Regarded as the father of modern advertising David Ogilvy created some of the most memorable advertising campaigns that set the standard for others to follow.
"We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough. We detest office politicians, toadies, bullies and pompous asses. We abhor ruthlessness. The way up our ladder is open to everybody. In promoting people to top jobs, we are influenced as much by their character as anything else".
Ogilvy was an expert in management. If you aspire to be a good manager in any kind of business then this is a must read. His views are timeless and form a blueprint for good practice in business. Confessions of an Advertising Man is the standard introduction to advertising, written in the bracingly robust style that has become the Ogilvy hallmark.
David Ogilvy was born in West Horsley, England in 1911 and was the youngest of five children of a Scottish stockbroker. He was educated in Edinburgh and then at Oxford, but was thrown out before he completed his degree. This he said was the real failure in his life.
He then worked in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic in Paris and was a door-to-door salesman for AGA Cookers in Britain before emigrating to the US in 1938. At the age of 37, he founded his New York based agency, which later merged to form an international company now known as Ogilvy & Mather. It employs 10,000 people in 90 countries.
