David Ogilvy: First of the Madmen

Published on Sunday 4 October 2009 22:15

DAVID Ogilvy created advertising campaigns for top-name clients – but as Tim Cornwell discovers, his method of selling the humble Aga was one of his finest achievements

HE BECAME the King of Madison Avenue, legendary for the snappy slogans he coined, making him a multi-millionaire master salesman for Rolls-Royce and Schweppes.

David Ogilvy is billed as a true version of Mad Men, the Emmy-winning American TV drama about a group of wise-cracking 1960s advertising men. He came from nowhere to found Ogilvy & Mather, the global advertising giant that developed the use of branding and championed direct or "junk" mail. Less well-known is that he got his start in sales persuading middle-class Scottish matrons to buy pricey Aga cookers during the Depression.

Last week, his biographer (and successor at the agency), Kenneth Roman, was in Edinburgh to talk to Fettes pupils about one of their school's greatest alumni – albeit one who was, by his own account, an "irreconcilable rebel", misfit, and "dud" as a schoolboy.

Ogilvy's life, observes Roman, "is a totally implausible story" – and one he was not above embellishing. After dropping out of Oxford University, Ogilvy's first job was as a chef in a Paris hotel; later on, his CV grew to include jobs ranging from Amish farmer to spy. And as Aga's first door-to-door salesman in Scotland, he told the ladies of the house they should call the police if their cooks managed to burn more than 4 of fuel a year on their Swedish stoves.

Yet Ogilvy did not really fit the Martini-quaffing, sexist 1960s male stereotype as portrayed in Mad Men. "People ask me, how much was he like all the people on that show, all this smoking, drinking, and demeaning women," Roman says. "Well, he did smoke, he drank in moderation. He was very good to women, very egalitarian in that sense. But he was far more interesting (than the show's characters]."

David MacKenzie Ogilvy, who died in 1999, was an archetypal Anglo-Scot. Born in Surrey in 1911, he was sent to a London kindergarten at the age of six, dressed in a kilt – where he punched another boy who made fun of him. He was still wearing a kilt 40 years later, part of the exaggerated national pride he embraced as he made his way in Madison Avenue.

His mother was Irish and his father a Gaelic-speaking Highlander who was actually born in Argentina, and the Scottish connection was preserved through a private school education. "His father went to Fettes, his grandfather went to Fettes, his brother went to Fettes," says Roman. "His great-uncle was one of the earliest trustees, Lord Inglis of Glencourse, and chairman of the board for 48 years."

Roman worked with Ogilvy at Ogilvy & Mather for 26 years, later becoming the firm's chairman and chief executive himself. Almost his first encounter with his boss, as a junior executive, was when Ogilvy penned a letter to one of his clients on why their own design department was failing them. "The only thing that can be said in favour of the layouts is that they are 'different'," he wrote. "You could make a cow look different by removing the udder. But that cow could not produce results."

Roman's biography of Ogilvy, The King of Madison Avenue, was published earlier this year. Roman – already an author of his own successful books on advertising, with titles including Writing that Works – said he had no idea just how exotic Ogilvy's life story would turn out to be.

Like other emigrs, Ogilvy's relationship to Britain and Scotland had a mix of romance and rejection. In New York, he lectured at the St Andrews Society and paraded his aristocratic accent when it suited him, but he rejected the British class system that produced him, later saying that he had cured himself of snobbery.

When he found out that Max Byrnes, the head of Shell, was a Scot, he used the connection to get an introduction, landing a client that nearly doubled the size of his firm. He helped Puerto Rico create an arts festival, citing Edinburgh's example and enlisting the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals to help. Roman says: "He said, 'You've got this island, you are building all these factories, you're going to turn it into Detroit, you've got to have some culture.'"

Ogilvy was sent to Fettes aged 13, from an English prep school that he loathed. He wrote later of having delicious Scottish porridge three times a day, Scottish roast beef, and Scottish mutton pies. Both his father and brother had been head of school and captain of rugby, but he was an asthmatic boy who chose music rather than sport, though he left the school with top marks and would later praise its teaching standards to his American friends.

