David Ogilvy, arguably the most famous adman on the planet, died at his home in Touffou, France on June 21. He was 88.

Ogilvy’s life could have been pulled from the pages of a John le Carré novel. At various times a chef, a door-to-door salesman and a Pennsylvania tobacco grower, his serpentine career path eventually led him to Washington during World War II, where he served with British intelligence under the tutelage of Sir William Stephenson. There Ogilvy learned the finer points of espionage, including how to fire a gun and ‘kill with his bare hands’ – a skill he was no doubt tempted to use when advertisers resorted to using humour or music in their creative.

Even photographs of Ogilvy evoke the impression of the gentleman spy: clad in his signature red suspenders, Ogilvy’s bearing was aristocratic, an effect heightened by his craggy features and the smouldering pipe clenched firmly between his teeth.

Despite his starched appearance and buttoned-down demeanour, Ogilvy was a trailblazer in the world of advertising, shaking the industry out of its slumber with his unconventional views and writings. In his first of three books, Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963), Ogilvy deplored the insipid state of creative he saw around him, and exhorted agencies to seek a new breed of talent ‘among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.’

He repeated this challenge in an address to the Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide Meeting in 1989: ‘What kind of people should you discover and hire? Well, policemen and tobacco farmers, not MBAs! Clients have got MBAs! Hire the kind of people clients don’t have and wouldn’t dream of hiring.’ The subtext, of course, was clear: Hire people with backgrounds like mine.

Born in Surrey, England on June 23, 1911, Ogilvy was hardly groomed for a career in advertising. He was expelled from Oxford, where he studied history, and won his first job as a chef’s ‘apprentice’ at a hotel in Paris, preparing victuals for the pets of wealthy patrons. Then, in 1935, after an unsuccessful stint as a door-to-door salesman for Aga Stoves, Ogilvy’s brother Francis landed him a job at Mather & Crowther.

After just three years at the London agency, Ogilvy grew restless, prompting him to journey to the U.S and join forces with George Gallup, a famous market researcher with a bevy of high-powered Hollywood clients. Although he would leave Gallup in 1942 to join British intelligence, Ogilvy’s researching skills would later become a defining trait of his creative ethos. Perhaps drawing from both experiences, he once remarked, ‘Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.’

Following the war, Ogilvy settled in an Amish community in Pennsylvania to try his hand at tobacco farming. The interlude was brief. He beat a hasty retreat to New York in 1948, and with the aid of Mather & Crowther, an accountant named Anderson Hewitt, and $45,000 in startup capital from S.H. Benson, another London agency, he established Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather.

The agency rapidly became successful – the company spawned a Toronto office in 1960 – and in 1951, Ogilvy landed Hathaway Shirts, an account that would cement his creative reputation. The famous campaign, which ran for 25 years, featured the ‘The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,’ a distinctive-looking character who never appeared without an eye patch. The success of the Hathaway account induced a flood of new clients, among them Schweppes, Guinness, Shell and Rolls-Royce, for which he penned the legendary headline: ‘At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.’

Today’s aspiring copywriters may be heartened to know that creativity didn’t always come effortlessly to Ogilvy. Bob Harper, a Toronto-based PR consultant who worked as a public relations director at O&M New York in 1969, recalls Ogilvy complaining about ‘the tyranny of that blank sheet of paper’ – apparently, he had written the Rolls-Royce tagline 27 times before he was satisfied.

Harper describes Ogilvy, who was referred to as simply ‘D.O.’ around the office, as a true gentleman and a tireless worker, one who had a predilection for communicating with his employees through memos.

‘The thing I remember most was the agency culture of O&M,’ Harper says. ‘You worked just as hard writing clever internal memos as you did for your clients – it was engendered in the agency to bring the [staff] to a higher level.’

While Ogilvy’s copy was both interesting and engaging, it could hardly be described as scintillating. He scorned those who indulged in creativity for its own sake, and steadfastly rejected gobsmack appeal in favour of advertising that was informative and factual.

‘In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create,’ he remarked. ‘Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.’

He cast aspersions on creative that employed music (‘The advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything’) and humour (‘People do not buy from clowns.’) It seems the only things he found more abhorrent were billboards, which served as the object of one of his nastier invectives.

‘Man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?’

