ogilvy confessions of an advertising man

Image source: Jon Glatfelter Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)ĭavid Ogilvy wrote this iconic book in 1963, fourteen years after launching his wildly successful advertising agency. Over the years, Ogilvy and his ad agency did work for Rolls Royce, Sears, the British government, the state of Puerto Rico, Dove, Shell, and dozens of major brands in the CPG industry. With the backing of his old employer Mather & Crowther, which was now run by his brother, he successfully launched an advertising agency on Madison Avenue- Ogilvy & Mather. Gallup.ĭuring World War II, he worked for the British Intelligence Service and became an alumnus of the secret Camp X, a British paramilitary installation located in Canada, where, he was trained in sabotage and close combat, as well as propaganda and psy-ops.Īfter the war, Ogilvy lived among the Amish for several years, before moving to Manhattan. He would later credit much of his success to what he learned working for Dr. George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute in New Jersey for a year. In 1938, Ogilvy convinced his employer to let him work at Dr.

He was eventually hired as an account executive by the British advertising agency Mather & Crowther. He went on to work as an assistant chef at Hotel Majestic in Paris for a year, before he returned to the UK to become a door-to-door salesman in Scotland. He received a scholarship to attend Oxford University but was soon expelled for poor academic performance. I thought I had purchased an autobiography-one which, if I was lucky, might teach me something about the creative industry.īut as I came to find out as I was flipping through the pages of this book after it had been sitting on my desk for a couple of months, it is much more than that.įirst, a short biography of David Ogilvy: David Ogilvy smoking a pipe David Ogilvy-a brief biographyĭavid Ogilvy CBE (1911 – 1999) was born into a British upper-class family in 1911. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into when I began flipping through the pages of this book.

These are the words with which David Ogilvy start off his legendary Confessions of an Advertising Man. My agency was an immediate and meteoric success.” What could a Scotsman know about advertising? “Fourteen years before writing these Confessions, I had gone to New York and started an advertising agency.

Ogilvy confessions of an advertising man