Josue Valles

Josue VallesAug 25, 2026

David Ogilvy built a $363.2 million advertising empire. In 1982, he sent this internal memo to 3,000+ employees: "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." Then he gave them 10 rules: 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 as*. 5. Never write more than two pages on any subject. 6. Check your quotations. 7. Never send a letter or 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 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. --- Most business writing today is terrible, and AI is making it worse. Ogilvy understood that clear writing is clear thinking, and clear thinking builds better businesses.

Josue VallesAug 23, 2026

The best book on creativity I've ever read is 48 pages long, was written in 1939 by an ad man who left school in 6th grade, and takes about 30 minutes to read. Here's his entire method: The book is "A Technique for Producing Ideas" by James Webb Young. Young wasn't an academic...he was a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson who created one of the most controversial ads in history (a 1919 deodorant ad so blunt that 200 women cancelled their magazine subscriptions and female copywriters told him he'd insulted every woman in America. Sales went up 112%.) Here's the method: Step 1: Gather raw material (both specific and general). Young says the quality of your ideas is directly tied to the quantity and diversity of what you feed your brain. * Specific material is research about the actual problem. * General material is everything else: history, psychology, random conversations, unrelated industries. The more pieces you have, the more combinations are possible. Step 2: Mentally chew the material Take the facts and turn them over. Look at them from different angles. Try fitting pieces together like a puzzle. Young says most people quit here because it's uncomfortable...you're holding a bunch of disconnected information and nothing clicks yet. That discomfort is the process working, not failing. Step 3: Drop it completely. Stop thinking about the problem. Go for a walk. Watch a movie. Sleep. Your subconscious is still connecting the pieces even when your conscious mind has moved on. Step 4: The idea shows up on its own. Young says it'll come to you "while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning." This only works if you did steps 1-3 honestly. If you skipped the research or rushed the chewing, nothing shows up in the shower. Step 5: Test it against reality. Take your idea to other people. Let them poke holes in it. Young says most people are so attached to the flash of insight from step 4 that they skip this entirely, and the idea dies on contact with the real world. Good ideas survive criticism, but great ideas get better from it. My takeaway: An idea is nothing more than a new combination of existing elements. You can't combine things you haven't collected, and you can't connect dots you've never seen.

Josue VallesAug 24, 2026

"Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad." Howard Gossage wrote this sometime in the 1950s. Fast forward 7 decades and I wouldn't swap a word in that phrase. P.S. The same goes for everything you write aimed at getting someone's attention: posts, emails, landing pages, sales decks. People will read everything, long or short, as long as it interests them.