John Ogilvy

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Ogilvy was born on 23 June 1911 at West Horsley, Surrey, in England. He attended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, on reduced fees and won a scholarship at age thirteen to Fettes College, in Edinburgh. In 1929, he won a scholarship in history to Christ Church, Oxford, but left after two years, having failed his exams. In 1931, he became a kitchen hand at the Hotel Majestic in Paris. After a year, he returned to Scotland and started selling AGA cooking stoves, door-to-door. His success led his employer to ask him to write an instruction manual, *The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA Cooker*, which *Fortune* magazine editors later called the finest sales instruction manual ever written. His older brother, Francis Ogilvy, showed the manual to management at the London advertising agency Mather & Crowther, where he was working, and they offered the younger Ogilvy a position as an account executive in 1935. In 1938, Ogilvy persuaded his agency to send him to the United States for a year, where he worked for George Gallup's Audience Research Institute in New Jersey. During World War II, he worked for the British Intelligence Service at the British embassy in Washington, DC, and was a notable alumnus of the secret Camp X in Ontario, Canada, where he was trained in sabotage and close combat. After the war, he bought a farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and lived among the Amish for several years before moving to Manhattan.

In Their Own Story

Having worked as a chef, researcher, and farmer, Ogilvy started his own advertising agency with the backing of Mather and Crowther, the London agency being run by his elder brother, Francis. The new agency in New York was called Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather. He had just $6,000 in his account when he started. His entry into the company of giants started with several iconic advertising campaigns. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt did a commercial for Good Luck Margarine in 1959. In his autobiography, *Ogilvy on Advertising*, he said it had been a mistake to persuade her to do the ad – not because it was undignified, but because he had grown to realize that putting celebrities in ads was a mistake. Ogilvy & Mather instead created celebrities in several campaigns, such as its work for Hathaway shirt, which used George Wrangell as "the man in the Hathaway shirt" sporting his aristocratic eye patch, and Schweppes, which introduced Commander Edward Whitehead to bring Schweppes and "Schweppervescence" to the U.S. with the line "The man from Schweppes is here." The firm also promoted the Rolls-Royce automobile with the famous headline, "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock." In 1962, *Time* called him "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry."

Reader's Guide

Ogilvy believed that the function of advertising is to sell and that successful advertising for any product is based on information about its consumer. He disliked advertisements with loud, patronizing voices and believed a customer should be treated as intelligent. In 1955, he coined the phrase, "The customer is not a moron, she's your wife" based on these values. He believed the best way to get new clients was to do notable work for his existing clients. Success in his early campaigns helped him get big clients such as Rolls-Royce and Shell. In 1973, Ogilvy retired as chairman of Ogilvy & Mather and moved to Touffou, his estate in France. He returned to the industry in the 1980s to serve as chairman of Ogilvy, Benson, & Mather in India and spent a year serving as the agency's temporary chairman of the German office. In 1989, The Ogilvy Group was bought by WPP Group for $864 million (US) in a hostile takeover. During the takeover, he called Sir Martin Sorrell an "odious little shit" (reports softened it to "odious little jerk"), but eventually became a fan of Sorrell. He was named the company's non-executive chairman for three years. Ogilvy authored four books: *Confessions of an Advertising Man* (1963), *Blood, Brains & Beer: The Autobiography of David Ogilvy* (1978), *Ogilvy on Advertising* (1983), and *The Unpublished David Ogilvy* (1986). He was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1967 Birthday Honours, elected to the U.S. Advertising Hall of Fame in 1977, and to France's Order of Arts and Letters in 1990. David Ogilvy died on 21 July 1999 at his home, the Château de Touffou, in Bonnes, France.

Did You Know?

• Ogilvy's first job after leaving Oxford was as a kitchen hand at the Hotel Majestic in Paris.
• He wrote a sales manual for AGA cookers that Fortune magazine later called the finest sales instruction manual ever written.
• During World War II, he was trained in sabotage and close combat at the secret Camp X in Ontario, Canada.
• He coined the phrase "The customer is not a moron, she's your wife" in 1955.
• At age seventy-five, Ogilvy said the things he'd always wanted but had eluded him were a knighthood and a big family of ten children.