Read Online Adland by Mark Tungate - Free Book Online

advertising campaign for a line of mid-priced shirts. As Ogilvy himself explained in Confessions , the modest size of the account did not prevent him from having grandiose ambitions. He was determined to come up with a campaign that would surpass even that of Arrow Shirts. ‘But Hathaway could spend only US $30,000 against Arrow’s US $2,000,000. A miracle was required.’
    The miracle turned out to be an eye patch. Ogilvy wanted the ads to exude class and sophistication, so he recruited a dashing, moustached model named George Wrangell. Early on, he had the idea of accessorizing George with a piratical eye patch, but this was rejected as too unorthodox. Finally the day of the shoot came, and on the way to the studio, Ogilvy ‘ducked into a drugstore and bought an eye patch for US $1.50… Exactly why it turned out to be so successful, I shall never know.’
    But Ogilvy knew very well why the campaign worked. He called it ‘story appeal’. The rakish eye patch was unusual and caught readers’ attention. ‘[The reader] glances at the photograph and says to himself: “What goes on there?” Then he reads your copy to find out. The trap is set.’
    Ever the practical daydreamer, Ogilvy used the Hathaway campaign to re-create ‘a series of situations in which I would have liked to find myself: conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, playing the oboe, copying a Goya at the Metropolitan Museum, driving a tractor, sailing, fencing, buying a Renoir, and so forth.’
    At the same time, Ogilvy had a cost-effective and strategically sound approach to buying advertising space for Hathaway. The ads ran only in the literary, upmarket New Yorker magazine, thus adding a further touch of class. As Stephen Fox notes in The Mirror Makers , after four years ‘the campaign was so familiar that Ogilvy could run an ad without copy, without even the name of the product – just a photograph of the man and his eye patch. Customers were buying an image, not a sales pitch.’
    Ogilvy repeated the process for Schweppes tonic water, this time recruiting the company’s luxuriantly bearded advertising manager, Commander Edward Whitehead, as the star of the campaign. This nautical-looking figure captured the imagination of the public exactly as the man in the Hathaway shirt had done, with a commensurate rise in sales.
    But image was not the only key to a successful ad. Ogilvy was also a crack copywriter, often working until the early hours of the morning to polish the perfect pitch. The result was invariably compelling. Joel Raphaelson, a copywriter who joined Ogilvy’s agency in 1958, recalls: ‘Despite his air of breeding and sophistication, David never used complicated words when simple ones would do. I remember him leaning over some copy I’d written that read, “Choice seats are still available”, and asking, “Why don’t you just say ‘ good seats’?” And the ads for Hathaway shirts always used words like “made” or “sewn” – never “handcrafted”.’
    When he won the Rolls Royce account in 1957, Ogilvy produced 26 different headlines for the first advertisement. The client chose: ‘At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock.’ It was probably a coincidence that a BBDO ad for Pierce Arrow cars had used more or less the same slogan 25 years earlier. Ogilvy later insisted that he had spent three weeks researching his newclient before starting on the copy, and that his headline had been inspired by a magazine article.
    Nobody, in any case, could have doubted his dedication. When he won an account, he believed in learning everything he could about the company, believing like Claude Hopkins that this was the best route to sales insights. He worked all the hours that God sent, including weekends. ‘Nobody ever died from hard work,’ he