Here’s a wonderfully dated video of David Ogilvy giving what looks like a keynote address to a Direct Response Advertising conference (by video, which must have been breathtakingly modern back in the 1960s).
Ogilvy came from a background in research, and was an early proponent of AB testing. He had a huge amount of respect for the Direct Response Advertising industry (as opposed to what he called ‘General Advertising’ – Print, TV, etc.) – mainly for the fact that they were so focused on tracking response rates, and working towards winning ad designs. To quote:
“You Direct Response people know what kind of advertising works, and what doesn’t work. You know to a dollar. The General Advertising people don’t know. […] The chasm between Direct Response advertising and General Advertising is wide. On your side of the chasm, I see knowledge and reality. On the other side of the chasm, I see ignorance. You are the professionals. This must not go on. I predict that the practitioners of general advertising are going to start learning from your experience.”
It’s funny that, even today, the web industry is still catching up with this philosophy of metrics-based optimisation.
Does anyone know the date and origin of this video? (Found via @yandle.)
Great find @yandle, It reflects the sexist nature of the industry back then too, check out how many references there are to “him” and “his”…
Change ‘direct response’ to ‘usability’ and replace advertising agencies with design agencies and you have a pretty good representation of the state of the user experience industry.
Two comments
1. Yes David Ogilvy is a legend and i strongly recommend his book ‘On Advertising’ – it’s full of relevant and original insight, from a true innovator
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ogilvy-Advertising-David/dp/1853756156
2. It’s kind of depressing how unaware most ‘digital’ designers are of the history of Design and User Focussed creative work. I often find myself gritting my teeth when UX Designers flaunt the principles of UCD like a newly discovered craft.
Walter Landor, David Ogilvy, Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Walter Gropius – how often do you hear these guys referenced at Online events?
It can be a stark reminder of how digital design is still in it’s adolescence.
Absolutely brilliant. What a legend.
right on, david travis, right on!
This brought back a lot of memories (take it from someone who’s been around for a while). He was a legend.
David Ogilvy was born 1911 and so in the 1960s was only in his 50s. This video shows a man much older than that. Furthermore it was only later, in the 1980s, that Ogilvy worked for extended periods in India and so it seems likely that this video, showing a man in his 70s, was likely filmed in the 1980s, not the 1960s.