Advertising agencies have a genius for wheel-spinning. The average time it takes them to produce a campaign is 117 days – faster than goats but slower than hyenas. Ambition Few copywriters are ambitious. It does not occur to them that if they tried hard enough, they might double the client’s sales, and make themselves famous. ‘Raise your sights!’ I exhort them. ‘Blaze new trails! Hit the ball out of the park!! Compete with the immortals!!!’ Leo Burnett said it better, ‘When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.’ Pursuit of knowledge I once asked Sir Hugh Rigby, Surgeon to King George V, ‘What makes a great surgeon?’ Sir Hugh replied, ‘There isn’t much to choose between surgeons in manual dexterity. What distinguishes the great surgeon is that he knows more than other surgeons.’ It is the same with advertising agents. The good ones know more. I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any; he preferred to rely on