10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy

“Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints.”

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification,attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

David Ogilvy’s 20 unconventional rules for getting clients

Regard the hunt for new clients as a sport.Once you land new business, that’s when it’s time to become dead serious — until then — save yourself from dying of ulcers over lost clients. Approach the search for new clients with “light-hearted gusto”. Play to win but enjoy the fun.

Never work for a client so big you can’t afford to lose them.
Why? The fear of losing them, alone, will wreck your life. You will be unable to give candid advice, and “slowly become a lackey”. David Ogilvy once turned down Ford, saying: “Your account would represent one-half of our total billing. This would make it difficult for us to sustain our independence in council.” Landing your ideal client immediately may not be as great for your business as you think.

Take immense pain in selecting your clients.On average, Ogilvy and Mather would turn down about 60 clients every year. You too should be choosing clients before they choose you. The truth is first-class agencies aren’t in high supply. You have the power to select who you work with, so do it carefully.

Only add 1 new client every 2 years.You want to keep the clients you have. For life. That should be your #1 goal. And if you’re working with great clients and keeping them, then you’ll need only a few clients. David Ogilvy also discovered other reasons adding too many new clients hurt his business. Growing too fast led to hiring too fast. This led to not having well-trained staff. That led to diverting too much of his agencies best brain power away from servicing old clients and failing at keeping clients for life. Plus starting new clients off is often the most difficult work; because you’re building everything from scratch. So screw finding new clients, keep old ones.

Only seek clients with a product or service you are proud of. Unlike lawyers and doctors, professionals in the creative field can’t detach themselves from their work. If you privately despise your client’s product or service, you will fail. You need to have a personal fondness for the client you service before you can help them succeed.

Only accept a client if you can improve their existing work. Ogilvy was famous for turning down the New York Times because he“didn’t think (he) could produce better advertisements than the brilliant ones they had been running.” Don’t think you can create better work than what’s already there? Don’t take on the client.

Don’t take on clients whose business is dying. 
This can be tough when you need work, but if a client approaches you who you know won’t be able to stay in business, regardless of if they hire you, don’t take them on. It doesn’t matter how great your work is, nothing you do will make up for their deficiencies. You may be hungry for work, but the success of your clients, ultimately defines you. Your profit margin is too slim to survive a prospective client’s bankruptcy.

Only work for clients who want you to make a profit. Just because you produce results for a client doesn’t mean you will automatically see those profits come your way. Every client service firm treads a thin line between over-servicing clients and going broke, or under-servicing them and getting fired. Make sure your client’s understand that you too are making money — by helping them make money. Make sure they understand you are planning to take a percentage of their profit (however small). Don’t shy away from it and don’t pretend otherwise.

Don’t publicly pursue clients.
If a client announced they were considering hiring Ogilvy, he would withdraw his company from the race. His reason? “I like to succeed in public, fail in secret.”

Avoid contests in which more than four other agencies are involved.It’s way too easy to waste your time in meetings. Especially when you’re on the shopping list of every prospective client. You have other fish to fry — the fish of your current clients. Ideally you wanted to be courted by clients who have no other prospects in mind.

Getting new clients is a solo performance. The person who decides to hire you is almost always the top decision maker at the company. David believed, “Chairmen should be harangued by chairmen.” Additionally, he felt having too many people on sales calls caused confusion. That’s why singularity is an important ingredient in winning accounts.

Remain flexible when selling clients.It’s OK to rehearse for sales calls but David hated speaking from prepared text. A slide deck or written text locks you into a position which may become irrelevant during the meeting.

Tell prospects about your weaknesses.
David picked this up from antique dealers. He realized that when a dealer drew your attention to a flaw in the furniture, he almost always gained your trust. If you do this too — before the client notices your flaws on their own, you will also gain their trust. It will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points.

Don’t get bogged down in case-studies or research numbers.
These things put prospects to sleep. “No manufacturer ever hired an agency because it increased market-share for somebody else.” Clients care about themselves, talk about them.

Explicitly tell clients why they should hire you.The day after a new business a new client meeting, David would send the client a 3-page letter on why they should pick him. Today you can send an equally brief email to help clients make the right decision.

