OGILVY & MATHER AT 50 -- THE `HOUSE THAT DAVID BUILT' STILL LIVES BY HIS PRECEPTS: 2 OF 4

`GRADING' THE ADS Mr. Ogilvy liked to quantify effective design. Every ad brought to him would start with 100 points. He would then deduct 9 points if the brand was not "visible at a glance"; another 6 if a drawing was used; 4 if the copy was reversed -- until finally the poor art director was left with literally zero. "Ordinary Americans," Mr. Ogilvy wrote in a 1985 memo, "are too nice, or too dumb. . .to dislike anything." David Ogilvy was neither, and he disliked many things. On larger issues, though, his certainty was not always matched by consistency. For years this admitted showman inveighed against the values of humor, entertainment and cleverness in the advertising of others while admiring them endlessly in his own work. He condemned nepotism, but not before it had paved his way into advertising and later helped him start an agency. FRANK AND CHARMING But Mr. Ogilvy saw himself with the same clarity he brought to his clients' products. He once referred to "Confessions of an Advertising Man" as "unrelieved egotism." It was one Ogilvy opinion neither friends nor enemies had cause to challenge. But by saying it himself, he disposed of the issue before it arose. He knew that frankness often implied more than it said. In the '60s, his agency bio said this: "David Ogilvy is a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather. He is also Chairman of the Board." The message was that this was a man who regards his work as more important than his titles. Mr. Ogilvy was not only disarmingly frank but also irresistibly charming. An ad he'd done for Morgan Guaranty may have been "rather dull, but," he told a group in 1964, "[it's] the best on a bank which was ever written." (Headline: "Wanted: Young Men With Fire in Their Bellies") A NEW YORK SABBATICAL The advertising career of British-born David Ogilvy began in 1936 after a varied and intriguing series of other careers and adventures (see article on Page C-25). He joined the distinguished agency Mather & Crowder, London, where his older brother, Francis (1904-64), had worked since 1929. By the time David joined the agency, Francis had become general manager and mentor to his brother. In 1938, Mr. Ogilvy persuaded the agency to stake him to a one-year sabbatical in New York to learn about American advertising. He returned thoroughly educated. In 1939, London read the first public pronouncements of Ogilvy on advertising in the World's Press News. Asked to name his "All-American Agency Team," Mr. Ogilvy submitted his assessments of leading American advertising people. It was a list that showed both perception and, in the case of Rosser Reeves, who in 1939 was still an unknown copywriter at Blackett-Sample-Hummert, amazing prescience. FINALLY AN AGENCY LAUNCH Prescience, however, may have had an ally in Mr. Ogilvy's interest in Mr. Reeves' sister-in-law, an 18-year-old Juilliard student whom he returned to the U.S. to marry just as war was breaking out in Europe. (They were divorced in 1957.) War postponed any advertising ambitions Mr. Ogilvy may have had. After three years with research giant George Gallup, in 1942 he joined British Intelligence and later the British Embassy in Washington. After the war he marked further time as a gentleman farmer in Pennsylvania. In 1948, at an age (37) when most men are well along in their careers, Mr. Ogilvy finally got down to business. Once again he went to his brother at Mather & Crowther, this time with a plan to launch a "British agency" in America. M&C and S.H. Benson Ltd., another London shop, invested $45,000, but with the proviso that Mr. Ogilvy, who had been out of advertising for nearly 10 years, hire someone who knew how to run an agency. His first choice, Rosser Reeves, preferred to stay at Ted Bates & Co. So he chose Anderson Hewitt, an account man he had met briefly at the Sterling Getchell agency in 1941 and who was at J. Walter Thompson when Mr. Ogilvy recruited him. SUN OIL COMES ABOARD The agency opened in September as Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. Business was slow as the new shop began chewing into its capital. Then in 1948 Mr. Hewitt brought in the first big account, Sun Oil. With no track record or creative reputation to offer, the decisive advantage HOB&M had over its competition was Mr. Hewitt and, according to a later article in Fortune, a willingness to kick back 40% of its commissions to the client. Even at that, the deal was profitable. After three years the agency billed about $9 million, but it had yet to acquire a defining account upon which Mr. Ogilvy could put his creative imprint. All that changed in 1951 when a small shirtmaker from Waterville, Maine, came calling. At only $30,000, the C.F. Hathaway Co. budget was so tiny that even HOB&M wondered if it would be worth it. When Hathaway promised never to change a word of the agency's copy, however, Mr. Ogilvy took the business. The Hathaway man with the eye patch remains one of the most famous of ad heroes and perhaps Mr. Ogilvy's greatest "hit." The ads crackled with a literacy that flattered readers' intelligence. In the 1950s, Mr. Ogilvy's London partners asked him to take on another small account billing only $15,000. It was Schweppes Co., a British maker of quinine water and other mixer beverages. The company had the unorthodox notion of using its own advertising manager, Commander Edward Whitehead, in the advertising. Mr. Whitehead was a distinguished looking, bearded Brit, whose accent and attitude were full of poise and well-tempered elegance. USING `THE NEW YORKER' What began as a single introductory ad built around him grew into a TV campaign that went well into the '60s. The commander's subtle sense of life's finer things, including women, delighted Americans. But there was more to Hathaway and Schweppes than upscale exotica. The product personalities created for these two small clients also reflected their creator and his agency. They had a refinement about them and required a refined environment in which to be seen. That was why David Ogilvy saw fit to favor a magazine that would help define the agency as effectively as its clients. "In those days The New Yorker was incomparably more important in sophisticated circles than it is today," says Joel Raphaelson, one of Mr. Ogilvy's closest associates for many years. "And David played that for all it was worth. Even though the magazine had a relatively small circulation, wherever it made any sense at all he saw to it that our clients ran in The New Yorker. Hathaway, Helena Rubinstein, Rolls-Royce and Schweppes all ran there. And more quickly than you might think, a very important group of readers became aware of [David Ogilvy]." It was hard not to become aware of David Ogilvy in the early '50s. He was a natural-born publicity hound, loaded with presence, glamor, charm and a head full of opinions that made outrageously good sense. He was also producing 90% of the work getting the agency noticed.

OGILVY & MATHER AT 50 -- THE `HOUSE THAT DAVID BUILT' STILL LIVES BY HIS PRECEPTS: 2 OF 4

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