# “Confessions of an Advertising Man” — summary and review

> A chapter-by-chapter summary of David Ogilvy’s 1963 advertising book, whether it’s still worth reading, and five things he gets wrong, mostly about design.

- URL: https://cultmethod.com/articles/confessions-of-an-advertising-man/
- Author: Jon Persson, Founder, Cultmethod
- Published: 2020-01-08
- Updated: 2026-10-20
- Category: Marketing

_Confessions of an Advertising Man_ (1963) is David Ogilvy’s practical guide to running an agency, winning and keeping clients, and writing ads that sell. It’s well-written and entertaining, and I recommend it to anyone in business. But Ogilvy gets five things wrong, mostly about design. Below is a chapter-by-chapter summary, followed by my fact-checks.

> “Fourteen years before writing these _Confessions_, I had gone to New York and started an advertising agency. Americans thought I was crazy. What could a Scotsman know about advertising?
>
> My agency was an _immediate_ and _meteoric_ success.”

These are the words with which David Ogilvy starts off his legendary _Confessions of an Advertising Man_.

I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into when I began flipping through the pages of this book.

I thought I had purchased an autobiography, one which, if I was lucky, might teach me something about the creative industry.

But as I came to find out as I was flipping through the pages of this book after it had been sitting on my desk for a couple of months, it is _much_ more than that.

First, a short biography of David Ogilvy:

![David Ogilvy sitting in an armchair, smoking a pipe.](https://res.cloudinary.com/djdutbywn/image/upload/v1758991884/ogilvy-pipe_ktlc7x.jpg)

*David Ogilvy, the original Mad Man, in his element.*

## Who was David Ogilvy?

David Ogilvy (1911–1999) was a British adman who founded Ogilvy & Mather on Madison Avenue and wrote _Confessions of an Advertising Man_. Before he started his agency, he worked as a chef, a door-to-door salesman, a researcher for George Gallup, and an agent for British intelligence.

David Ogilvy CBE was born into a British upper-class family in 1911. He received a scholarship to attend Oxford University but was soon expelled for poor academic performance.

He went on to work as an assistant chef at Hotel Majestic in Paris for a year, before he returned to the UK to become a door-to-door salesman in Scotland. He was eventually hired as an account executive by the British advertising agency Mather & Crowther. In 1938, Ogilvy convinced his employer to let him work at Dr. George Gallup’s _Audience Research Institute_ in New Jersey for a year. He would later credit much of his success to what he learned working for Dr. Gallup.

During World War II, he worked for the British Intelligence Service and became an alumnus of the secret Camp X, a British paramilitary installation located in Canada, where he was trained in sabotage and close combat, as well as propaganda and psy-ops.

After the war, Ogilvy lived among the Amish for several years, before moving to Manhattan.

With the backing of his old employer Mather & Crowther, which was now run by his brother, he successfully launched an advertising agency on Madison Avenue: _Ogilvy & Mather_.

Over the years, Ogilvy and his ad agency did work for Rolls Royce, Sears, the British government, the state of Puerto Rico, Dove, Shell, and dozens of major brands in the CPG industry.

![The book held up against a backdrop of nature and an urban skyline.](https://res.cloudinary.com/djdutbywn/image/upload/v1758991862/book-nature_nvfpui.jpg)

*Image source: Jon Glatfelter*

## What is *Confessions of an Advertising Man* about?

_Confessions_ is a practical guide to advertising, told through Ogilvy’s own career. It covers leadership, getting and keeping clients, building campaigns, writing copy, and (less convincingly) design.

David Ogilvy wrote this iconic book in 1963, fourteen years after launching his wildly successful advertising agency. _Confessions_ quickly became an international bestseller. By 1988, Ogilvy wrote, it had sold about a million copies in 14 languages.[^4]

Like I said earlier, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book.

I thought it might be an ordinary autobiography, containing one or two nuggets of wisdom from one of the titans of Madison Avenue.

I was mistaken.

The autobiographical aspect of the _Confessions_ is simply a backdrop used to communicate lessons in leadership, client acquisition, client management, copywriting, and advertising, among other things.

_Confessions_ doesn’t concern itself with the abstract. Nearly every single paragraph is used to dispense some practical truth or piece of advice.

**It is, in short, a practical guide to advertising.**

---

## What’s in each chapter?

It’s difficult to find any fault in the structure of this book. The table of contents is, just like the book itself, extremely practical:

### 1. Foreword

The foreword, written by Sir Alan Parker, praises Ogilvy’s genius and explains the cult status of the book, but also warns of presumed embellishments about Ogilvy’s life.

