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Conversely, Leo Burnett felt that the Second World War was a demonstration of the power of modern advertising. ‘[The] government got an entirely new idea of advertising as an effective means of communication to the people of this big country of ours, and as a tool for getting people to do things on a voluntary rather than compulsory basis. This in itself was not bad public relations for advertising.’ During the war, he argued, ‘advertising revealed itself to itself’. He added, ‘A lot of people… discovered for the first time that they had a moral obligation to society and could use their techniques just as effectively in selling ideas as in peddling goods.’

  NBC affiliate WNBT had begun commercial TV broadcasts in 1941. A year later, the minimum programme time required of TV stations was cut from 15 hours to 4 hours a week for the war period. After the war agencies hovered around the medium, still unsure what to make of it. ‘Television is the strongest drug we’ve ever had to dish out,’ Leo Burnett told the National Television Council in 1949. ‘Maybe that’s why our hands shake a little when we take the cork out of the bottle, but we’ll get over that.’

  Some were steelier than others. At BBDO, the charismatic Irishman Ben Duffy – who had taken over at the head of the agency from Bruce Barton in 1946 – was particularly keen on TV. By 1949, according to Stephen Fox, Duffy was spending US $4 million on the new medium, and the agency’s TV department had grown from 12 to 150 people. Total US advertising spend on television rose from US $12 million in 1949 to US $158 million just three years later. Having successfully occupied the radio landscape, brands were now firmly established on television.

  03

  Madison Avenue aristocracy

  ‘Creative organizations are led by formidable individuals’

  Iflew in to New York clutching two books: The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard (1957) and Madison Avenue, USA, by Martin Mayer (1958). The thing I liked most about them was that I had managed to get hold of the original editions – tattered ex-library copies with yellowing paper – so I was effectively taking them back to the street that inspired them. One April afternoon I strode half the length of Madison Avenue, stopping occasionally to grab a coffee and leaf through their pages. At the beginning of the Packard book there was a note scrawled in blue ink: New York, Xmas 1960. It may have been the perfect time and place to work in advertising.

  Mayer’s book informs us that Madison Avenue is ‘the only major New York street named after a president of the United States’. The author concedes that ‘the stretch that has made the street famous takes up one-fifth of its length, beginning at about 200 Madison and ending at about 650… forming what the vulgar call ad alley or ulcer gulch…’. At the time that Mayer wrote his book, the agencies on Madison Avenue controlled half of the total expenditure on advertising in the United States – while most of the rest was handled by their branch offices. Madison Avenue had been the unofficial home of the advertising business since before the war, but in the past few years an unprecedented building boom had turned it into a glistening canyon of communications firms. ‘Madison Avenue as it appears today is impressively new,’ writes Mayer in 1958. ‘More than a dozen new office buildings, each more than 20 stories high, have been built since the war…’

  And what was it like inside these monolithic agencies? Having done the tour, Mayer could tell us that the offices of Young & Rubicam were predominantly decorated in green. McCann-Erickson featured ‘restful pastels’, but J Walter Thompson was ‘a class in itself’. The agency’s stylishness had clearly not waned since the 1930s, and we rediscover with a sense of warm familiarity the dining suite ‘decorated like a New England colonial farmhouse’. The stylish Barcelona chairs by Mies van der Rohe may have been a more recent touch, however.

  Madison Avenue symbolized the US advertising industry. When I interviewed him in 2006 (sadly, he passed away the following year), Phil Dusenberry, the former vice-chairman of BBDO, who came to work on the street as a young copywriter in the early 1960s, confirmed: ‘Like Hollywood, it became an idea rather than a physical place. You could say that Madison Avenue was advertising.’

  By the 1950s, advertising was considered a glamorous – if still not exactly honourable – profession. Attitudes to the industry at the time are personified by the Cary Grant character in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), a dapper Madison Avenue man who is mistaken for a spy. Towards the beginning of the film, Grant says to his secretary, ‘In the world of advertising there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only the expedient exaggeration.’

