David Ogilvy - Entrepreneurial Skills
For those who are interested, the very first thing that David Ogilvy wrote in a professional capacity is still available on the web. It goes by the rather recondite title ‘The theory and practice of selling the Aga cooker’ and was written in 1935, when he was in his mid20s and working as a salesman for the UK’s iconic cooker company. Of course, given its vintage, it’s full of retrospectively amusing sexist howlers. But even so, it’s a clear, persuasive and compelling read, 75 years on, with memorable lines such as ‘The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bulldog with the manners of a spaniel.’ Fortune magazine once called it ‘the best sales manual ever written’.
Much of modern advertising owes its existence to David Ogilvy and his ideas. Many iconic mascots, slogans and brand identities owe their existence to Ogilvy and the agency he founded. Yet in many ways he was far from a typical ad man. In an industry famed for its ruthlessness and cynicism, he was anything but. In fact, if anything, his greatest single insight was nothing more than that consumers might actually be intelligent and shouldn’t be treated as idiots. He disdained the idea of advertising as some sort of creative art and was frank about its job as selling. (He said, ‘If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative’ and ‘I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.’) Yet his ads were about ideas, he wrote untold reams of copy (and never quite got on with television) and he was educated, deeply cultured and immensely witty. Indeed, he could barely open his mouth without bons mots dropping out.
One of his most famous quotes (and he was immensely quotable) is ‘The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.’ Other great diktats included ‘Never run an advertisement you wouldn’t want your family to see’ and ‘Tell the truth but make it fascinating.’ He also famously used the products he advertised whether they were Rolls-Royces or shirts. He described this as ‘elementary good manners’. He even resigned accounts when he felt he could no longer believe in the product.
David Ogilvy was born in West Horsley, not far from London, in 1911. His father was a stockbroker, whose business had been badly affected by the economic downturn of the 1920s. As a result, his upbringing is probably best characterized as one of genteel poverty. He attended St Cyprian’s School, Eastbourne, on reduced fees, before winning a scholarship to Fettes College, Edinburgh (the same school that Tony Blair attended), at 13. Afterwards, he won a scholarship to Oxford to study history at Christ Church in 1929. However, student life didn’t agree with him. He described himself as a ‘dud’ and was eventually sent down for laziness; he later described this as ‘the real failure of my life’. In 1931, he moved to Paris, where he got a job at the Hotel Majestic. This lasted a year; he said that it taught him discipline and management – and when to move on. ‘If I had stayed at the Majestic I would have faced years of slave wages, fiendish pressure and perpetual exhaustion.’
So Ogilvy returned to England, where he began selling the Aga cooker door to door. He was, by all accounts, an outstanding salesman. This was noticed at Aga headquarters, and he was asked to write an instruction manual for other salesmen in 1935. His brother, who worked in advertising for the firm Mather & Crowther, read the manual and was impressed. This was Ogilvy’s first big break. Ogilvy’s brother showed it to his colleagues, with the result that Ogilvy was offered the position of Account Executive. Ogilvy showed an early flash of genius when he was given only $500 to advertise a newly opened hotel. Even in the 1930s, this was a derisory amount. He spent it on postcards and then sent them to everyone in the area phone book; the hotel opened full. After his method succeeded he wrote that ‘I have tasted blood.’ It gave him a lifelong belief in direct marketing, which has always been seen as advertising’s poor and slightly disreputable relation.
Three years later, he managed to convince the agency to send him to the United States for a year. He was a hit with Americans (back then a British accent really did open doors) and became fascinated by the country.At the end of the year he resigned from Mather & Crowther and joined George Gallup’s national research institute. His job for Gallup was gauging the popularity of Hollywood movie stars and stories for the studios. This work gave him an opportunity to travel widely in the United States and learn a great deal about it and also taught him the value of understanding what ordinary people thought.
During the Second World War, he worked in intelligence at the British Embassy in Washington. Although this work involved being trained as a spy, what he wound up doing was more humdrum – report writing and analysis. During this time he tried to bring his knowledge of behaviour to matters military and diplomatic. His reports were well received. After the war Ogilvy made another change in direction. He bought a farm in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which is famous for its Amish population. There, he farmed for several years, growing tobacco, although eventually he recognized that he was never going to make a success of farming, much as he loved the area and some aspects of the lifestyle.
In 1948, he was ready to found his own agency. He called it Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather and did it with the backing of Mather & Crowther in London. At the time, he had $6,000 in the bank and was 38 years old. Despite his time in advertising and with Gallup, his CV really was pretty thin. He memorably noted afterwards that, at this point, he had never actually written an advertisement in his life. Indeed, by the time most people are well on their way up the ladder, Ogilvy had an eclectic smattering of experience in disparate (and mostly irrelevant) fields, had no degree and was unemployed.