Don’t pay an outside source a commission for new business.David Ogilvy believed the type of clients this brought in weren’t worth the trouble. Today commission-based lead finders include recruiters, head-hunters, and even other freelancers.

Beware of clients who have no budget but a great idea. Even though they might become huge if everything goes well, it’s more likely that things won’t go well. Servicing these companies will be expensive for you and very few of them will ever make it worth your while.

Don’t underestimate personality. The difference between client service firms is not as big as we like to believe. Most can show they produced results that increased sales for some of their clients. Very often the difference in new business depends on the personality of the head of the agency. Know you will win and lose some clients because of your personality.

Fire clients at least 5 times more often than you get fired. 
Always do it for the same reason: if their behavior erodes the morale of the people working on their account. Do not allow this from any client.

Use what you specialize in to find new clients. David Ogilvy created ads selling his ad agency. You should dog-food your own service too. So how does your work help clients? Can it help you in the same way? For example, do you help them find customers by creating content? Create content for your agency. Do you do graphic design? Create infographics for potential clients. The trick will be to not just make thing that you like or impress people in your industry, but to make things that impress potential clients.

40 facts about Britain and the EU

Oliver Wright in The Independent

We have claim, counter claim; claims of lies, claims of lying about lies; claims of fact, claims of using misleading facts.

It would be fair to say Britain's political class has not exactly done many favours for themselves during the nasty, brutish and long referendum campaign.

And now it our turn to try and work out the truth as we enter the polling station. To help we have tried - as impartially as possible - to lay out 40 ‘facts’ about Britain's relationship with Europe. Some will, of course, dispute them and even facts can themselves sometimes be subjective. But this is our best attempt. Over to you...

The Economy

1 Britain’s net financial contribution to the EU is £9.8 billion – or £188 million a week – which is the amount we pay in after the rebate is deducted along with the money we get back in grants. It is not £350 million a week that the Leave campaign claims it is.

2 Every family would not necessarily be £4,300 worse off if we left the EU. This figure was based on a Treasury projection suggesting that the economy would be 6.2 per cent smaller than it would have been if we stayed in the EU - this figure was then divided by the number of households in the UK.

But, as the fact check organisation FullFact points out, changes to the economy do not affect everyone in the same way. Some regions may gain or will lose more than others, and poorer households are unlikely to be affected in the same way as richer ones.

3 Most economic experts believe that in the short term the British economy will shrink if we vote to leave. Business investment is likely to be lower, house prices could fall as people put off moving while sterling is almost certain to fall – at least initially. But this is more due to uncertainty than any underlying problems with the UK economy as a result of Brexit.

4 A fall in Sterling is not necessarily a bad thing. It would make our exports cheaper – and if the EU imposed trade tariffs on British goods those could be partly off set by having a weaker currency. However, it would mean imported goods become more expensive – pushing up inflation.

5 Leaving the EU would mean the reintroduction of duty free allowances when travelling to Europe. But there would also be restrictions on how much you could bring back. The days of the booze cruise to France would be over.

6 The UK has provided a total of €6.5bn (£5bn) via the EU for two bailouts: €3bn for Ireland in November 2010 and €3.5bn for Portugal in May 2011. With both Ireland and Portugal now out of their bailout programmes, the UK has got this money back. The UK has not made a contribution via the EU for any other eurozone bailouts.

7 The UK will not pay for future eurozone bailouts. This has been agreed by EU leaders. In addition, the UK-EU deal from February, which will be implemented if the UK votes to stay in the EU, reinforces this and states that the UK would be reimbursed if the general EU budget is used for the cost of the eurozone crisis.

Sovereignty

8 Since 1999 the British Government has voted against laws passed in Brussels 56 times – which have been imposed upon us. But that represents two per cent of the total EU votes during that time and we’ve been on the winning side 2,466 times.

9 There is no way of accurately measuring how many UK laws originate from or are influenced by Brussels. The leave side claims up to 70 per cent of laws have some European element contained within them – while remain says it is less than 20 per cent. Both figures can be justified depending on how you count them. But those at the higher end count EU rules that aren’t really laws in any meaningful sense.