  An entire mythology formed around the advertising business during this period. The standard template for a New York advertising executive was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the titular figure of Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel, who actually worked in public relations. If admen had ever worn flannel suits before the book became a bestseller, they certainly avoided them afterwards – although they were paid handsomely enough to be well dressed. They were also known to work hard – often ridiculously so, until the early hours of the morning – hence all the talk of ulcers and heart disease in the profession. They fought stress with alcohol, giving rise to the ‘three martini lunch’. This actually existed, according to Phil Dusenberry: ‘Taking a break for lunch, particularly if you were with a client, wasn’t a big deal in those days.’

  One figure we might have seen strolling down Madison Avenue on his way to lunch – perhaps with a young colleague hanging onto his every word – was a lanky Englishman, dressed in tweeds for winter or in a lightweight suit brightened with a pocket square in summer. Good-looking, charming and (on the surface, at least) irrepressibly self-confident, David Ogilvy was one of the stars of the Manhattan advertising scene. And he was British.

  A British advertising agency in New York

  David Ogilvy played such a large part in the creation of his own myth that it is often hard to tell where the truth ended and the branding began. There are a few things we know for certain, however. He was born in 1911 in West Horsley, England and educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh – a school renowned for its ‘Spartan disciplines’, according to Ogilvy. Apparently destined to become a historian, he won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford – but by his own admission he ‘screwed that up’. The reasons for this are unclear. In his book Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) he writes glibly that he was ‘too preoccupied to do any work, and was duly expelled’. Later he revealed that he had two serious operations on his head, for double mastoids, which contributed to his lack of concentration (‘David Ogilvy at 75’, Viewpoint, September/October 1986). In any event, what Ogilvy forever described as ‘the great failure of my life’ helped to shape his paradoxical personality: that of the scholarly entrepreneur; the daydreaming pragmatist.

  Having been a keen reader of Mark Twain as a schoolboy, Ogilvy was stricken with wanderlust. Although the eventual goal was America, his first destination was France, where he got a job in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic in Paris. ‘I have always believed that if I could understand how Monsieur Pitard, the head chef, inspired such white-hot morale, I could apply the same kind of leadership to the management of my advertising agency,’ he wrote later. He came to the conclusion that ‘no creative organization… will produce a great body of work unless it is led by a formidable individual’.

  Ogilvy would become that individual – but not for a while yet. In the meantime he was lured back to England to sell Aga cooking stoves, because the company needed somebody who could pitch to French chefs in London restaurants. Ogilvy maintained throughout his career that advertising was no more or less than a sophisticated form of selling, and closing a sale was something at which he turned out to be adept. His admiring boss asked him to write a sales manual for other Aga employees: it later became a standard text for aspiring sales people, eliciting admiration from Fortune magazine journalists some 30 years later. Ogilvy’s older brother, Francis, was an account executive at the advertising agency Mather & Crowther, where he showed the crisply written sales manual to management. Sure enough
, David was duly asked to join the agency too.

  With the combination of charm and chutzpah that was to aid his rise in advertising, in 1938 David convinced the agency to send him to New York to study transatlantic advertising techniques. The boy who had revelled in Huckleberry Finn was off to America at last. ‘When he saw the Manhattan skyline he wept for joy,’ claims Stephen Fox in The Mirror Makers.

  Needless to say, Ogilvy did not return home. Instead, he sought the advice of established New York admen like Rosser Reeves, at that time a copywriter at Blackett-Sample-Hummert. Although Ogilvy admired Reeves, he could never fully accept his new mentor’s coldly scientific approach to advertising, believing like Raymond Rubicam (another of Ogilvy’s heroes) that effective advertising had to be entertaining as well as persuasive. In essence, Ogilvy’s style of advertising was a synthesis of everything that had gone before: the science of Claude Hopkins, the sophistication of JWT under Stanley Resor, and the research-based creativity of Young & Rubicam.

  As if to continue his advertising education, Ogilvy got a job with researcher George Gallup, and spent the best part of three years travelling across America learning about the hopes, dreams and habits of his adopted homeland’s citizens. Perhaps what he saw disturbed him, because after wartime military intelligence service he took an unlikely sidestep into rural life, buying an Amish farm in Pennsylvania. Fortunately for the advertising industry, his efforts to farm tobacco were as unsuccessful as his attempts to become a history scholar, and he realized that he would have to go back into business. He also realized that he was unlikely to get a job at an advertising agency.

