by David Ogilvy
Also – this is related to being objective – I came into advertising from research and that gave me great advantage. I always approached the creative role, I’d see the creative thing, through a researcher’s eyes. I’m almost unique in that. Very few creative people do. A lot of creative people fight research and don’t want much to do with it. I was the exact opposite. I came at it from research and suddenly I was doing very good campaigns. And that gave me great advantage I think. It was unique. Still is.
And for a time, I had a short period in my life, I think maybe ten years at the outside, when I was pretty close to being a genius and I can look back on that with interested curiosity and affection and some nostalgia. Then it ran out. But I was. I was creating most of the campaigns myself. And I was doing a lot of other things.
If you asked me what my biggest achievement in Ogilvy & Mather has been, I think I’d say new business. I’d put it ahead of creative. I made a calculation of all the accounts I’d personally brought in – I always went off to new accounts alone, I didn’t like doing it as a team – and I totted up all the money they’ve given us since I’ve brought them in. If in the beginning, instead of taking a salary, I’d taken one percent of the billing I brought in, I would have made four times as much money over the years as I did make.
Take Shell. How did you do it? You say it started when you went to that lunch and smelled billings. What would you do? You wouldn’t just go up to Max Burns and start selling the agency, would you?
Well, this Scottish Council, when I smelled the billings, I joined it. We’d have lunch once about every two months together. We’d talk about business and getting this or that for Scotland and so on.
And Max Burns used to come to lunch quite a lot. Then we would somehow talk about advertising at lunch. And one day he decided to fire his agency. It was J. Walter Thompson. He’d had them for something like 30 years. He set up a committee to pick the new agency. There were four candidates and he put Ogilvy & Mather on the list.
The committee sent all the agencies a questionnaire. I never answered questionnaires, they irritated me. But this time I did. About 25 questions. But I knew that committee wasn’t really going to pick that agency. I knew that Max Burns was going to pick it. And I couldn’t reach him. ’Cause he was in London.
So I went to London. And he was staying at Claridge’s. And I called Claridge’s and he never called back. I was pretty desperate. Finally, the day before he left he called me back. I said Max, I’m having lunch at the House of Commons today with the Secretary of State for Scotland. Would you like to join us? He said, I’d love to. So he came to lunch.
After lunch we were walking back to my hotel, it’s pouring with rain, he hadn’t got an umbrella, and I had, so I kept him dry. He was grateful for that. I was able to tell him during that walk all the points I’d made in answering the questionnaire. That was very important. But more than anything else what got us the Shell account was the Rolls-Royce campaign. He thought that was a very intelligent piece of work. It was only $100,000 a year, but it got us the huge Shell account.
You went to London just to see Max Burns?
Yeah.
I suppose you had a few other things to do there too?
Nothing. Just waited. Chewing my fingernails.
Afterwards I went back to America. I went on holiday, in Massachusetts, and forgot about it. Then one day the telephone rang, it was Monty Spaght, calling from Shell to tell me we’d got it. And I said God help me. And he thought that was a very peculiar reaction.
But what I meant was I thought it was a damned difficult job and God help me to do it properly.
Chronology of David Mackenzie Ogilvy
Born at West Horsley in England, June 23, 1911.
Fettes College, Edinburgh, 1924–1929.
Christ Church, Oxford, 1929–1931.
Chef at Hotel Majestic, Paris, 1931.
Salesman for Aga Cookers, Scotland, 1932–1935.
Joined Mather & Crowther in London, 1935.
Went to United States to study American advertising for Mather & Crowther, 1938.
Associate Director of Dr. George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute, Princeton, 1939–1942.
With British Security Coordination, Washington, D.C., 1942–1944.
Second Secretary, British Embassy, 1944–1945.
Farmer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1946–1948.
Co-founded Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, New York, 1948.
Board of Directors, New York Philharmonic, 1957–1967.
Chairman, Public Participation Committee for Lincoln Center, 1958–1960.
Trustee, Colby College, 1962–1969.
Wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963), Blood, Brains & Beer (1978), Ogilvy on Advertising (1983).
Commander of the British Empire, 1967.
Chairman, United Negro College Fund, 1968.
Moved to France, 1973.
Trustee, World Wildlife Fund International, since 1975.
Worldwide Creative Head, Ogilvy & Mather (after retirement as Chairman), 1975–1983.
AAF Advertising Hall of Fame (in the US), 1976.
Honorary Doctor of Letters, Adelphi University, 1977.
Active in company affairs as Founder and Director, 1983–1995.
Non-executive Chairman of WPP Group after takeover by WPP, 1989–1992.
Officer, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, French government, 1990.
Dies aged 88, at his home, Château de Touffou, 1999.
Credits
The photographs in this book come from the Ogilvy family and the Ogilvy Group, Inc., with the exception of the following:
viii
Joel Raphaelson
x
Editorial Atlántida
35
Aero Oy Archives, courtesy of Finnair Oy
76
Sarah Lowell Smith
166
Gilles De Chabaneix
The excerpt from the interview on page 35 is reprinted by permission of Svante Löforgen and Resume.
*Editor’s note: The first paragraph read: “My father was in charge of the men’s lavatory at the Ritz Hotel. My mother was a chambermaid at the same hotel. I was educated at the London School of Economics.”
*Regional directors.
*Writing That Works, Harper & Row, 1981.
* Editor’s note: The award went to Roy Whittier, a distinguished copywriter at Young & Rubicam.
* Editor’s note: This campaign, then just six months old, is still running 32 years later.
* Editor’s Note: Another excerpt from this 1955 speech appears on pages 86–88.