The Real Mad Men (5 page)

Reeves had a point; Bates was almost exclusively a packaged goods agency and despite the antipathy it created, not just for its own sake but for all advertising, clearly a lot of the time his utilitarian advertising
for those low cost, functional products was effective. Companies like P&G adopted it as the only way in which they wanted their advertising to be conducted.

This was the era of constant product innovation, when new variations of medicines, shaving products, hair shampoos, skin creams or foods were flooding the market, to the potential bewilderment of the public. It's easy to understand that advertising, which was little more than a shouted bulletin board, was often the most efficient way to elevate your pitch above the daily cacophony. And its charisma-free directness was the quickest way to explain the benefits of, say, the previously unheard of product now being sold as hair conditioner.

But many inside advertising would argue that this soulless hard-sell approach was working for its advertisers at the expense of advertising as a whole. This certainly was not the era when the consumer would claim to prefer the commercials to the programs.

It took the likes of Reeves' even more famous brother-in-law, not always one of his greatest fans, to both lighten and soften the advertising mood.

 

“Ogilvy wrote a book. I got the galleys.… Advertising's already up there with lawyers as the most reviled. This is not going to help.”

ROGER STERLING MAD MEN

D
avid Ogilvy married Rosser Reeves' wife's sister in 1939. By several measures the two men were similar: workaholics, strongly opinionated advertising writers, and both, in their demeanor at least, cultivated men. But while for Reeves culture ended at his typewriter keys, Ogilvy carried all his considerable personal style into his and his eponymous agency's work. From the early-fifties onward, a stream of articulate and elegantly art-directed print campaigns issued from Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (OB&M), all assuming literacy and sophistication on the part of the reader—and usually offering the promise of yet more sophistication through the use of the product they were advertising.

Ogilvy was English, at a time when an English accent was still rare and hugely prized in New York. Ogilvy's was a particularly well-modulated accent, and with his long, lean figure, foppish hair, and ever present pipe, he was every bit Hollywood's idea of the perfect English gentleman, a character he exploited fully.

Ken Roman, his biographer, who worked with Ogilvy and knew him closely from 1963 until he died in 1999, says, “He dressed for his parts. He didn't wear a business suit. Sometimes he dressed as the English country gentleman with his brogues, a tweed jacket, and lapels on his vest. Sometimes he wore a kilt, before anyone had seen one. Sometimes, at big
state occasions, he put on this kind of a purple vest that looked vaguely ecclesiastical. But he never wore a normal business suit, never.”

Ogilvy's route to fame and fortune in New York was as peripatetic as it was exotic. Born in England in 1911, he won a scholarship to study history at Christ Church College, Oxford. He left without completing his degree, having suffered some sort of block, and, as quoted by Bart Cummings in
The Benevolent Dictators
, “ran away from the cultured, civilized life, and changed class and tried to become a workman. I went to Paris and got a job as a chef in the great kitchen at the Hotel Majestic.” He withstood the “slave wages, fiendish pressure, and perpetual exhaustion” for a year, returned to England, and began selling Aga cookers door to door. His sales prowess brought him to the attention of his elder brother Francis's employers at the advertising agency Mather & Crowther (M&C).

Ogilvy accepted the offer of a job as an account executive and did well, but felt he was working in his brother's shadow. To prove his independence he asked for a transfer to M&C's US office. He went to New York in 1938, and by the end of a year he loved it so much he didn't think of returning to England. With no firm intention of continuing with a career in advertising, he drifted into his next job, but it turned out to be critical in the formulation of his theories and future practices. He joined George Gallup's company and entered the new but rapidly expanding world of consumer research.

ADVERTISING RESEARCH
had existed since the late nineteenth century in the form of crude testing of different versions of ads by evaluating coupon responses. Mail order shopping was dominant in a dissipated, still largely rural population, so it was easy to measure the success of an ad simply by tracking the volume of orders that followed each insertion. The offer of a free sample at the bottom of an advert for a new beauty soap wasn't generosity on the part of the manufacturer, nor was it just about getting a trial; it elicited a coupon to be returned to the company. The coupons were coded to identify the specific advert and the publication in which it had appeared, and by analysis of the returned coupons a basic picture could be drawn of which version of the ads, running in which publications, were the most successful.

But the research was rough and ready and reactive; it could only give you a crude view afterwards, which you could then apply to your next insertion. As the development of mass production and branded products fed the growth of advertising, market research slowly grew up alongside it, developing from “How did we do?” to “Why?” to “How can we do it better?”

In an attempt to assuage the advertisers' anxiety—best expressed by the nineteenth-century Philadelphia store owner John Wannamaker when he said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”—agencies racheted up their research presentations, claiming to be able to produce super-efficient advertising based on their “proprietary” research techniques.

