Advertising guru David Ogilvy was born 23 June 1911 in West Horsley, Surrey.
As time progressed so did Ogilvy, gaining a scholarship to the prestigious Christ Church College in Oxford.
But education was not for this dynamic pioneer, and so he left Oxford for Paris in 1931. He began an unpromising career as a chef’s assistant, apparently directionless.
Yet he was charming, confident, and graced with an inherent ability to sell. As well as a stint as a farmer, he sold Aga cookers door-to-door in England – and sold well. Noting this, his employer commissioned a handbook to educate other salesman.
This guide, coupled with a little brotherly nepotism, secured a role with London advertising agency Mather & Crowther. Ogilvy grasped his destiny after the Second World War. He founded the agency Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather and ran highly profitable campaigns for Hathaway, Schweppes and Rolls Royce.
David Ogilvy apparently believed “it to be the right and duty of a wise and benevolent elite to civilise the world.” His most famous ad featured ‘the man with the Hathaway shirt’, a mustachioed gentleman with an eye-patch – more of a bond villain than the embodiment of a ‘wise, benevolent elite’.
He also believed there was a science to advertising. “Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet,” he once said. “Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?”
Unconventional to the last he attained public exposure with his one-million-selling book ‘Confessions of an Advertising Man’, which was translated into 14 languages. In the book he recalls how at first, he struggled to get clients for his firm. A morale-booster to all struggling start-ups, the agency Ogilvy & Mather International now employs almost 10,000 staff in 97 countries and generates whopping annual billings of $8.8bn.
Ogilvy died in the summer of 1999, aged 88. Despite starting late, Ogilvy proved that if you can sell yourself, you can successfully sell anything.
