as the originator of The Big Idea, a fresh point of view that he claimed was “a distinct breakaway from the David Ogilvy ‘school’ of advertising with its well-behaved words, benign imagery, and rigid do’s and don’ts.”3
Lois: “Read Ogilvy’s stifling rules and regulations on art direction in his highly regarded book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, to understand how far apart he and I were on the subject of creativity.”4
While it is true that Ogilvy favored his rules (guidelines, really, formed by research into which techniques promoted the highest readership), Lois might be surprised to learn that David Ogilvy understood the limits of research and testing. As the legendary agency owner and writer later confessed,
Ogilvy: “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.”5
So yes, David was also a devotee on the power and necessity of the big idea – if not The Big Idea – though unlike Lois (“I never create the ideas that characterize my best work. I snare them from the air as they float about me.”6), showed perhaps more humility about the endeavor.
Ogilvy: “It’s horribly difficult to recognize a good idea. I shudder to think how many I have rejected. Research can’t help you much, because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea, and no idea is big unless it will work for 30 years.”7
As for where those big ideas come from, they’re surprisingly in sync on that, too:
Lois: “Big ideas can originate from a variety of sources. They can often generate electricity from that enormous reservoir of popular culture – the arts, sports, politics, history, today’s headlines8 … I spend all my time feeding the inner eye, the artistic persona that operates, somewhat mysteriously, from the subconscious.”9
Ogilvy: “Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.”10
As proof, Ogilvy cited his first commercial idea for Pepperidge Farm baked goods, which he was told was lacking in imagery.
Ogilvy: “That night I dreamed of two white horses pulling a baker’s delivery van along a country lane at a smart trot. Today, 27 years later, that horse-drawn van is still driving up that lane in Pepperidge Farm commercials.”11
Piqued by a photo of America’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Lewis Douglas, wearing an eye patch due to an injury sustained while fly fishing, Ogilvy impulsively placed an eye patch on the model in a photo for Hathaway shirts. As his biographer, Kenneth Roman, later explained, “He knew he had to have something unorthodox. The patch was there to imbue the advertisement with what Ogilvy called ‘story appeal.’ The reader wonders how the arrogant aristocrat lost his eye.”12
Ogilvy: “As soon as we saw the photographs, we knew we’d had something.”13
Despite being critical of much of Ogilvy’s output, Lois hailed the campaign as a masterpiece. Perhaps The Man in the Hathaway Shirt, an aristocrat stiffly posed amid the trappings of elegance, reminded him of the fine art from which he so often drew his inspiration.
Lois: I drink in that art created by generations of mentors who have been the antennae of human sensibility, artists who have kept faith with the past without being captive to it.”14
In fact, Lois went so far as to publish a book linking his Big Ideas to what he believes were their specific influences. In his hands (and mind), high-brow art was scaled down (and sometimes up) to the masses:
Called upon to help differentiate UniRoyal’s leathery vinyl, Naugahyde, from its copycat competitors, Lois traces his inspiration to a tiny Japanese sculpture of a snarling lionesque beastie.
Lois: “Designer Kurt Weihs and I spawned the ugly Nauga, a mythical species who shed their hide once a year for the good of mankind (and UniRoyal). The Nauga, taller than a basketball center, became a spokesman for Naugahyde on TV and in national magazines.”15
In another 1960s campaign, this one for Maypo hot cereal, Lois finds echos of the late-eighteenth-century Viennese sculptor, Franz Xavier Messerschmidt and his sculptures of humans in extreme emotional duress. Instead of kids pleading for Maypo, Lois’s commercial showed the anguished faces of the era’s greatest sports stars, including Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas, and Wilt Chamberlain.
Lois: “The words and visuals – superstars crying “I want my Maypo!” – gave the campaign extraordinary power. American kids ate it up.”16
(Twenty-five years later, Lois paid that inspiration forward, adapting his Maypo approach to a fledgling music channel, with Mick Jagger and other music superstars demanding, “I want my MTV!”)
A second look at the examples above make it clear that while Lois and Ogilvy may agree in principle on the need for a Big Idea, in execution, they were indeed worlds apart; while Lois was brash and showy in his advertising, David preferred a quieter, more genteel style.
Ogilvy: “I have produced my share of advertisements which have been remembered by the advertising world as “admirable pieces of work,” [but hold that] a good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. It should rivet the reader’s attention on the product. Instead of saying “What a clever advertisement,” the reader says, “I never knew that before. I must try this product.”17
On the other hand, Lois had bigger ambitions, of “creating imagery and slogans that not only sell products and services, but also become part of our popular culture and enter the American psyche.”18
Lois: The ethos of my life has been the passionate belief that creativity can solve almost any problem – the Big Idea, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.19
Perhaps, as befitting a man who came into advertising via research, Ogilvy had a more utilitarian view of the process.
Ogilvy: “I have to invent a Big Idea for a new advertising campaign and I have to invent it before Tuesday. ‘Creativity’ strikes me as a high-falutin’ word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.”20
* * *
1 George Lois with Bill Pitts, What’s the Big Idea? (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 4
2 Lois, Pitts, What’s the Big Idea?, 6
3 Lois, Pitts, What’s the Big Idea?, 5
4 George Lois, Damn Good Advice (For People With Talent!) (New York: Phaidon Press, 2012), 78
5 David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 16
6 Lois, Damn Good Advice (For People With Talent!), 15,
7 Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 16
8 Lois, Pitts, What’s the Big Idea?, 6
9 George Lois, George Lois on His Creation of the Big Idea (New York: Assouline Printing, 2008), Introduction
10 Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 16
11 Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 19
12 Kenneth Roman, The King of Madison Avenue (New York: Palgrave Macmillin, 2009), 90
13 Roman, The King of Madison Avenue, 89
14 Lois, George Lois on His Creation of the Big Idea, introduction
15 Lois, George Lois on His Creation of the Big Idea, 35
16 Lois, George Lois on His Creation of the Big Idea, 56
17 David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 90
18 Lois, Pitts, What’s the Big Idea?, 10
19 Lois, George Lois on His Creation of the Big Idea, introduction
20 Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 24
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