### 2. The Story Behind This Book

In this chapter, added in 1988, Ogilvy explains the _raison d’etre_ of _Confessions_, briefly talks about cheap clients, corporate culture, and other things that are given a more in-depth treatment later on in the book.

### 3. Background

The origin story of David Ogilvy; from growing up in Lewis Carroll’s old house in Guildford, to being on Sir William Stephenson’s staff in British Security Coordination.

### 4. How to Manage an Advertising Agency

Principles of leadership, mostly told through anecdotes about Ogilvy’s days as a chef in the kitchen of Hotel Majestic in Paris. The principal role of a good leader: to provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do good work. Ogilvy also shares principles for being a good employee.

### 5. How to Get Clients

Acquiring clients as a small agency; addressing size objections; methods of self-advertising; the sport of sales; showing enthusiasm vs. indifference; the importance of setting criteria for prospective clients; how to avoid being pigeonholed; and the importance of being honest and showing your flaws.

### 6. How to Keep Clients

Cultivating long-term and mutually beneficial relationships with your clients; the importance of candor; why you constantly need to “resell” your agency to corporate clients; how to give more effective presentations.

### 7. How to Be a Good Client

Fifteen rules to extract the best possible service from your agency; questions to ask before firing an agency.

### 8. How to Build Great Campaigns

Ten principles of creating great campaigns; the importance of investing in a consistent brand image; the importance of Great Ideas; the role of facts in advertising.

### 9. How to Write Potent Copy

Features of effective headlines; features of effective body copy.

### 10. How to Illustrate Advertisements and Posters

Importance of story appeal and of great photography; advice on how to break up longer copy; mostly incorrect statements about design.

### 11. How to Make Good Television Commercials

This chapter is very brief owing to the novelty of television in 1963, and David Ogilvy’s inexperience with the medium; mostly contains general principles about advertising campaigns.

### 12. How to Make Good Campaigns for Food Products, Tourist Destinations and Proprietary Medicines

The value of content marketing, social proof, and fashion; the importance of never straining credulity.

### 13. How to Rise to the Top of the Tree – Advice to the Young

Becoming an expert on your clients’ businesses; how to blow your competition out of the water; how to navigate office politics; how to build a personal brand.

### 14. Should Advertising Be Abolished?

In this chapter Ogilvy presents anti-advertising and pro-advertising arguments from various economists, and argues for the economic benefits of advertising (to the public, not just individual companies).

### 15. A Collection of Ogilvy-isms

A short and incomplete list of the quotes & aphorisms David Ogilvy was known for, for example:

> “It is important to admit your mistakes and to do so before you are charged with them.”

---

_Confessions_ is well-written, practical, and entertaining. I cannot recommend it enough; it is truly a fantastic read.

However, the book is not without faults: in a couple of places, he offers advice (especially about design) which is wrong. I am sure that, in the spirit of admitting one’s mistakes and being honest, Ogilvy would have conceded these points had he only been better informed.

## What does Ogilvy get wrong?

Ogilvy gets five things wrong: reverse type, form versus content, balance and movement, serif versus sans-serif, and whether ads should entertain.

Here are the points which, after careful consideration, I have decided that Ogilvy is incorrect about:

### 1. Advertisements set in reverse (i.e. light text on a dark background)

Ogilvy talks about this as if it were a cardinal sin of design. You will find his statements on pages 21 and 139:

> “I recently counted forty-nine advertisements set in reverse (white type on black background) in one issue of a German magazine, long years after research demonstrated that reverse is difficult to read.”
>
> — David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (p. 21)

And, expressed more forcefully:

> “Never set your copy in reverse (white type on a black background), and never set it over a grey or colored tint. The old school of art directors believed that these devices _forced_ people to read the copy; we now know that they make reading physically impossible.”
>
> — David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (p. 139)

Look at this advertisement from Apple:

![Apple ad with reverse (white-on-black) type](https://res.cloudinary.com/djdutbywn/image/upload/v1758991860/apple-reverse-type_sqdpk2.jpg)

*Apple ad with reverse (white-on-black) type*

Were you able to read that? Good. So it should be clear that reading copy set in reverse is, in fact, not “physically impossible” at all. Not even close.

See, the reason why white text on dark backgrounds can be less legible is that lighter-value elements tend to bleed into the void of darker-value regions, causing them to look “heavier” on a dark background.

