The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising (review)

For those familiar with the advertising realm, Kenneth Roman provides an intriguing and readable insider's view of the iconic figure, David Ogilvy—the man who shot to advertising fame in the 1950s and who became the Don Quixote of advertising by the 1970s. Although he spent twenty-six years with Ogilvy & Mather, Roman has not generated the one-sided laudatory tribute that one might naturally expect. In large measure, this is because he has countered his heavy reliance on Ogilvy's published and unpublished writings, broadcast interviews featuring Ogilvy, and his own personal papers and recollections with over one hundred interviews with Ogilvy's employees, clients, business associates, competitors, and family members, and with industry publications.

Roman moves quickly through Ogilvy's early life, and what emerges is an English-born intelligent young man who would not wholly apply himself to his studies, who lacked direction, and who, although social, felt like an outsider. Dropping out of Oxford in 1931, Ogilvy became an apprentice sous-chef in Paris where he claimed that he acquired his penchant for high standards and his future leadership style.

Roman then turns to Ogilvy's early foray into business. Through his brother Francis, already a principal in the London advertising agency of Mather and Crowther, he got a job as salesman for Aga Cookers and developed his life-long beliefs of never talking down to customers, measuring success by sales, and focusing ad copy on product benefits. In 1935, Ogilvy became a trainee at his brother's agency, and by 1938, he had convinced agency principals to send him to New York to study American advertising. After a short foray back in London in 1939, Ogilvy returned to the United States and found employment with pollster, George Gallup. Here, he became convinced of the value of basing advertising on marketing research.

While Roman touches upon Ogilvy's years in British military intelligence between 1942 and 1945, he quickly turns to Ogilvy's foray back into advertising. Early in 1948, after convincing his brother and partners to open an American branch, Ogilvy, Benson and Mather opened in New York. Although Roman depicts the early years of the operation as touch and go, he emphasizes the clients and campaigns that would bring the agency and Ogilvy acclaim and fame during the 1950s: Hathaway Shirt, Schweppes, Tetley Tea, Pepperidge Farm, Dove, and Rolls Royce. While Ogilvy was clearly the creative force behind these campaigns which made bold headlines, brand name emphasis, dense copy, product benefits, and brand image industry standards, much of his genius lay in his ability to write clearly and precisely and to apply what he read and observed.

In the late 1950s, Ogilvy turned away from the creative side to agency management, but Roman never explains why this shift occurred. Rather, he focuses on the publication of Ogilvy's still notable Confessions of an Advertising Man and the structural shifts occurring within the agency: its international mergers, Ogilvy stepping down as head of the U.S. branch in 1965, his taking the agency public in 1966 due to his personal financial needs, and the arrival of notable new clients, including General Foods, Shell, and American Express.

In the ensuing chapters, Roman depicts a man attempting to "buck the tide," but increasingly unable to do so. In 1975, at age 63, Ogilvy stepped down as Chairman and Chief Executive of Ogilvy & Mather International and retreated to France to his 1973 acquired one hundred fifty-acre, thirty-room chateau. For the next fifteen years, he tried to steer the agency by serving as worldwide creative head, writing numerous too-often-ignored encyclicals on agency management and waging an unsuccessful campaign to stop Ogilvy & Mather's acquisition of additional agencies. He quickly came to regret having taken the business public because he believed the focus was now on profits and not clients and...