13THE NOISY ENGINE AND THE
QUIET CLOCK

In 1949, after working at a number of other agencies David Ogilvy left to help found a new agency. Ogilvy & Mather is today one of the largest advertising agencies in the world and part of the even larger WPP marketing services group. In 1953 Ogilvy & Mather won the prestigious Rolls Royce account and David Ogilvy and his team set about creating some new advertising for the brand.

Ogilvy believed in the importance of research and so immersed himself in the brand, its cars and its history. He avidly read all he could about how the cars were designed, how they were made and how they performed.

Several days into his research, he came cross a line in a technical report that stopped him in his tracks. It referred to some testing done on noise levels inside the car while travelling at various speeds. It was an unusual piece of information but one that he felt epitomized the superb engineering skills of the Rolls Royce engineers.

It read simply: “At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in the Rolls Royce was the ticking of the clock.” David Ogilvy had not only discovered an intriguing, little known fact about the car’s performance but had found a headline too!

And the moral is that it pays to interrogate your product until it squeaks. What is your product’s true competitive advantage?