David Mackenzie Ogilvy David Ogilvy has often been called "The Father of Advertising".
He also had a boundless personality and a lot of fresh ideas, not to mention the luck of a booming postwar economy and the genius to take advantage of it. He helped transform the world of advertising and generally in a good way, even for those of us who usually find advertising an annoying distraction from important things, like sports. In 1962, Time called him "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry." After his father's business was badly hit by the depression of the mid-1920s, Davids studies were discontinued and he left Oxford for Paris in 1931 where he became an apprentice chef in the Majestic Hotel. After a year, he returned to Scotland and started selling Aga cooking stoves, door-to-door. His success at this marked him out to his employer, who asked him to write an instruction manual, The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA cooker, for the other salesmen. Thirty years later, Fortune magazine editors called it the finest sales instruction manual ever written. He established an advertising agency in New York, backed by his brothers agency and another major English group. The agency, which became known as Ogilvy & Mather, succeeded almost immediately. Ogilvy took a little-known shirt manufacturer and made it instantly recognizable with the Hathaway man, who wore a rakish yet dignified eye-patch. After a single ad appeared in a single magazine, Mr. Roman says, shirt sales rose so fast that the ad had to be pulled until factories could catch up. It was Ogilvy who devised the slogan that said Dove soap was onequarter cleansing cream and made Dove a leading seller around the world.
Ogilvy & Mather was founded in 1948 by David Ogilvy, as "Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson, & Mather" in Manhattan with a staff of two and no clients. The company became a leading worldwide agency by the 1960s. Central to its growth was its strategy of building brands such as American Express, BP, Ford, Barbie, Maxwell House, IBM, Kodak, Nestl, Cadbury and Unilever brands Pond's and Dove. Ogilvy & Mather was built on Ogilvy's principles, in particular, that the function of advertising is to sell and that successful advertising for any product is based on information about its consumer. Ogilvys primary gift was as a writer; he had less success once television ads made images more important than words, and he never really grasped the emotional power of music in ads. By the 1980s, he had faded into the role of elder statesman. Ogilvy was a known technophobe, that he used sharpened pencils instead of ball-point pens. In his agency's first twenty years, Ogilvy won assignments from Lever Brothers, General Foods and American Express. Shell gave him their entire account in North America. Sears hired him for their first national advertising campaign. In 1965, Ogilvy merged the agency with Mather & Crowther, his London backers, to form a new international company. One year later the company went public - one of the first advertising firms to do so. Soon Ogilvy & Mather had expanded around the world and was firmly in place as one of the top agencies in all regions. Ogilvy came out of retirement in the 1980s to serve as chairman of Ogilvy & Mather in India. He also spent a
year acting as temporary chairman of the agency's German office, commuting daily between Touffou and Frankfurt. He visited branches of the company around the world, and continued to represent Ogilvy & Mather at gatherings of clients and business audiences. When, in 1989, the Ogilvy Group was bought by WPP, two events occurred simultaneously: WPP became the largest marketing communications firm in the world, and David Ogilvy was named the company's non-executive chairman (a position he held for three years). In 1989, The Ogilvy Group was bought by WPP Group, a British parent company, for US$864 million in a hostile takeover made possible by the fact that the company group had made an IPO as the first company in marketing to do so. During the takeover procedures, Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder of WPP, who already had a tarnished reputation in the advertising industry following a similar successful takeover of J. Walter Thompson, was described by Ogilvy as an "odious little shit"[4], and he promised to never work again. Eventually he became a fan of Sorrell. A letter of apology from Ogilvy adorns Sorrell's office, which is said to be the only apology David Ogilvy ever offered in any form during his adult life. Only a year after his derogatory comments about Sorrell, he was quoted as saying, 'When he tried to take over our company, I would liked to have killed him. But it was not legal. I wish I had known him 40 years ago. I like him enormously now.' References http://www.lawrencecreaghan.com/Archive/TheKingOfMadisonAvenue.htm http://www.ogilvy.com/About/Our-History/David-Ogilvy-Bio.aspx
