Ogilvy & Mather Marks Centennial of Founder’s Birth with Cannes Celebration

- Cannes set to ‘turn red’ in honour of David Ogilvy -

Cannes, France, June 20, 2011 — To mark the centennial of David Ogilvy’s birth, the agency he founded is holding a special celebration at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

At sunrise on June 23rd, the longest red carpet ever seen in Cannes will be rolled out along the entire length of the Croissette, leading to the steps of the Grand Auditorium, where a giant billboard stating, “On this day, 100 years ago, David was born to inspire,” will commemorate the centenary. After dark, all the lights along the boulevard will bathe the pavement in red, setting the mood for the agency’s celebration at Le Grand Hotel.

The company kicked off the celebration by challenging Ogilvy employees from around the globe to create a short video on the theme of inspiration to honour David’s lasting influence, with the grand prize to be Ogilvy’s on-the-ground bloggers at the festival www.ogilvy.com/contest “Turning red” and the theme of ‘inspiration’ is carried out through the official website where people are prompted to tweet “What inspires you?” to #do100, turning their Twitter avatar red and adding their message to thousands of others from around the world in a giant David Ogilvy mosaic.

One of the advertising industry’s most famous and lauded figures, David Ogilvy began his business career as a door-to-door salesman of Aga cookers in Scotland. He founded his agency in 1948 with no clients and a staff of two, building it into an empire that was eventually acquired by WPP in 1989. His books Ogilvy on Advertising and Confessions of an Advertising Man are among the most influential and widely-read publications concerning the industry. His famous campaigns for Schweppes, Guinness, Rolls-Royce, among others, remain highly influential, and his legacy led him to be widely known as “The Father of Advertising”, as well as gaining him the honour of a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Tham Khai Meng, Worldwide Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather, said: “To work at a company founded by someone like David Ogilvy is inspiration in itself. It’s that kind of legacy that pushes you to explore ideas and ways of thinking, and drives you to new and better things. We wanted to pay our respects to the great man, but also to celebrate just what made him such a pioneer in this industry and how that can inspire people today. Where better to commemorate his creative legacy than Cannes?”

Turn red for creativity at www.ogilvy.com/do100

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For more information, contact:
Sarah Owen at Pumpkin:
T: 020 7287 2007 E: [email protected]

“Ogilvyisms”- Quotations from David Ogilvy
1. Never write an advertisement that you wouldn’t want your own family to read.

2. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles.

3. If you hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.

4. Encourage innovation. Change is our life blood, stagnation is our death knell.

5. We prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance.

6. Tolerate genius.

7. Unless your advertising is built on a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.

8. Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom.

9. I believe in the Scottish proverb: Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom. They do not die of hard work.

10. You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.

11. The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure you can live happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.

12. No manufacturer ever got rich by underpaying his agency. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.

13. Hire the kind of people clients don’t have and wouldn’t dream of having.

14. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out – either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time.

15. Do not summon people to your office. It frightens them. Instead go to see them in their offices.

16. You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.

17. I despise toadies who suck up to their bosses; they are generally the same people who bully their subordinates.

18. I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings.

19. Look for people who aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.

20. The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.

David Ogilvy Biography

June 23, 1911 – July 21, 1999
David Ogilvy, the quintessential advertising man, died on July 21, 1999 at his home in Touffou, France after a long illness. He is survived by his wife, the former Herta Lans, as well as his son, David Fairfield Ogilvy, daughter-in-law Cookie Ogilvy and three stepgrandsons.
Ogilvy remains one of the most famous names in advertising and one of the handful of titans (Raymond Rubicam, Leo Burnett, William Bernbach, Ted Bates) who shaped the business after the 1920s.

In 1948, David founded the agency which is now known as Ogilvy & Mather. Starting with no clients and a staff of two, he built the company into a worldwide enterprise—one of the eighth largest agency networks, and one of the most respected. Today it has 359 offices in 100 countries.

Perhaps more than any other agency, Ogilvy & Mather has been built on a set of clearly defined principles reflecting the views of its founder. David developed these principles early in his career and never wavered from them. He has always believed that the function of advertising is to sell, and that it is possible to determine the techniques by which sales are most likely to be produced.

