Copywriter and advertising legend David Ogilvy died in France on July 21st at the age of 88. His fame was not simply the result of his canny knack for self promotion but of his straightforward approach to the business of advertising and his uncompromising belief that the only advertisement worth anything is one that sells.
He wrote some of the most famous campaigns of all time and developed the concept of brand identity. His two books on advertising, Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) and Ogilvy on Advertising (1983) even now, in the supposedly fast-moving world of advertising, are essential reading.
He was passionate in his objection to the notion of creativity in advertising, saying that "people do not buy from clowns." Another one of the many slogans he famously directed at copywriters was: "The consumer is not a moron, she's your wife."
David Ogilvy was born in Surrey to a stockbroker father and a mother who was a Fairfield from Co Kerry. He seemed set to follow a well-worn, professional career path when he went first to Fettes College in Scotland and then to Christ Church, Oxford. However, having failed all his exams he left without a degree in 1931 and headed for Paris where he took a job in a hotel kitchen.
He returned to Scotland where he sold cookers door-to-door before moving to the United States where he took a job with George Gallup's Audience Research Institute based at Princeton.
It was his years with Gallup that convinced him of the importance of research and he later said his trips across the US taught him not only how consumers think but how to talk to them in a way that sells.
During the second World War he worked for British intelligence and was offered a career as a diplomat. He retired instead to a farm in Amish country in Pennsylvania for a few years before heading for New York. In 1948 he arrived in Madison Avenue where he founded his own agency with "no clients, no credentials and only $6,000 in the bank".
In what was even then perceived to be a young man's industry, David Ogilvy stood out, writing his first advertisement at the age of 39.
Early campaigns included the famous eye patch-wearing "Man in the Hathaway Shirt". He introduced Schweppes to the US by using pictures of his client, the quintessential Englishman, Commander Whitehead.
He paid Eleanor Roosevelt $35,000 to appear in a margarine advertisement but later dismissed the idea of using celebrities as a complete waste of money because the consumer remembered the celebrity not the product. His press advertisement for Rolls Royce is the most famous car advertisement of all time with its headline: "At 60 miles-an-hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock." In the 1960s his New York agency merged with Mather & Crowther. Ogilvy & Mather became a global agency with branches in several major cites.
The flotation of the company in 1966 made him a very wealthy man and he continued as chairman of the group until he resigned in 1973, retreating to his beloved medieval castle, Touffou, in Poitiers.
He was lured out of retirement by Martin Sorrell, a financier who bought Ogilvy & Mather in the late 1980s and who David Ogilvy famously called an "odious little jerk".
He settled his differences with Sorrell and was persuaded to become executive chairman of WPP plc, the largest advertising group in the world. Three years later he retired.
He is survived by his third wife, Herta Lans and a son from his first marriage.
David Mackenzie Ogilvy, CBE: born 1922; died July, 1999