How to Advertise

First published in 1976, a practical handbook covering the full advertising workflow: setting budgets, choosing media, writing copy, producing commercials, working with agencies. Kenneth Roman was chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather; Jane Maas was a senior creative executive at the agency who later wrote her own memoir of the Mad Men era. Now in 6 editions.

Ogilvy listed How to Advertise in the "Recommended Reading" appendix of Ogilvy on Advertising and wrote the foreword to an earlier edition. The book is the operational manual that matches Ogilvy's principles to the actual machinery of running campaigns — media planning, creative briefs, production, measurement.

For a founder who needs to market a product but does not know where to start, this is the book that explains how the industry actually works. What is a media plan? How do you brief a creative team? How do you measure whether a campaign worked? Roman and Maas answer these questions not from theory but from decades of doing it at the highest level. It is less about inspiration and more about process — which is exactly what most founders need.