The advertising Guru

David Ogilvy

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 (although he didn't graduate).
After Oxford, Ogilvy went to Paris, he worked in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic where he learned discipline, management - and when to move on: "If I stayed at the Majestic I would have faced years of slave wages, fiendish pressure, and perpetual exhaustion." He returned to England to sell cooking stoves, door-to-door.
Ogilvy's career with Aga Cookers was astonishing. He sold stoves to nuns, drunkards, and everyone in between. In 1935 he wrote a guide for Aga salesmen (Fortune magazine called it "probably the best sales manual ever written"). Among its suggestions, "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."
But his dreams took him some where else, so in 1948, he founded the New York-based ad agency Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (which eventually became Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide), with the financial backing of London agency Mather & Crowther. He had never written an advertisement in his life.
Ogilvy visualized himself in the advertising field no matter if he had or not previous knowledge or trainning.
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 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 his passion and his edgy attitude lead him to become the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.

Building an advertising empire:
In his agency's first twenty years, Ogilvy 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.

"I doubt whether any copywriter has ever had so many winners in such a short period of time," he wrote in his autobiography. "They made Ogilvy & Mather so hot that getting clients was like shooting fish in a barrel."

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. Soon Ogilvy & Mather had expanded around the world and was firmly in place as one of the top agencies in all regions.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ogilvy