BY THE 1930S
, research had become the Holy Grail of advertising; clients, often uncertain and uncomfortable when handling and evaluating abstract “creative” ideas, were much happier pouring over the endless charts and graphs churned out by the research people, and were reassured by the rules guiding them through the alien world of advertising creativity. The copywriter's imagination and individuality was allowed to run only to the point at which it interfered with the “proven” rules of how they should do their ads, and intuition became subordinated to research reports.

An audience measurement system was developed by Claude Hooper, specifically to cater for the explosive interest in radio as an advertising medium, and the phrase “Hooper Ratings” became the scourge of radio producers and agencies across the country. Such was the client confidence in their research that a low Hooper rating on a Monday morning could break a Saturday night radio show.

In 1931 George Gallup, then a professor of journalism at Northwestern, produced a report of his research into readers' reactions to advertisements in magazines. He found that ads based around sex and vanity were the most popular with women, the second most popular being those based on the quality of the product. Men also ranked those as their top two, only in reverse order. But in the same survey, Gallup found that those approaches were the two least favored by advertisers, who preferred ads leading on efficiency and economy—which were the least favored by all readers.

Brothers-in-law but in little else; David Ogilvy (left) and Rosser Reeves (right).

The impact of his findings attracted major attention across the advertising world and he was wooed by several of the larger agencies. He eventually joined Young & Rubicam (Y&R) to head their research department and then in 1935 set up the American Institute of Public Opinion, which later became The Gallup Organization. The main purpose was the objective measurement of what “the people” were thinking, and his first big success was the correct forecasting of the 1936 election, Roosevelt's victory over Landon. The Literary Digest, the respected pollster of the day, had projected a Landon landslide. High on the success, Gallup's business expanded—and it was this organization that David Ogilvy joined in 1939.

IN THE THREE YEARS
he was with Gallup, Ogilvy conducted more than four hundred surveys, many of them in Hollywood, pre-testing films. Interrogating the US public on how they perceive and receive communications designed to entertain them was clearly ideal grounding for a future career in advertising. The rigor of the research and analysis also influenced the development of what became his highly disciplined and well-documented philosophy of advertising.

By the time Ogilvy returned to New York, now aged thirty-eight, he'd convinced himself he wanted to be a copywriter but felt no one would employ him as he'd never done the job formally. The only other route open to him was to start his own agency. His personal wealth amounted to $6,000 but his brother persuaded his old British agency M&C, together with another London agency, SH Benson, to invest in the venture on condition he employed an American partner—they felt a British man in New York wouldn't have the business credibility. So in 1948 he set up Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather with Anderson Hewitt, a Chicago advertising executive who contributed $14,000. Hewitt left the company five years later, when it became Ogilvy, Benson & Mather.

Their first piece of business was Wedgwood, the china manufacturer. It's a typical Ogilvy product, reflecting a genteel refinement. Indeed, his earliest successes were for similar “drawing room” type products. And despite their small size, they could well be described as his biggest triumphs, since they're still amongst the most famous work his agency ever did and on which the agency was initially built.

Elegant literary copy and captivating photographs selling the historical and cultural benefits of a holiday in Britain for the British Tourist Association was an early noted campaign. Ogilvy said he was happiest working on products that interested him and they tended to be products with a touch of class, more white than blue collar. In fact, often he couldn't help imbuing the one with the status of the other, as in an ad for Austin cars with the headline attributed to an anonymous diplomat, “I'm sending my son to Groton with the money I've saved driving an Austin.” In Ogilvy's velvet-cushioned world, a cheap car was sold not on the basis of anything as sordid as thrift or value but on the promise of a posh education for the children of the diplomatic classes.

It was entirely consistent that he should describe the account executives he wanted as the backbone of his agency as “gentlemen with brains.”

HATHAWAY WAS
a medium-priced range of shirts from a small Maine clothing manufacturer with an advertising budget of just $30,000. Typically, Ogilvy decided that the shirts would be modeled on a man of some sort of distinction and they settled on a dispossessed White Russian baron turned part-time PR man, George Wrangell. He definitely had the aristocratic look but was often in poor health and, according to Cliff Field who wrote a lot of the ads over the ten-year period, “a difficult man to photograph. He had a tendency to turn blue outdoors.”

For no clear reason other than he had been intrigued by a picture of Lewis Douglas (the US Ambassador to Britain) wearing a patch over one eye after a fishing accident, on the morning of the shoot Ogilvy bought a handful of eyepatches. At the shoot, he asked that Wrangell be photographed with and without one of the eyepatches, and in the end he chose a version with the patch.

The first ad ran in
The New Yorker
on September 22, 1951. It was an instant success. The device had exactly the effect Ogilvy wanted, adding intrigue and narrative as a background to the shirts. The campaign developed, showing Wrangell engaged in all sorts of narrative-rich situations; as a painter, an orchestral conductor, a classical musician—always with the eyepatch. Soon it became a popular prop at parties and offices, and other campaigns aped it, even putting it on animals. To maintain an upmarket image the ads ran only in the smart, literary
New Yorker
, the magazine's ad manager saying he'd never seen such interest in a campaign.