This can pretty easily be accounted for by increasing the _tracking_ (i.e. letter-spacing) of the lighter-value letters.

One might also opt to set the type in a light-gray/off-white color, and use a not-quite-black background to prevent the bleeding from happening in the first place.

So why would you reverse type in the first place? I’m sure there are many reasons why. The main ones that come to mind are:

- To emphasize something and draw people’s attention there

- To create a visually appealing design

- To break up blocks of text and make content more digestible

I’m sure these are all benefits that David Ogilvy would value very much, had he been better informed about the ways in which you can make reverse type just as legible as normal type.

Overall though, I think far too much emphasis is placed on legibility as opposed to aesthetic appeal.

Of course it’s important that people can read your text.

But beyond achieving a baseline level of legibility, marginal improvements in this area are very seldom worth the large sacrifices you have to make in terms of visual interest & dramatic effect.

_It doesn’t matter that your text is 0.1% more legible if it looks so plain and boring that no one bothers to read it in the first place._

### 2. The role of content and form in advertising

On page 110, Ogilvy claims:

> “What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the _content_ of your advertising, not its form.”
>
> — David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (p. 110)

He is wrong.

We are visual creatures at heart. The written language is, in the grand scheme of human evolution, a fairly recent invention.

Our brains are still wired to make decisions based on subtle visual cues. For most of human history, failure to do this _fast_ and _accurately_ would often lead to a gruesome death.

Modern behavioral research keeps showing that people make choices based on form, and that they often don’t notice it.

As Ellen Lupton states in her book _Design Is Storytelling_[^5]:

> “Seemingly minor design decisions—like preselecting a radio button or changing the color of a candy wrapper—can influence choices at an unconscious level.”
>
> — Ellen Lupton, Design Is Storytelling

For example:

> “Participants in a study were given three boxes of detergent to test over a period of time. The detergent inside the boxes was all the same, but the packages were printed in different colors: some were blue, some were yellow, and some were both blue and yellow. Users generally preferred the detergent in the multicolored boxes. They explain their choices in terms of the product’s performance, but in fact, the only real difference was graphic design.”
>
> — Ellen Lupton, Design Is Storytelling

That last bit may explain Ogilvy’s error. As a staunch adherent to _research_ and _consumer surveys_, he had no doubt found that consumers reported that their decisions were informed by the _content_ of advertisements. More on the dangers of relying too much on consumer surveys shortly.

For more on how our decision-making is influenced by design (and other seemingly irrational factors), see Leonard Mlodinow’s _Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior_, and [this _Psychology Today_ article](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/subliminal/201205/why-people-choose-coke-over-pepsi) adapted from the book.

---

### 3. The importance of “balance, movement, and design”

Quoth David Ogilvy:

> “Most of the art schools which train unsuspecting students for careers in advertising still subscribe to the mystique of the Bauhaus. They hold that the success of an advertisement depends on such things as ‘balance,’ ‘movement,’ and ‘design.’ But can they _prove_ it?”
>
> — David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (p. 136)

This seems like pure arrogance on the part of Ogilvy. Balance, movement, and design can create clarity and guide users to interact with something in a certain way. Not only do we look for and prefer objects that are visually pleasing to us; failure to resolve issues like balance and movement leads to confusion (and boredom) and makes whatever content you have worthless.

For an in-depth look at the practical usefulness of good design, see my article **[The business value of design](https://cultmethod.com/articles/value-of-design/)**.
---

### 4. Serif vs. sans-serif type

> “Serif type ... is easier to read than sans serif type ... The Bauhaus brigade is not aware of this fact.”
>
> — David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (p. 139)

This was indeed long thought to be the case. More recent research is mixed. Colin Wheildon’s studies in the 1980s found that sans-serif text hurt comprehension. Kathleen Tinkel argues that any difference “can be offset by careful setting,” and one study found that single words were read slightly faster in sans-serif.[^1]

As long as you are choosing between high-quality options, the choice of serif vs. sans-serif ought to be based on style, tone, and personality rather than hardly noticeable differences in legibility.

As a side note: Ogilvy seems to really have it in for the Bauhaus school. Regardless of what you think of them, it’s silly to fault them for this supposed design “sin” when Josef Albers, an influential Bauhaus figure, sings the praises of serif type (and criticizes sans-serif type) in the first chapter of his _magnum opus_, _Interaction of Color_.

