All great advertisers are born that way...or are they? David Ogilvy was a man known for his colourful temperament, formidable wisdom, but most of all for his lasting impression on the advertising world. He transformed advertising and copywriting from a disreputable business into a fast-paced industry full of passionate and powerfully creative minds. But even people at the top can have humble beginnings and they don’t come as far fetched as Ogilvy’s!
This world-renowned advertising mogul was a jack-of-all-trades, a working chameleon. If you think David Ogilvy had a linear career path to advertising stardom, you’d be very much mistaken. Years later he forwarded this memo to one of his partners:
Will Any Agency Hire This Man?
He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and an Amish farmer. He knows nothing about marketing and had never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year.
I doubt if any American agency will hire him.
However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.
The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.
Before becoming the legendary ad man of Ogilvy & Mather, he was a cooking apprentice in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic, claiming if he’d stayed he would have, “faced years of slave wages, fiendish pressure and perpetual exhaustion”. Onwards and upwards, Ogilvy went to sell cookers, door to door. Taking inspiration he wrote his first novel, “A Guide for Aga Salesmen”, which stressed the importance of direct marketing, salesmanship and closing that all-important deal. Fast-forward to WW2 and Ogilvy was now a member of the British intelligence, secret Camp X, in Ontario, Canada. "It was there he mastered the power of propaganda before becoming king of Madison Avenue.” Even Eisenhower's Psychological Warfare Board implemented Ogilvy’s reports throughout Europe.
Ogilvy’s empire had a humble beginning in 1948, with just $6000 in the bank, and yet to write his first advert he founded the ad agency, Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. Not letting any ad “pass like a ship in the night”, Ogilvy went on to write some of the most iconic adverts of our time, for example, The man in the Hathaway Shirt, The loudest noise is the electric clock - from Rolls Royce and his personal favourite, Pablo Casals is coming home - to Puerto Rico. To come out on top you need to “Play to win but enjoy the fun”.