In 1936, at the age of 25, he declared that “Every advertisement must tell the whole sales story. Every word in the copy must count,” adding that “permanent success has rarely been built on frivolity and…people do not buy from clowns.” In a speech to the Association of National Advertisers (U.S.) in 1992, he was still sounding this theme: “If you focus your advertising budget on entertaining the consumer, you may not sell as much of your product as you like. People don’t buy a new detergent because the manufacturer told a joke on television last night. They buy it because it promises a benefit.”

Despite the austerity of his doctrine, as a copywriter, Ogilvy was personally responsible for many of advertising’s most famously sophisticated campaigns. These include The Man in the Hathaway Shirt, the series of advertisements for Schweppes featuring Commander Whitehead, and perhaps the best-known headline ever written for an automobile ad: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

Ogilvy has been widely quoted both in and beyond the advertising industry. In the 1950s he declared that “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.” Among other memorable sayings:

“You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.”

“Never run an advertisement you would not want your own family to see.”

“We prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles.”

He published his first book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, in 1963. It became the most widely read book ever written about advertising. In 1978, Ogilvy published his autobiography, Blood, Brain & Beer. Five years later, Ogilvy on Advertising expanded on Ogilvy’s beliefs about advertising. Together, these books set forth a coherent point of view, and a compendium of detailed knowledge and specific advice, unlike any other available to practitioners of advertising.

David Mackenzie Ogilvy was born in West Horsley, England on June 23, 1911. He was educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh and at Christ Church, Oxford. He did not graduate from Oxford; as he put it years later, he “got thrown out.” He called this “the real failure of my life … I was supposed to be a star at Oxford. And instead of that, I was thrown out. I couldn’t pass the exams.”

After Oxford, Ogilvy went to Paris, where he worked in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic. Monsieur Pitard, the head chef, made an everlasting impression on him and helped form his principles of management. In a 1972 talk on leadership, he recalled the high morale in Pitard’s kitchen:

“I saw my old boss in the kitchens of the Hotel Majestic fire one of his chefs because the poor devil could not get his brioches to rise straight. I was shocked by his ruthlessness, but it made all the other chefs feel that they were working in the best kitchen in the world. Their morale would have done credit to the U.S. Marine Corps.”

When Ogilvy returned to Britain, he worked as a door-to-door salesman for Aga Cookers. In 1935 he wrote a guide for Aga salesmen that Fortune later called “probably the best sales manual ever written.” The 24-year-old author served up timeless advice such as this:
“The more prospects you talk to, the more sales you expose yourself to, the more orders you will get. But never mistake quantity of calls for quality of salesmanship.”

David Ogilvy emigrated to the United States in 1938. He became associate director of George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. David cites Gallup as one of the major influences on his thinking. Gallup’s meticulous research methods and devotion to reality became characteristics of David’s own approach to everything that came before him.

During World War II, he worked with British Security Coordination and served as second secretary to the British Embassy in Washington. He reported to Sir William Stephenson, learning, among other things, the art of the terse note. Memos to Sir William were returned swiftly to the sender with one of three words written in hand at the top: YES, NO, or SPEAK (meaning come to see him).

A letter Ogilvy sent to Puerto Rico Governor Ted Moscoso in 1972, shortly after Moscoso’s party was returned to power, read, “Dear Governor: Thank you. Yours ever, D.O.”

When France elected the Socialist Francois Mitterand to the presidency, Ogilvy sent this telex to a colleague, “Mitterand is going to tax the rich. I am rich.”

After the war, Ogilvy lived among the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and worked as a farmer.
In 1948, he founded the New York–based ad agency Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (its name changed to Ogilvy, Benson & Mather in 1953 and later to Ogilvy & Mather International in 1965 and finally Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide in the mid-Eighties), with the financial backing of London agency Mather & Crowther. Thirty-three years later, he sent the following 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 a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing and has 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.
In his agency’s first twenty years, Ogilvy almost single-handedly won assignments from Lever Brothers, General Foods, and American Express. Shell gave him their entire account in North America. Sears hired him for their first national advertising campaign.