---

### 5. Advertisements that entertain

Finally, Ogilvy sets up an interesting dichotomy:

That between advertisements that entertain, and advertisements that sell.

Based on research by Horace Schwerin, he claims that:

> “The purpose of a commercial is not to _entertain_ the viewer, but to _sell_ him. Horace Schwerin reports that there is no correlation between people _liking_ commercials and being _sold_ by them.”
>
> — David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (p. 145)

Modern research into the neuroscience of advertising would contest this view. Here’s Peter Murray, Ph.D. in consumer psychology, in Psychology Today[^2]:

> “Advertising research reveals that the consumer’s emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on their reported intent to buy a product than does the ad’s content — by a factor of 3-to-1 for television commercials and 2-to-1 for print ads.”
>
> — Dr. Peter Murray, How Emotions Influence What We Buy (Psychology Today)

Moreover, he continues:

> “Research conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation concluded that ‘likeability’ is the measure most predictive of whether an advertisement will increase a brand’s sales.”[^2]

Clearly, the idea that the likeability of an advertisement has no impact on how effective it is in generating sales, both runs counter to common sense (why would we buy from a brand if we don’t _like_ what they’re saying to us?) and modern psychological research.

So what’s happened since Ogilvy’s time? Did the facts change?

That’s doubtful.

The more likely situation is this:

Ogilvy, shaped by his time working for Dr. Gallup’s research institute, put too much stock in consumer surveys.

Douglas van Praet, whose agency created the wildly successful Volkswagen advertising campaign known as “The Force,” warns against the dangers of using marketing research as a crutch[^3]:

> “Despite lip service paid to emotions, businesses routinely make multimillion-dollar marketing decisions on the false premise that respondents in survey research can consciously explain the unconscious origins of their actions. They fail to recognize that most of the business of life happens through our emotions, below the threshold of awareness.
>
> For too long, standard marketing theory has had it backwards. The most startling truth is we don’t even think our way to logical solutions. We feel our way to reason. Emotions are the substrate, the base layer of neural circuitry underpinning even rational deliberation. Emotions don’t hinder decisions. They constitute the foundation on which they’re made!
>
> Emotions, not words, are the innate universal language of humans and the primary means by which we learn new behaviors. We learn best kinesthetically, through feeling not thinking, which is why ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and ‘talk is cheap.’
>
> — Douglas van Praet, The Myth of Marketing

By the way, here’s his Volkswagen ad, which he goes on to say might not have made it through the traditional research process:

[Volkswagen ad (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HugFW8rLZ8)

---

## Is *Confessions of an Advertising Man* worth reading?

Yes. It’s practical and entertaining, and anyone in business can learn from it.

One can easily look past these errors. Considering Ogilvy’s _Confessions_ were written in 1963, more than 60 years ago, at a time when the scientific disciplines of behavioral economics and neuroscience were hardly even invented, it is surprising that there aren’t _more_ errors to be found.

I’m sure some of the technical copywriting advice may be dubious or outdated. That’s not my expertise, so I’ll abstain from commenting on it. But overall, _Confessions_ is an extraordinarily useful and educational book, and it’s still widely read in advertising today.

This book has a lot to offer anyone who’s looking to become a better business owner, regardless of what industry they’re in. For people interested in marketing, it’s required reading.

PS. If you found this article interesting, you’ll _love_ [my companion piece on Ogilvy’s 7 principles of marketing](https://cultmethod.com/articles/ogilvys-principles/). It’s full of great quotes from _Confessions_.

[^1]: Wikipedia, _Serif, Readability and legibility_. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif#Readability_and_legibility) (accessed Oct 2026).

[^2]: Peter Murray, _How Emotions Influence What We Buy_. [Psychology Today](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-the-consumer-mind/201302/how-emotions-influence-what-we-buy).

[^3]: Douglas van Praet, _The Myth of Marketing_. [Fast Company](https://www.fastcompany.com/1682625/the-myth-of-marketing-how-research-reaches-for-the-heart-but-only-connects-with-the-head).

[^4]: Wikipedia, _Confessions of an Advertising Man_. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Advertising_Man).

[^5]: Ellen Lupton, _Design Is Storytelling_ (Cooper Hewitt, 2017).

---

Written by Jon Persson (Founder, Cultmethod). Cultmethod is the branding practice of Jon Persson. It sells one product, the Brand Sprint: positioning, visual identity, a website and an AI brand voice kit, delivered in 10 working days at a fixed price, for one client a month. More: https://cultmethod.com/index.md