However, he did have a feel for advertising, and the new company’s ads were soon huge hits. Ogilvy memorably told us that Dove soap was a quarter moisturizing cream, and Dove went on to become the biggest brand in its sector. He invented the man in the Hathaway shirt, an aristocrat who had lost an eye and had to wear a patch. The patch instantly made a fairly nondescript middle-aged man in a shirt an object of mystery and intrigue. Ogilvy’s copy at the bottom helped, of course, for he had a wonderful if rather strange way with words. The copy famously began ‘The melancholy disciples of Thorstein Veblen would have despised this shirt.’ Veblen was a sociologist and the author of The Leisure Class. It’s doubtful whether even 1 per cent of people who saw the ad knew this, but it was a great and intriguing story, and an icon was born. Hathaway’s sales shot up, and the company became a major brand. Ogilvy later wrote that the success of his one-eyed aristocrat baffled even him: ‘Exactly why it turned out to be so successful, I shall never know. It put Hathaway on the map after 116 years of relative obscurity.’
He memorably had a stab at rebranding Puerto Rico as a cultural destination, saying ‘Pablo Casals is coming home to Puerto Rico.’ It worked. The company’s Schweppes ads that featured a cultured Brit coming to the United States offering Schweppervescence ran for an extraordinary 18 years. As Ogilvy once said, ‘every advertisement must contribute to the complex symbol which is the brand image’. He was a man of great charm. In the early 1960s Time magazine reported that he’d been given an account to sell the United States as a tourist destination to various West European countries, ‘Every advertisement I write for the US travel service’, Ogilvy quipped, ‘is a bread and butter letter from a grateful immigrant.’
In 1959, the agency won the Rolls-Royce account. This campaign was one of his favourites. It read, ‘At 60 miles per hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.’ It was a great success. Over its first 20 years, and from a standing start, the agency won prestige accounts such as Lever Brothers, General Foods, American Express, Shell and Sears. Indeed, if Ogilvy had a flaw, it might have been a tendency to oversell himself. He wrote of this time, ‘I doubt whether any copywriter has ever had so many winners in such a short period of time’, adding that the agency was ‘so hot that getting clients was like shooting fish in a barrel’.
Perhaps because of his vanity, some said that his greatest creation was himself. Still, as they say, he had a great deal to be immodest about. He was a great writer, with a quick wit, who combined British manners, accent and eccentricity with American hard work and a distaste for the self-love of his industry. Physically he was striking – tall and red-haired – and he dressed stylishly and smoked a pipe. Set against all this, was a rather large ego so bad? In the early 1960s Ogilvy decided to write a book. It was intended to be a how-to manual for those entering the industry. With an ear for a snappy title he called it Confessions of an Advertising Man. With its crisp prose and catchy name, the book reached an audience far beyond Madison Avenue. The initial print run was 5,000, but to date it has sold over a million copies and is still considered required reading in the industry. He went on to write two other books.
Thirty-three years after founding his agency he wrote the following memo to another director:
Will Any Agency Hire This Man? He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing and had never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will hire him. However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world. The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.
As Stephen Bayley (2009) wrote in the New Statesman, ‘Ogilvy’s psychology was complicated. He knew Shakespeare and wrote beautifully, but wanted to be seen only as an evolved version of the doorstepping salesman that was his first career incarnation.’
Yet for all his towering self-love, many others loved him too. When Kenneth Roman wrote The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the making of modern advertising (2009), few felt that the title was inaccurate or grandiose.
In 1973, Ogilvy retired as Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather and moved to Touffou, his vast estate in France. According to the company’s website, he stayed in touch with the firm, and ‘his correspondence so dramatically increased the volume of mail in the nearby town of Bonnes that the post office was reclassified at a higher status and the postmaster’s salary raised’.
His career wasn’t over, though. In 1989, the Ogilvy Group was bought by Martin Sorrell’s WPP in a hostile takeover. Ogilvy famously called Sorrell uncomplimentary names. But, although there were many in advertising who were less than keen on Sorrell’s way of doing things, here it was Sorrell, not Ogilvy, who knew which way the wind was blowing. Indeed, in the way that Ogilvy was a great founder of modern advertising, it was Sorrell who decades later would drag it kicking and screaming into the information age. Ogilvy was clever enough to realize that Sorrell was the new king – and Sorrell magnanimous and shrewd enough to retain Ogilvy’s services. They made up, WPP became the largest communications firm in the world, and Ogilvy became Non-Executive Chairman, a position he held for three years. Only a year afterwards, Ogilvy said: ‘When he tried to take over our company I would have liked to have killed him. But it was not legal. I wish I had known him 40 years ago. I like him enormously now.’ Ogilvy is said to have sent Sorrell the only letter of apology he ever wrote, and the latter is supposed to have it on his office wall.
David Ogilvy died on 21 July 1999 at his home in France. He was survived by his third wife Herta Lans and a son, David Fairfield Ogilvy, from his first marriage. His name however lives on in the name of the agency he founded and in his huge influence on advertising. Moreover, thanks to the TV show Mad Men and its focus on this formative period, interest in Ogilvy has enjoyed something of a resurgence over the last few years.
This is the end of the file.
