Profile: David Ogilvy, the first 'mad man'

JOAN Holloway's feline, sashaying walk provides only part of the allure of the cult US drama series Mad Men. For some viewers, pleasure is also found in the way it captures a nostalgia for the days when lunches were long, men dressed sharply and women never wore trousers.

Lunches were never longer, or boozier, than on Manhattan's Madison Avenue in the 1950s and 60s heyday of the advertising world. And one of the kings of the era, described as the quintessential Mad Man, was a Scot – David Ogilvy. Or at least, Ogilvy was one of those men who stormed America, and later the world, brandishing his Scottish heritage proudly.

Father of direct mail – more commonly known now as junk mail – and a stickler for what is known as "long copy", he was described in an advertisement taken out by his own agency to celebrate his birthday as: "Stubborn, irreverent, uncompromising, unpredictable, brilliant, impudent, contrary, provocative, infuriating."

By turns irascible and mercurial yet talented and insightful, Ogilvy created a legacy that outstrips the agency that still bears his name, Ogilvy & Mather. Many of those who have read his books, Confessions of an Advertising Man, and later, Ogilvy on Advertising, might be surprised that this week will mark 100 years since one of the advertising world's gurus was born.

His story is almost but not quite rags-to-riches. Born in Surrey to a Scottish stockbroker father and an Anglo-Irish medical student mother, the family's fortunes were reduced to that of genteel poverty after the markets collapsed on the eve of the First World War.

The ups and down of his young life – which included a cherished education at Fettes – led this impetuous ginger-haired young man to abandon Oxford University for the hotel kitchens of the Hotel Majestic in Paris, followed by stints as an Aga salesman, a spy, a market research pioneer and an Amish farmer. It was almost as an afterthought that at the age of 38 he decided to launch, at the end of a recession, what would become one of the world's biggest ad agencies – with only $6,000, the support of his London-based brother Frances and a handful of timid British clients keen to break into the US market.

It is this aspect of his story, that of a creator of his own destiny, which entranced his adopted country and continues to attract admirers to this day. But it is also the myth as well as the man that entrances – and was he really like the characters now dramatised in the TV show?

In an introduction to Confessions, he is happy to support at least one of the myths. "Many people – and I think I am one of them – are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write," wrote Ogilvy, who died at age 88 in 1999.

His biographer and former employee, Kenneth Roman, demurs. "He didn't smoke cigarettes. He smoked a pipe. He drank in moderation. He almost never wore a business suit. He wore costumes. He was a hard, dedicated, disciplined worker, who also had fun."

Roy McCallum, head of the advertising agency Levy McCallum, started his career in the early 1970s. A young copywiter, like Ogilvy, at Robertson & Scott – which he points out was the "second-oldest agency in the world" – he says it was the original mad man that inspired him as well as those he worked for, like his agency's founder Neil McCallum (who is no relation to Roy), and his then boss, Donald Mckenzie.

"Nothing he said doesn't hold good today," says McCallum. "David Ogilvy is someone for whom I have unqualified respect. I would think anyone who has any feeling for the industry would feel this same way. I never met him but I have read almost everything he wrote."

Nor, like the characters on Mad Men, was Ogilvy a sexist. Although he married three times, Ogilvy took an egalitarian approach to hiring women and Jewish people that was unusual in his time. In his biography, he even takes credit for encouraging his alma mater, Fettes, to adopt co-ed education.

Invited to speak at the school's Founder's Day event in 1968, Ogilvy told the boys that the school's founder "clearly intended that this great school should educate girls as well as boys" and then said that if the governors continued to ignore this then they should "follow the example of your contemporaries at foreign universities – riot!". He noted that "the following year Fettes went co-ed". However, Robert Philip, the author of A Keen Wind Blows, The Story of Fettes College, said: "In reality it was not quite so simple." His talent for putting his finger on a pulse that he was able to amplify, was the hallmark of the campaigns he developed for some of the world's largest companies in his long and respected career.

Graeme Atha, the chairman of the Glasgow-based advertising agency Frame, says of Ogilvy's heyday: "We love that era and all the stories that went with them."

He recalls how his father handed him a book when he was a student, Ogilvy's Confessions. Initially he admitted to being embarrassed. "I thought it was soft pornography," he says, but found there was nothing sordid about it. Written in 1963 – the title a nod to St Augustine, but also the 18th century Scots novelist James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner – Ogilvy intended the tome to be a "text book, sugar-coated with anecdotes". The book turned out to be a bestseller, still now in print. Handed to the impressionable young Atha, eventually it became the inspiration for him to go into advertising.

"It attracted me into studying marketing at university. All of a sudden there was a glamour to it which business didn't have beforehand. I probably wasn't artistic enough to be an arts student but I probably wasn't dull enough to be an accountant – with all due respect to that profession. That book brought it to life for me." Roman says that 50 years on some of Ogilvy's rules may be dated; McCallum says he could be didactic. But Ogilvy's ideal format of "long copy" – with a simple image, a headline and a simple, persuasive bit of reading in three columns, is becoming more relevant than ever.

Mark Gorman, who co-founded a former Edinburgh ad agency, 1576, and who is now an adviser to STV, said: "Clients always say to you that copy is too long. But readers of newspapers and magazine and blogs – that is all long copy. There is a role for persuasive advertising and he was the arch exponent of it."

McCallum, who still believes in the "long copy" and a good read, agrees: "Copywriters are constantly involved with a battle with people who would like more pictures There is still the feeling out there that the consumer is thick, can't read, only understands pictures. It is not true, the consumer is not a moron, she's your wife," says McCallum, paraphrasing what has probably become one of Ogilvy's most famous quotes. "Sometimes when you are in this industry you forget how literate and smart consumers are," says Atha. "What Ogilvy has, is he was almost poetic in his use of language. In that phrase – 'the consumer is not a moron' – there is a very strong idea there, very simply put with a wee touch of humour. That is why he is so memorable."

In the 1980s, Ogilvy realised a dream of his and opened an office of his empire in Scotland, bringing a little Mad Men glamour to Edinburgh. In honour of Ogilvy's centenary, the Marketing Society for Scotland is launching a year of events starting on 23 June, his birthday. One of the events, a cocktail party featuring glamorous advertising era actors dressed like Joan Holloway and Don Draper will recreate the sort of gala events Ogilvy, often dressed in a kilt, loved.

Gorman recalls he applied to work at Ogilvy & Mather back in 1984 as a "fresh-faced youth" – but failed to get a job. "Some of us of a certain age feel like Mad Men is true to life – the drinking, smoking and even some of the shagging," says Gorman. "Even in the 1980s, advertising agencies were still a little like that but they are nothing like that now."

A fan of both the original mad man and the TV series, Atha, who chairs the Marketing Society, says the characters and the storylines ring true to life. "When I am watching it with my wife I sometimes tell her this is closer to the truth than you might imagine it to be," says Atha.

"It was a golden age that has been brought to life in glorious Technicolor. Any one of us will remember the way business was conducted. A lunch would be three hours, not the half- hour thing it is now – a sandwich over the laptop. There was a bit more depth, character and colour. There is also a degree of respect for the industry. It wasn't just about price. Craft and creativity were important.

"There was just a bit more style about it."