Adland by Mark Tungate Page B

established New York admen like Rosser Reeves, at that time a copywriter at Blackett-Sample-Hummert. Although Ogilvy admired Reeves, he could never fully accept his new mentor’s coldly scientific approach to advertising, believing like Raymond Rubicam (another of Ogilvy’s heroes) that effective advertising had to be entertaining as well as persuasive. In essence, Ogilvy’s style of advertising was a synthesis of everything that had gone before: the science of Claude Hopkins, the sophistication of JWT under Stanley Resor, and the research-based creativity of Young & Rubicam.
    As if to continue his advertising education, Ogilvy got a job with researcher George Gallup, and spent the best part of three years travelling across America learning about the hopes, dreams and habits of his adopted homeland’s citizens. Perhaps what he saw disturbed him, because after wartime military intelligence service he took an unlikely sidestep into rural life, buying an Amish farm in Pennsylvania. Fortunately for the advertising industry, his efforts to farm tobacco were as unsuccessful as his attempts to become a history scholar, and he realized that he would have to go back into business. He also realized that he was unlikely to get a job at an advertising agency.
    In the book The Unpublished David Ogilvy , an internal agency document compiled in 1986, a short autobiographical note captures his predicament at the time. ‘Will any agency hire this man? He is 38, and unemployed. 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 willing to go to work for US $5000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will hire him. However, a London agency did hire him.’
    The facts are a little more complicated. Convinced that he would never find employment at a US agency, Ogilvy decided to start one of his own. His capital amounted to US $6,000, but fortunately by that stage his brother Francis was managing director of Mather & Crowther, which agreed to lend him money and its name. David also persuadedanother well-known British agency, SH Benson, to invest. At the same time, he convinced the American branch of Wedgwood China to take a risk on a new agency, if only for strategic space-buying purposes.
    At first, Ogilvy’s backers assumed that the agency needed an American (and presumably more experienced) front man. And so Anderson Hewitt was persuaded to leave the Chicago office of J Walter Thompson, where he was an account man, and become president of the new agency. Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, ‘a British advertising agency in New York’, was born in September 1948. Ogilvy was named vice-president in charge of research. Although the partnership toddled along for four years, it became quite clear that Ogilvy yearned to stand on his own two feet, and Hewitt eventually left.
    In the meantime, Ogilvy had been busy making a name for himself as one of the industry’s emerging stars. If his backers in London had imagined that his archetypal ‘Britishness’ would be a drawback in New York, they were quite wrong. As he later recalled in the interview with Viewpoint , Ogilvy knew how to brand himself: ‘I had a terrific advantage when I started an agency in New York. I had a British accent. With so many agencies, so much competition, I’d got a gimmick – my English accent, which helped to differentiate me from the ordinary. There are an awful lot of English over there in advertising now, but in those days there were only about two of us. That was very helpful.’
    Of course, two of the campaigns that made Ogilvy famous were based on exactly this kind of ‘branding by personality’. The first was ‘the man in the Hathaway shirt’. In 1951 Ogilvy was hired by Hathaway, a small Maine-based clothing firm, to create a national