10 We would still be a member of the European Court of Human Rights if we pulled out of the EU. The ECHR has nothing to do with the EU and contains a number of non-EU countries. It’s rulings would still be binding on the UK.

11 We would no longer be subject to rulings by the European Court of Justice. This court rules on whether member states have broken EU treaties and if we pulled out we would no longer have to abide by its judgments.

12 The EU has banned powerful hoovers. Vacuums with an input power of more than 1600w were banned from sale in 2014.

13 The EU did not ban bendy bananas. They did however set standards for imported fruit. One of the standards said the fruit should be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature of the fingers”, although only premium bananas sold as “Extra” class had to be perfect. Class I and II bananas could have some defects in shape.

Immigration

14 EU nationals who are currently living and working in Britain will be allowed to stay in the country even if we vote to leave. The Leave campaign have made clear that they will not deport anyone currently in the country and restrictions will only be for new immigrants. It is unclear when these might come into force.

15 Around three million people living in the UK in 2014 were citizens of another EU country. That’s about 5 per cent of the UK population. Figures for 2015 suggest that 1.2 million people born in the UK live in other EU countries.

16 In 2015, an estimated 270,000 citizens from other EU countries immigrated to the UK, and 85,000 emigrated abroad. So EU ‘net migration’ was around 185,000. That is the highest recorded level.

17 Britain still lets in more non-EU citizens every year – where there are immigration restrictions – than EU citizens. Last year 277,000 non-EU citizens came to live in Britain.

18 EU nationals of working age are more likely to be in work than UK nationals and non-EU citizens. About 78 per cent of working age EU citizens in the UK are in work, compared to around 74 per cent of UK nationals and 62 per cent of people from outside the EU.

19 Most research suggests that immigration does have a small effect on wages – benefitting medium and higher-waged workers and reducing pay for lower-waged workers.

20 Research by the Bank of England found that for lower-paid occupations, a 10 per cent rise in the ratio of immigrant workers to UK born workers was associated with a near 2 per cent reduction in pay. However it also found that immigration had no significant effect on overall average wages.

21 About five per cent of all staff working in the NHS have EU nationalities other than British. Of these 10 per cent of doctors and four per cent of nurses are EU citizens – the overall figure is made by including ancillary workers as well.

Trade

22 Currently the EU has trade deals with 52 countries. If the UK left the EU and wanted to retain preferential access to the markets of these countries, it would have to renegotiate trade deals with them.

23 Norway, which has access to the European Single Market, paid around £115 per head of population for that access in 2014. In the same year as a full member of the EU the UK paid in around £220 per head. It has to accept the free movement EU workers.

24 Canada has preferential access to the EU single market under the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement or Ceta. Leave campaigners say this could provide a model for the UK. But EU rules of origin require non-EU states to comply with detailed customs checks, to prevent imports entering the EU through a “back door”.So Canadian exporters have to prove that their goods are entirely “made in Canada”, which imposes extra costs.

Services make up about 80 per cent of the UK economy, yet they are only partially covered by Ceta. Importantly a Ceta-type deal would not give UK financial services the EU market access that they have now. It would be hard for London-based banks to get “passporting” rights for their services in the EU.

25 It is not strictly true to say, as the Leave campaign do, that since 1992, 27 other (non EU) countries have been more successful at exporting goods to the single market than the UK has. This figure merely looks at growth in exports – rather than the total amount. For example Vietnam is top of the list with a 544 per cent increase in exports – but it start at a low base of only £50 million a month.

26 TTIP would not allow American companies the right to "buy up" the NHS. This is a myth.

27 TTIP could make it harder for the UK Government to introduce such measures as a sugar tax or and alcohol levy. American companies selling into the EU could argue that they were being discriminated against and take there case to legally binding arbitration.

Free movement

28 Under the Dublin Regulation migrants who arrive in the EU have to claim asylum in the first country they enter. If they subsequently move countries they can be deported to the first country they arrived in. The UK deports around 1000 migrants a year using this process which would end if the UK pulled out of the EU.

29 If Britain pulled out of the EU there would still be free movement of people between Britain and Ireland as this was agreed in the 1923 Common Travel Area agreement – long before the EU was ever created.