  In the book The Unpublished David Ogilvy, an internal agency document compiled in 1986, a short autobiographical note captures his predicament at the time. ‘Will any agency hire this man? He is 38, and unemployed. He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing, and has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is willing to go to work for US $5000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will hire him. However, a London agency did hire him.’

  The facts are a little more complicated. Convinced that he would never find employment at a US agency, Ogilvy decided to start one of his own. His capital amounted to US $6,000, but fortunately by that stage his brother Francis was managing director of Mather & Crowther, which agreed to lend him money and its name. David also persuaded another well-known British agency, SH Benson, to invest. At the same time, he convinced the American branch of Wedgwood China to take a risk on a new agency, if only for strategic space-buying purposes.

  At first, Ogilvy’s backers assumed that the agency needed an American (and presumably more experienced) front man. And so Anderson Hewitt was persuaded to leave the Chicago office of J Walter Thompson, where he was an account man, and become president of the new agency. Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, ‘a British advertising agency in New York’, was born in September 1948. Ogilvy was named vice-president in charge of research. Although the partnership toddled along for four years, it became quite clear that Ogilvy yearned to stand on his own two feet, and Hewitt eventually left.

  In the meantime, Ogilvy had been busy making a name for himself as one of the industry’s emerging stars. If his backers in London had imagined that his archetypal ‘Britishness’ would be a drawback in New York, they were quite wrong. As he later recalled in the interview with Viewpoint, Ogilvy knew how to brand himself: ‘I had a terrific advantage when I started an agency in New York. I had a British accent. With so many agencies, so much competition, I’d got a gimmick – my English accent, which helped to differentiate me from the ordinary. There are an awful lot of English over there in advertising now, but in those days there were only about two of us. That was very helpful.’

  Of course, two of the campaigns that made Ogilvy famous were based on exactly this kind of ‘branding by personality’. The first was ‘the man in the Hathaway shirt’. In 1951 Ogilvy was hired by Hathaway, a small Maine-based clothing firm, to create a national advertising campaign for a line of mid-priced shirts. As Ogilvy himself explained in Confessions, the modest size of the account did not prevent him from having grandiose ambitions. He was determined to come up with a campaign that would surpass even that of Arrow Shirts. ‘But Hathaway could spend only US $30,000 against Arrow’s US $2,000,000. A miracle was required.’

  The miracle turned out to be an eye patch. Ogilvy wanted the ads to exude class and sophistication, so he recruited a dashing, moustached model named George Wrangell. Early on, he had the idea of accessorizing George with a piratical eye patch, but this was rejected as too unorthodox. Finally the day of the shoot came, and on the way to the studio, Ogilvy ‘ducked into a drugstore and bought an eye patch for US $1.50… Exactly why it turned out to be so successful, I shall never know.’

  But Ogilvy knew very well why the campaign worked. He called it ‘story appeal’. The rakish eye patch was unusual and caught readers’ attention. ‘[The reader] glances at the photograph and says to himself: “What goes on there?” Then he reads your copy to find out. The trap is set.’

  Ever the practical daydreamer, Ogilvy used the Hathaway campaign to re-create ‘a series of situations in which I would have liked to find myself: conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, playing the oboe, copying a Goya at the Metropolitan Museum, driving a tractor, sailing, fencing, buying a Renoir, and so forth.’

  At the same time, Ogilvy had a cost-effective and strategically sound approach to buying advertising space for Hathaway. The ads ran only in the literary, upmarket New Yorker magazine, thus adding a further touch of class. As Stephen Fox notes in The Mirror Makers, after four years ‘the campaign was so familiar that Ogilvy could run an ad without copy, without even the name of the product – just a photograph of the man and his eye patch. Customers were buying an image, not a sales pitch.’

