They published The Unpublished David Ogilvy on David’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1986, and gave it to him at a boat party in London. (At the time I was slaving as a Junior Account Director in our offices at Brettenham House by Waterloo Bridge and blithely ignorant of the doings of the Great and the Good Salon on the river below).
Ken Roman was Ogilvy & Mather’s CEO at the time and it was his idea to begin with. Then it was Bill Phillips, another CEO, who enabled it. Bill wrote the original Foreword and I am honored to follow on over twenty-five years later. Bill wrote at the time that, when David received his copy, “for once, words failed him.”
Otherwise, words were what made him. Reading this collection, one is struck, piece after piece, whether in the most apparently (but perhaps not so) casual of memoranda or the most public of pronouncements, by how David’s words surprise and seduce, tease and provoke.
To me, his writing is in the best tradition of Dr. Johnson – opinionated, forceful, and urgent, whether it addresses the higher principles of management or the dangers of the lowly paper clip. Above all, though, one can see in it the recurring theme of his love for people, which is an abiding legacy for us in Ogilvy & Mather and an essential part of the extraordinary culture which he crafted and which endures so strongly.
David and Herta Ogilvy at Touffou, their home in France, in June 1986.
When Ken and Bill decided to make this book, they turned to Joel Raphaelson, one of David’s paladins. I asked Joel how he went about it and this is what he told me.
“I canvassed the Ogilvy world, asking for anything David had written, handwritten or typed, long or short, important and thoughtful or spontaneous and frivolous. Responses by the dozen came pouring into my office in Chicago. When I’d accumulated a big stack I went through it, item by item, hoping to find things piling up naturally into a few well-defined categories. And they did. For example, I saw to my surprise that I’d made a pile of memos made up entirely of lists.”
But perhaps Joel’s most important contribution was getting the money to pay for David’s court typographer, Ingeborg Baton, to leave retirement, and her native Denmark, in order to design the typography. In Joel’s words, “that made sure the result would be something that would please David to look at. The relaxed good looks of the book are thanks to her.”
Relaxed though this book may be, it will also stimulate the most jaded brain in today’s world of business, different in so many degrees – but not in fundamental kind – to the years when David was building his first-class business in a first-class way.
It very well deserves this re-publishing.
Miles Young
Worldwide Chairman and CEO, Ogilvy & Mather
September 2012
In 1971, on the ranch in Argentina where his father was born.