30 The UK is not part of the Schengen Agreement – so anyone entering the country has to show a passport. But EU nationals cannot be turned away unless they pose a risk “on grounds of public policy, public security or public health”. The rules state that “criminal convictions shall not in themselves constitute grounds for taking such measures”.

31 Government statistics show that since 2010 the total number of EU passengers initially refused entry to the UK has been rising; in 2015 a total of 2,165 EU passengers were not allowed in. That is about 1 in 20,000 EU nationals coming to the UK.

New EU members

32 Turkey could not join the EU without the explicit permission of a British Prime Minister. All EU countries have an absolute veto on new members joining. However Britain’s official foreign policy at present is to support Turkey’s membership.

The NHS

33 The independent fact checking charity Full Fact estimates that in 2014, migration from the EU added £160 million in additional costs for the NHS across the UK.

34 Last year NHS costs went up by £2.8 billion due to inflation and rising wages.

Farming, fishing and science

35 EU subsidies account for 50 per cent of British farm incomes. In 2014, farmers in the UK received £3.19bn in subsidies. The average payment was £17,735. The highest was almost £2 million.

36 European fishing fleets are given equal access to EU waters and fishing grounds up to 12 nautical miles from the coasts of EU member states under the Common Fisheries Policy. e UK to leave the EU, the status of its fishing waters would depend on whether the UK would allow access by foreign vessels to its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). An EEZ extends 200 nautical miles (370km) off a country's coastline. It gives the state the authority to control the fish resources within it.

37 Between 2007 and 2013 official figures suggest Britain paid in 5.4 billion euros to EU research and development funds and received 8.8 billion back.

38 The European Space Agency (ESA) and the EU are two separate organisations with different member states, different competencies, and different rules and procedures. A UK exit from the European Union should not affect the country's involvement with ESA.

Crime

39 In 2014 the UK’s National Crime Agency issued 219 European Arrest Warrants for suspects in other EU countries and 228 in 2014. In return the National Crime Agency received 5,522 EAWs requests in 2013, and 13,460 in 2014. If Britain left the EU it would have to renegotiate with other countries about retaining the current system.

The Future of Brexit

40 Nothing would change with our relationship over night if we voted to leave. What would follow a leave vote is years of negotiations around our future relationship with Europe. In this process almost everything would be up for grabs. Even if we vote to leave today we would probably not ‘leave’ the EU much before 2020.

Denial then panic: how the EU misjudged the British mood

Natalie Nougayrède in The Guardian

European leaders and officials have had a rocky ride leading up to the EU referendum in the UK. First, there was complacency and denial, then a sense of panic, and now a muddled attempt to prepare next steps, whatever the result of the vote.

Six months ago, when David Cameron was trying to wrap up his renegotiation with the EU, the mood in European capitals was one of barely hidden annoyance – the “British question” needed to be dealt with swiftly so that the EU could get back to addressing more serious and pressing challenges than the requests coming from London.

Yet later, as opinion polls in Britain narrowed, the reaction shifted to a mixture of panic and bewilderment that Brexit might actually happen, bringing far-reaching consequences for the whole EU bloc. Now, days before the vote, minds have started to focus on what should be done to strengthen the European project, whichever way the referendum goes. But the answer to the question of “the day after” remains blurry – not least because of the shaky state of the Franco-German engine, which has always been key to the EU’s solidity.

For months, EU leaders kept mostly silent. They saw the prospect of a UK referendum as a tedious, unnecessary sideshow distracting attention from the more urgent and deeper matters the continent was confronted with – the Greek euro crisis, dealing with Russia, terrorism, migration and asylum questions.

European officials wanted the British question out of the way as fast as possible. The widely shared assumption was that Britons would be pragmatic enough to see pulling their country out of the EU was an utterly irrational and self-damaging move. Cameron had discreetly asked fellow EU leaders to refrain from wading into the referendum debate, for fear their input would be counterproductive. His hopes rested on the message Barack Obama would deliver while in London. But as time passed, it became obvious that hadn’t done the trick.