  Ogilvy repeated the process for Schweppes tonic water, this time recruiting the company’s luxuriantly bearded advertising manager, Commander Edward Whitehead, as the star of the campaign. This nautical-looking figure captured the imagination of the public exactly as the man in the Hathaway shirt had done, with a commensurate rise in sales.

  But image was not the only key to a successful ad. Ogilvy was also a crack copywriter, often working until the early hours of the morning to polish the perfect pitch. The result was invariably compelling. Joel Raphaelson, a copywriter who joined Ogilvy’s agency in 1958, recalls: ‘Despite his air of breeding and sophistication, David never used complicated words when simple ones would do. I remember him leaning over some copy I’d written that read, “Choice seats are still available”, and asking, “Why don’t you just say ‘good seats’?” And the ads for Hathaway shirts always used words like “made” or “sewn” – never “handcrafted”.’

  When he won the Rolls Royce account in 1957, Ogilvy produced 26 different headlines for the first advertisement. The client chose: ‘At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock.’ It was probably a coincidence that a BBDO ad for Pierce Arrow cars had used more or less the same slogan 25 years earlier. Ogilvy later insisted that he had spent three weeks researching his new client before starting on the copy, and that his headline had been inspired by a magazine article.

  Nobody, in any case, could have doubted his dedication. When he won an account, he believed in learning everything he could about the company, believing like Claude Hopkins that this was the best route to sales insights. He worked all the hours that God sent, including weekends. ‘Nobody ever died from hard work,’ he was fond of saying, quoting his father.

  Fortunately, he also knew how to motivate staff. Joel Raphaelson recalls: ‘When I joined the agency, David must have been about 46 or 47, and he cut a dashing figure. After about a week, he asked me to speak with him about an ad for the New York Philharmonic – he was on the board and we ran ads promoting fundraising subscriptions. He said, “Let’s t
alk about it over lunch”, and asked his secretary to call the Pavillon, which was the fanciest restaurant in New York at the time.’

  But, like Monsieur Pitard in the kitchen of the Majestic, Ogilvy never forgot that an effective manager should be formidable. ‘He scared the hell out of me a couple of times,’ says Raphaelson. ‘He was temperamental and he didn’t pull punches. Once he sent me a note that read: “Joel, I thought you promised to show me the Sears ads last Tuesday. You have now been working on them for three months – longer than the gestation period in PIGS.”’

  Ogilvy could appear arrogant, although his arrogance seems to have been a cloak for lurking insecurity. He was intelligent enough to be aware of this, and even to have a sense of humour about it. ‘I am a miserable duffer in everything except advertising,’ he wrote in Confessions. But a few lines down, he added: ‘When Fortune wrote an article about me and titled it “Is David Ogilvy a genius?” I asked my lawyer to sue the editor for the question mark.’ Many years later, he gave a speech at the Bombay Advertising Club. Afterwards he was asked: ‘Mr Ogilvy, Indian advertising draws its inspiration from Madison Avenue. What about Madison Avenue? What is its source?’ Ogilvy replied: ‘Modesty forbids.’

  The film-maker and former adman Sir Alan Parker skewers Ogilvy’s faintly caricature-like image in the preface to the 1983 re-edition of Confessions. ‘I suspect that Ogilvy’s Turnbull & Asser shirts and puffing pipe were as much an egregious concoction as the man in the eye patch he had made famous, but who could fail to be seduced by a little British narcissism fused with hard-nosed American, self-serving salesmanship?’

  Although he is sometimes associated with the period revered in advertising circles as ‘the creative revolution’, Ogilvy was suspicious of the idea of creativity. His terse summary of the adman’s role was: ‘Sell – or else.’ He claimed that he had ‘a reasonably original mind, but not too much so. I thought as clients think.’ In a later book, Ogilvy on Advertising (1985), he wrote: ‘I occasionally use the hideous word creative myself, for lack of a better.’ But he also said that ‘if you ask which of my advertisements was the most successful, I will answer it was the first I wrote for industrial development in Puerto Rico. It won no awards for “creativity”, but it persuaded scores of manufacturers to start factories on that poverty-stricken island.’ He quoted his old friend Rosser Reeves: ‘Do you want fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve start moving up?’