BOOK OF THE DAY: The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern AdvertisingBy Kenneth Roman Palgrave Macmillan 281pp, £17.99
DAVID OGILVY, a 39-year-old English immigrant with almost no experience of advertising, implausibly set up an agency in Madison Avenue and, within a decade, had become the most talked about advertising man in the world.
His curriculum vitae at the time contained little to suggest his subsequent success. Born in England into what is quaintly described as “genteel poverty”, an earlier “credit crunch” wiped out the family wealth and, as a schoolboy, he was acutely conscious of his reduced financial circumstances. The experience made him determined to make a large amount of money. He became a chef in the Majestic Hotel in Paris, a large kitchen with 35 mad, egotistical chefs: ideal training for running a creative department. He returned to Britain as a door-to-door salesman for Aga cookers which alerted him to the importance of making a sale, a fact sometimes overlooked by advertising agencies. He worked for a brief period for an agency in London and then emigrated to the US armed with an introduction to George Gallup who, in addition to his political opinion poll work, had developed a number of techniques for measuring the effectiveness of advertising.
During the second World War, he remained in the States and was engaged in intelligence work for the British war effort under an official reputedly the model for James Bond. Again, all very relevant experience.
He read everything he could about advertising and hatched plans for starting his own agency.
His opening campaign was for Hathaway shirts which were sold out after the first ad featuring the man with the famous eye-patch appeared in the New Yorker. A succession of business gains and well-known campaigns quickly followed and, by the 1960s, he was rich, famous, garlanded with awards and honoured by board membership of prestigious arts institutions and invitations to the White House. He published the all-time best-selling book on advertising in 1963, Confessions of an Advertising Manand, when Fortune magazine ran a cover story in 1965, "Is David Ogilvy a Genius?", he queried the question mark.
His private life is only lightly sketched by the author, a former employee, but the occasional glimpses are revealing: “One weekend in 1957, Ogilvy went to a house party with Melinda (his first wife) and in a characteristically impulsive, romantic, exciting , thoughtless act, left Sunday morning with another man’s wife.” Good of the author to add “thoughtless”.
The agency eventually went public but this left it open to a takeover which he was reluctantly forced to accept in 1989. He became fairly grumpy in old age, trying without much success to maintain the illusion that he was still in charge but a grand chateau in France and a third wife eased the burden.
He has much to offer today’s advertising generation who should read this book. He was a consummate professional. When starting work on an ad he studied every ad in the previous 20 years for competing brands. In 1955, he spotted the first definition of brand image in the Harvard Business Review and, a few months later, he articulated his vision of advertising: “a silk glove with a brick inside it”.
He regarded every ad as a long-term investment in the personality of the brand and aimed to give his clients’ brands “a first-class ticket through life”.
A competitor he greatly admired placed full-page ads in the trade publications after his death: “David Ogilvy 1911--. Great brands live forever. Leo Burnett.” He would have appreciated that.
John Fanning is the author of
The Importance of Being Branded: An Irish Perspective
, published by The Liffey Press. He is also a non-executive director of
The Irish Times
Ltd