Barack Obama in the UK in April, when he warned against leaving the EU. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

When concern grew, prominent European voices started openly sending warnings. At an event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Verdun, the leaders of France and Germany criticised opponents of the EU. “They denounce Europe as the source of evil, without realising that Europe was created out of the ravages of evil,” said François Hollande. “It is important for the survival of the European Union that we not retreat within ourselves but remain open to the other,” said Angela Merkel.

Hitting an economic nerve, Germany’s finance minister made plain that if Britain quit the EU, it would deprive itself of access to the single market. Following the Swiss or Norwegian model “won’t work”, said German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble: “In is in, out is out”. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the EU commission, said that if it quit the bloc, “the United Kingdom won’t be handled with kid gloves”.

EU leaders have in fact been struggling to find the right balance between two conflicting priorities: the need to demonstrate that Brexit could not be painless, to discourage other member states from contemplating a special status or from withdrawing from the bloc; and the need to limit the damage in case of a British departure by stating that cooperation would be preserved regardless.

Perhaps nowhere in the EU is the geopolitical fallout of a possible Brexit being watched with more anxiety than in the Baltic states. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia, a country of 1.5 million where concern over Russian aggression has ridden high, said last month that over the past two decades he’d never been less optimistic about Europe’s prospects. He listed “the rise of populism and serious talk of the UK leaving the EU” among the most worrying developments.

In eastern Europe, “countries that had finished a 15-year odyssey to rejoin Europe” suddenly felt that “the world around us began to unravel”, Ilves said.

Britain’s withdrawal would mark a weakening of Europe’s liberal democratic order, many participants agreed. Some pointed to how Russian propagandists were trying to capitalise on European divisions, anticipating Brexit as a watershed. “The sands of Europe are shifting under our feet,” said one speaker. Britain is the only country that ever committed to carrying out an in/out referendum, but surveys show there are many in favour of holding similar consultations in other countries (53% in France; 49% of Swedes).

Last week, leaders of Europe’s largest far-right and populist parties gathered near Vienna to urge Britons to leave the 28-nation bloc. The meeting, called the Patriotic Spring, was designed to strengthen cooperation among anti-immigration, Europhobic movements that have been on the rise across Europe and see Brexit as a decisive, galvanising factor.

Marine Le Pen and Austrian far-right leader Heinz-Christian Strache arrive at the Patriotic Spring meeting in Vienna. Photograph: Heinz-Peter Bader/Reuters

The leader of France’s National Front, Marine Le Pen, told the crowd that “the peoples of Europe” should “take back their liberties” just like “the United Kingdom is regaining its liberty”. Hosted by Austria’s Freedom party, which came close to winning presidential elections in May, the event was attended by representatives from nine countries, including from Germany’s Alternative for Germany party and Italy’s Northern League party.

For many on the continent, Britain’s specific identity – being “of” Europe rather than fully “in” it – was never much in doubt, but there has been deep annoyance about how Cameron has put the very destiny of the EU at stake by falling into a political trap of his own making, ever since he called for a referendum in 2013.

The irony, many European diplomats and experts say, is that if it were to leave the EU now, Britain would be shunning a club that has arguably never been as “British” in its mindset. Events and crises have forced the EU to focus on trying to deliver concrete, pragmatic solutions to immediate problems rather than entertain abstract notions such as “ever closer union” that the British dislike.

Once emphatic talk of deepening political integration, for example, through initiatives meant to strengthen eurozone governance or to work on a common European defence and security policy, has become cautious. That’s because France and Germany do not necessarily see eye to eye on how to proceed. Their leaders are faced with important elections next year and the rise of Eurosceptic movements in both countries is having a paralysing effect. Pro-EU statements will surely follow the British vote, whichever way it goes, but rapid and effective decision-making seems highly uncertain, say diplomats.

One widely shared sentiment is that Brexit would represent a deep danger to Europe’s democratic ideals because of possible domino effects and because of the overall popular loss of confidence in the EU it would signal. Karel Schwarzenberg, a former Czech foreign minister who was a close friend of Václav Havel, once an important voice of Europe’s moral conscience, takes the historical perspective: “We in Europe have had the great opportunity over the last half-century to create a sense of common identity and interest – why throw that away?”