Lessons from an ad man

At least when set against the clearest and bluntest of them all: the late advertising tycoon David Ogilvy.

Ten years after his death, Ogilvy has become a cult figure.

He was a smartly dressed pipe-smoking Scot who triumphed on Madison Avenue, then the home of American advertising.

He was James Bond meets Mad Men.

Fortune magazine last month ran an adoring piece about him: "The most influential advertising man in history ... this elegant and eclectic Brit pioneered consumer research, direct marketing - and built an industry-leading juggernaut, Ogilvy & Mather."

Open any advertising journal and odds are you will find at least one Ogilvy quote or reference to his work.

The durability of his legend is testament to the power of his ideas and the force with which he expressed them.

It is the victory of an austere, prickly intelligence over the men in wacky spectacles who promise the earth and deliver much less.

Ogilvy's most famous advertisements included the eye-patch-wearing Man in the Hathaway Shirt and a classic for Rolls-Royce: "At 60mph, the loudest noise in the Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock".

A typical Ogilvy advertisement came loaded with crisp prose conveying the attributes and benefits of the product he was plugging.

"Bear in mind that the consumer is not a moron," he used to say. "She is your wife. Do not insult her intelligence."

But Ogilvy's sense went beyond advertising. His book Confessions of an Advertising Man, recently reissued, deals with managing a company, winning clients and advancing one's career.

But it begins with a three-page summary of Ogilvy's pre-advertising life: birth in Guildford to a Gaelic-speaking financial-broker father, learning the double bass at Fettes, and being expelled from Oxford in 1931, at the height of the depression.

"For the next 17 years, while my friends were establishing themselves as doctors, lawyers, civil servants, I adventured about the world uncertain of purpose.

"I was a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a social worker in the Edinburgh slums, an associate of Dr Gallup in research for the motion picture industry ... and a farmer in Pennsylvania."

Once he discovered advertising in New York he forgot his early ambitions to be prime minister: "The revenues of my 19 clients are now greater than the revenue of Her Majesty's Government."

This should be consoling for recent graduates searching for life-rafts in this recession. A few years of aimless wandering can be a prelude to great success.

The chapter How To Rise to the Top of the Tree - Advice to the Young should be required reading. The key, he says, is to be ambitious without being so aggressive you alienate those around you.

Never stop learning and strive to become the best-informed person in your industry.

Read trade journals and reports and spend Saturdays scoping out your customers and markets.

Most of your colleagues will be too lazy to do much of this and will remain "permanently superficial".

He recommends putting in long hours, while acknowledging their cost: "If you prefer to spend all your spare time growing roses or playing with your children, I like you better, but do not complain that you are not being promoted fast enough. Managers promote the men who produce the most."

He calls the idea of team-work "bunkum". "Most top managements are secretly aware of this, and keep their eyes open for those rare individuals who lay golden eggs."

The trick, he says, is to do the routine stuff well but seize a golden opportunity when it arises and outperform. You will be remembered by your bosses.

Focus on being a specialist early in your career. Business schools boast of producing general managers but Ogilvy is convinced it is the specialists who get the glory. You want to be Usain Bolt, not the person who wins the decathlon.

He also recommends discretion in public, lucidity in writing and the habit of "graceful surrender on trivial issues".

He also offers the following advice for "refreshing vacations": "Don't stay at home ... You need a change of scene. Take your wife, but leave the children with a neighbour ... Take a sleeping pill every night for the first three nights. Get plenty of fresh air and exercise. Read a book every day - 21 books in three weeks."

He assumes you are able to read 1,000 words a minute.

There are other occasions when his writing smacks of his time: "I have an inviolable rule against employing nepots and spouses, because they breed politics. Whenever two of our people get married, one of them must depart - preferably the female, to look after her baby."

But most of it is still sound. He was a great believer in hard work delivered on time. He was a stickler for clean desks.

He loathed toadies, suspecting them of being bullies to their subordinates, and admired brains and self-confidence.

He despised office hacks, or "quarrelsome people ... who wage paper-warfare".

A couple of years before he died, aged 88 at his château in the Loire where he had nurtured a dazzling garden, he was asked what else he would like to have achieved: "Knighthood. A big family. Ten children [he was made CBE and bore only one son]."

It was a short list, appropriate for a man who liked to quote an old Scottish motto: "Be happy while you're living, for you are a long time dead."