Skilled as a copywriter, Ogilvy also demonstrated an uncanny knack for managing accounts. He (quite literally) wrote the book on client-agency relationships, often meting out ‘advice’ to advertisers in the process.

‘Do not compete with your agency in the creative area,’ he advised them. ‘Why keep a dog and bark yourself?’

Julian Clopet remembers attending a pitch with Ogilvy for the North American Campbell Soup/Pepperidge Farm account. Clopet, who handled the Canadian portion of the business out of the Toronto office, was asked to join Ogilvy as he presented a series of 10 print ads to executives at Campbell’s headquarters in Camden, N.J.

‘Nothing went right,’ Clopet recalls. ‘David’s copy was savaged. None of the ideas presented were salvageable. The meeting overran by two hours and the air conditioning broke down midway through. Yet David was unflappable, unfazed, and completely in control.’

After the pitch, Ogilvy conducted a post-mortem, concluding with the question: ‘Advertising is a wonderful business, but do you know the problem with it? In the final analysis, we are all performing monkeys.’

Buoyed by a thriving client list and the 1963 publication of Confessions of an Advertising Man (which sold over one million copies worldwide), Ogilvy merged his agency with Mather & Crowther in 1964 to form Ogilvy & Mather. He continued on as creative director of the New York operation after the merger, and served as chairman of O&M International for another 10 years before retiring to a sprawling 14th century castle in Touffou, France in 1973. Although he formally relinquished his chairman’s title in 1975, he still managed to exert significant clout over the O&M offices from his French hermitage.

Tony Houghton, a former creative director at O&M Canada, once spent a week at Chateau Touffou, helping Ogilvy on a pitch to retain the Schweppes account (the attempt proved unsuccessful). Ogilvy, he recollects, was a man of eccentricities: parsimonious with his money, he opened his castle to tourists a few days each week so the French government would pay half of the property’s upkeep.

Houghton remembers standing with Ogilvy in the Renaissance Wing, surveying a group of tourists (each of whom had to pay $1.75 in admission) as they made their way into the courtyard. As each visitor appeared, Ogilvy muttered a running tally: ‘$1.75, $3.50, $5.25…’

In 1975, Houghton was shipped to the Toronto office to revive the sagging fortunes of O&M Canada (he was later joined by compatriots Clopet and Graham Phillips, a triumvirate which was dubbed ‘the English Mafia’).

In order to rejuvenate the agency, which he described as ‘dreadful,’ Houghton flouted one of Ogilvy’s golden rules (the advertising equivalent of ignoring a papal decree) – he began to enter creative in competitions, making Toronto the first such operation in O&M’s worldwide network to do so.

Ogilvy immediately replied with a letter, telling Houghton ‘You know how I feel about award shows. If you’re going to enter them, you better damn well win them.’ Houghton complied. In his first year, O&M won a silver Lion at Cannes for a spot the agency produced for Shell.

In 1978, Ogilvy penned his life story, the aptly titled Blood, Brain, and Beer, confirming Henry James’ notion that the only people who lead interesting lives are the ones who know to how to write about them (the book was re-released in 1997 as David Ogilvy: An Autobiography). Like his other works, the autobiography is chock full of advertising aphorisms and boasts enough pithy quotes to make Oscar Wilde blush.

More importantly, it served to further mythologize Ogilvy in the ad community. In a sense, he used his books to brand himself, becoming an aberrant form of the Hathaway Man he had created in 1951: it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between Ogilvy the image (as cast in his book), and Ogilvy the man (the product he was trying to sell).

As an icon his legacy continues to flourish, inspiring numerous individuals to take up the craft and guide them in their work.

Ogilvy & Mather, which was bought by WPP in 1989, today boasts 359 offices in 100 countries around the world. Ogilvy’s quotations adorn the walls of each of these locations, including Toronto. Dennis Stief, president of O&M Canada, favours one quote in particular:

‘You must hire people who are bigger than you. If we don’t, we will become an agency of dwarfs.’

Ogilvy was elected to the U.S. Advertising Hall of Fame in 1977 and to France’s ‘Order of Arts and Letters’ in 1990. He is survived by his third wife, Herta Lans, his son, David Fairfield Ogilvy, his daughter-in-law Cookie Ogilvy and three stepgrandsons.