In 1965, Ogilvy merged the agency with Mather & Crowther, his London backers, to form a new international company. One year later the company went public—one of the first advertising firms to do so.

Ogilvy had lived full-time at Touffou, France since 1973 and retired as Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather in 1975. And, while no longer responsible for the day-to-day management of the firm, he stayed in touch by telex, fax and mail. His correspondence so dramatically increased the volume of mail handled in the nearby town of Bonnes, France that the post office was reclassified at a higher status and the postmaster’s salary raised.

By the time Ogilvy moved to France, Ogilvy & Mather had expanded around the world and was firmly in place as one of the top agencies in all regions. David emerged from Touffou on occasion to visit branches of the company in many countries and to deliver speeches to gatherings of clients and other business audiences. In a 1991 address to the Association of National Advertisers (U.S.), he continued to trumpet his lifelong themes. The speech ended:

“I once got a new client who told me to create a campaign which would make his friends at his country club congratulate him on his clever, amusing advertising. I refused to do that. I just gave him a campaign which research had told me was likely to increase his sales.
No manufacturer has ever complained that his advertising was selling too much.”

In 1989 The Ogilvy Group was bought by WPP, a British holding company, for US$864 million. The purchase made WPP, which also owned the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson and a number of other companies, the largest marketing communications firm in the world. Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, asked Ogilvy to serve as the holding company’s non-executive chairman, a post he held for three years.
In an interview on his 75th birthday, Ogilvy was asked if anything he’d always wanted had somehow eluded him. His reply, “Knighthood. And a big family—ten children.” His only child, David Fairfield Ogilvy, of Greenwich, Connecticut, was born during his first marriage, to Melinda Street. That marriage ended in divorce (1955) as did a second marriage to Anne Cabot. Ogilvy married Herta Lans in France in 1973.

Although he did not achieve knighthood, Ogilvy was made a commander of the British Empire in 1967. He was elected to the Advertising Hall of Fame in the U.S. in 1977 and to France’s “Order of Arts and Letters” in 1990.

From 1958 to 1960, Ogilvy served as chairman of the Public Participation Committee for Lincoln Center, helping raise funds to build the huge performing arts complex in New York. He was appointed Chairman of the United Negro College Fund in 1968 and trustee on the Executive Council of the World Wildlife Fund in 1975.

David Ogilvy – A Timeline

1911 (23 June) Born in West Horsley, England.
1924 – 1929 Attends Fettes, a boarding school near Edinburgh.
1929 – 1931 Attends Christchurch, Oxford (Scholar In Modern History).
1930 – 1931 Works as a chef in the kitchen of the Majestic Hotel, Paris.
1932 Works as a salesman for AGA Cookers, Edinburgh.
1935 Joins Mather & Crowther, a London advertising agency.
1938 Goes to U.S. to study American advertising for Mather & Crowther.
1939 Becomes Associate Director of George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute at Princeton, New Jersey.
1942 Works at British Intelligence Service at the British Embassy In Washington.
1945 Works as a farmer In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
1957 – 1967 Becomes Director, New York Philharmonic.
1963 Publishes Confessions of an Advertising Man. The book becomes an international best-seller and gets translated into fourteen languages.
1966 Ogilvy & Mather goes public on Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange.
1967 Made Commander of the British Empire.
1968 Appointed Chairman, United Negro College Fund.
1973 Moves to Touffou, a 14th-century castle In France.
1975 Retires as Ogilvy & Mather’s Chairman. Becomes Worldwide Creative Head.
1975 Appointed trustee, World Wildlife Fund International.
1978 Publishes autobiography, Blood, Brains & Beer.
1983 Publishes Ogilvy on Advertising.
1989 (16 May) WPP plc of London acquires The Ogilvy Group for $864 million.
1989 – 1992 Serves as Chairman, WPP Group.
1990 Named Officer. Ordre des Arts & Lettres, French government.
1997 Advertising on Ogilvy, a documentary created by Ogilvy & Mather New York as a present and testimonial to David on his 85th birthday, makes its public debut at the Museum of Television and Radio In New York.
1997 An Autobiography, a reprint of Blood, Brains & Beer, Is republished by John Wiley & Sons with a new foreword and some revisions In the appendix.