In 1968, returning for a Founder's Day speech, he berated the school for barring girls at the time and said: "I wasn't a scholar. I was a duffer at games. I detested the philistines who ruled the roost. I was an irreconcilable rebel – a misfit. Fellow duds, take heart! There is no correlation between success at school and success in life." On a return visit in 1974, he cheerfully urged the school to change its image by hiring a French chef and a dancing master and train boys in plumbing, typing and shorthand.

Ogilvy went to Oxford as a scholar, but left without a degree, talking of his impatience to begin earning a living. He went to Paris as a sous-chef at the Hotel Majestic, then after 18 months got a job through his elder brother as Aga's first sales representative in Scotland. Part of his pitch was to offer free cooking lessons with a sale; he'd also make sure he'd sell the Aga's virtues to the cook below stairs, as well as the lady of the house above.

His biggest breakthrough came when he sold an Aga to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh – and got letters of introduction to church leaders in his archdiocese. "For about four months, I just drove around Scotland, ringing bells at convents and monasteries and schools and hospitals." He would ask for the Mother Superior, and she would sign the order.

"He was never a student, he learned from all of his life experiences," says Roman now. "Selling Aga cookers door to door was a defining experience. The way he put it was, 'No sale, no commission. No commission, no eat.'" The Aga experience turned Ogilvy into a salesman and that suffused his view of advertising: advertising had to sell, not entertain.

In 1960, Ogilvy coined what was later called the most memorable headline in the US auto business: "At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock." The magic of Rolls-Royce, his adverts declared, was "merely patient attention to detail".

From Scotland, Ogilvy's maverick career took him first to London and then the US, where he went to work for George Gallup's Audience Research Institute. During the Second World War, he worked for Sir William Stephenson, the head of British Security Co-ordination. But though his training as a spy included unarmed combat and sabotage, his work was more prosaic, including analysing polls of US public opinion towards Britain.

After the war, he bought a farm in Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania, and lived briefly among the Amish. But in 1948, backed by his elder brother Francis, an advertising boss in London, he launched Ogilvy & Mather in New York. He launched iconic campaigns including "The Man from Schweppes is here", starring Commander Teddy Whitehead, its very English company chief, arriving in the US with bowler hat and furled umbrella, carrying the "Schweppes elixir". And Ogilvy championed the concept of branding, saying that every advertisement was a contribution to the image of the brand. He brought direct mail and direct marketing – more commonly known now as junk mail – into the mainstream. By the mid-1960s, Time magazine was calling him "the most sought-after wizard in the advertising industry". With his best-selling 1962 book Confessions of an Advertising Man, he was the best-known figure of his day.

But it was his Aga business that made him, Roman insists. Ogilvy would reminisce about how he turned the cooker into a status symbol. In the Aga sales manual he wrote in 1935, at the age of 24, Ogilvy wrote: "The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bulldog with the manners of a spaniel. If you have any charm, ooze it … above all, laugh till you cry every time the prospect makes a joke about the Aga Khan."

Ogilvy's ideas to remember

DAVID Ogilvy's detractors might remember him mostly as a champion of direct marketing – better known as junk mail.

But in the advertising industry, he is revered for campaigns that turned products into best-sellers.

"You cannot bore people into buying," he wrote in his book Confessions of an Advertising Man, adding: "Compromise has no place in advertising. Whatever you go, go the whole hog."

In the book's most famous line, he said: "The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Don't insult her intelligence."

Ogilvy's most successful gimmick, recalled his biographer Kenneth Roman, transformed the fortunes of Dove soap.

Ogilvy realised that one of the soap's ingredients was stearic acid, also used in cold cream.

"Dove is one-quarter cleansing cream," went the slogan he coined. "It creams your skin while you wash." The Dove brand, with its promise of producing softer, less dry skin, is now the biggest of its kind.

Another famous moment was his placing of an eyepatch on the man modelling a shirt by the Hathway company in Maine. The Man in the Hathaway Shirt – with the untold story of a mysterious aristocrat who had lost an eye – turned the product into a best-seller.