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was fond of saying, quoting his father.
    Fortunately, he also knew how to motivate staff. Joel Raphaelson recalls: ‘When I joined the agency, David must have been about 46 or 47, and he cut a dashing figure. After about a week, he asked me to speak with him about an ad for the New York Philharmonic – he was on the board and we ran ads promoting fundraising subscriptions. He said, “Let’s talk about it over lunch”, and asked his secretary to call the Pavillon, which was the fanciest restaurant in New York at the time.’
    But, like Monsieur Pitard in the kitchen of the Majestic, Ogilvy never forgot that an effective manager should be formidable. ‘He scared the hell out of me a couple of times,’ says Raphaelson. ‘He was temperamental and he didn’t pull punches. Once he sent me a note that read: “Joel, I thought you promised to show me the Sears ads last Tuesday. You have now been working on them for three months – longer than the gestation period in PIGS.”’
    Ogilvy could appear arrogant, although his arrogance seems to have been a cloak for lurking insecurity. He was intelligent enough to be aware of this, and even to have a sense of humour about it. ‘I am a miserable duffer in everything except advertising,’ he wrote in Confessions . But a few lines down, he added: ‘When Fortune wrote an article about me and titled it “Is David Ogilvy a genius?” I asked my lawyer to sue the editor for the question mark.’ Many years later, he gave a speech at the Bombay Advertising Club. Afterwards he was asked: ‘Mr Ogilvy, Indian advertising draws its inspiration from Madison Avenue. What about Madison Avenue? What is its source?’ Ogilvy replied: ‘Modesty forbids.’
    The film-maker and former adman Sir Alan Parker skewers Ogilvy’s faintly caricature-like image in the preface to the 1983 re-edition of Confessions . ‘I suspect that Ogilvy’s Turnbull & Asser shirts and puffing pipe were as much an egregious concoction as the man in the eye patch he had made famous, but who could fail to be seduced by a little British narcissism fused with hard-nosed American, self-serving salesmanship?’
    Although he is sometimes associated with the period revered in advertising circles as ‘the creative revolution’, Ogilvy was suspicious of the idea of creativity. His terse summary of the adman’s role was: ‘Sell – or else.’ He claimed that he had ‘a reasonably original mind, but not too much so. I thought as clients think.’ In a later book, Ogilvy on Advertising (1985), he wrote: ‘I occasionally use the hideous word creative myself, for lack of a better.’ But he also said that ‘if you ask which of my advertisements was the most successful, I will answer it was the first I wrote for industrial development in Puerto Rico. It won no awards for “creativity”, but it persuaded scores of manufacturers to start factories on that poverty-stricken island.’ He quoted his old friend Rosser Reeves: ‘Do you want fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve start moving up?’
    Joel Raphaelson says, ‘David did little to correct the misconception that he was overly scientific about advertising. He simply didn’t like advertising that sold the creative more than it sold the product. He thought the things that some of the younger guys were doing were a little nutty. He knew the history of advertising and he understood what worked most of the time – and he felt that any professional should know that.’
    Rather than trying to turn advertising into an art form, Ogilvy strived to raise its professional status: ‘I think he failed in that effort, but it is one of the reasons he remains an honoured figure in the industry, even if others had a greater influence on the development of advertising.’
    Ogilvy played