Where Did David Ogilvy Find the Rolls-Royce Clock Headline?

David Senra says David Ogilvy found the Rolls-Royce headline in an obscure engineering document that was not written as an ad and was not meant for the outside world. Senra recalls the search as hundreds of pages about the car, and he is telling that part from memory. The line became the basis of one of Ogilvy's most successful campaigns: at 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.

The book's line, as Senra reads it, is that genius is the art of taking pains. An ad writer needs full information on the subject. A painstaking advertising person will often read for weeks. Many volumes may hold few facts worth using, and one fact may be the keystone. For a toothpaste, Hopkins read volumes of scientific matter, dry as dust, and found in the middle of one volume the idea that helped make millions for that maker. The person who spares the midnight oil will never get very far. Weeks of work sit behind an ad that has to look simple. Behind it may lie reams of data, volumes of information, and months of research.