No ad-man is more celebrated than David Ogilvy. He even celebrated himself, publishing his advice, both specific and general, in two of the best-known books in the advertising canon: "Confessions of an Advertising Man" and "Ogilvy on Advertising." Not surprisingly, the...
[more]No ad-man is more celebrated than David Ogilvy. He even celebrated himself, publishing his advice, both specific and general, in two of the best-known books in the advertising canon: "Confessions of an Advertising Man" and "Ogilvy on Advertising." Not surprisingly, the man who turned $6,000 into a worldwide advertising empire had a few thoughts on the business.
He was an Englishman who failed at Oxford. After stints as a Parisian chef and Scottish door-to-door stove salesman, (where he learned enough to write a pamphlet on salesmanship), he landed a position at the London ad agency Mather & Crowther. He soon convinced his bosses to send him to the United States to study American advertising techniques. Soon thereafter, he took a job with George Gallup's Audience Research Institute, a position that shaped many of his ideas about advertising, though not necessarily his practices.
In 1948, after a bizarre stint as a farmer in Amish Pennsylvania (he even grew an Amish beard), he returned to his true calling and hung his own sign. It was not until 1951 that Ogilvy made his big breakthrough, with the "Man in the Hathaway shirt" campaign. Perhaps his most famous work, this campaign broke away from the factual, hard-sell approach into a narrative, creative style. The ads for the small shirt-making firm ran in the New Yorker and featured an unremarkable but sophisticated model who wore a collared shirt as he pursued multifarious activities (playing the oboe, painting, loading a shotgun). The model was made more interesting with an eyepatch, though the story behind the eyepatch was made deliciously mysterious. Within a few years the ads were running without any copy, as the magazine's readers were known to first flip through each issue to check out the new installment of the Hathaway man.
A similar character, Commander Whitehead, was created for Ogilvy's next stand-out work, a campaign for the Schweppes account. The "Ambassador from Schweppes" sported a Van Dyke beard and an aura of hauteur in various upscale settings, which gave the foreign brand of tonic water and club soda a refined, old-country appeal. With the Rolls-Royce account, Ogilvy put his agency on the map with his most acclaimed headline: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock."
Ogilvy was an ad-man of contradictions. While one of the best soft copywriters ever, he always praised the scientific approach and admonished his employees with scores of one-line ukases: no more than 12 words per sentence; don't put a period at the end of a headline; humorous copy should be avoided. Critics said these and various other mandates stunted creativity, but Ogilvy always said that testing would prove him out.
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