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28 Business Thinkers Who Changed the World
that, at this point, he had never actually written an advertisement in his life. Indeed, by the time most people are well on their way up the ladder, Ogilvy had an eclectic smattering of experience in disparate (and mostly irrelevant) fields, had no degree and was unemployed. However, he did have a feel for advertising, and the new company’s ads were soon huge hits. Ogilvy memorably told us that Dove soap was a quarter moisturizing cream, and Dove went on to become the biggest brand in its sector. He invented the man in the Hathaway shirt, an aristocrat who had lost an eye and had to wear a patch. The patch instantly made a fairly nondescript middle-aged man in a shirt an object of mystery and intrigue. Ogilvy’s copy at the bottom helped, of course, for he had a wonderful if rather strange way with words. The copy famously began ‘The melancholy disciples of Thorstein Veblen would have despised this shirt.’ Veblen was a sociologist and the author of The Leisure Class. It’s doubtful whether even 1 per cent of people who saw the ad knew this, but it was a great and intriguing story, and an icon was born. Hathaway’s sales shot up, and the company became a major brand. Ogilvy later wrote that the success of his one-eyed aristocrat baffled even him: ‘Exactly why it turned out to be so successful, I shall never know. It put Hathaway on the map after 116 years of relative obscurity.’ He memorably had a stab at rebranding Puerto Rico as a cultural destination, saying ‘Pablo Casals is coming home to Puerto Rico.’ It worked. The company’s Schweppes ads that featured a cultured Brit coming to the United States offering Schweppervescence ran for an extraordinary 18 years. As Ogilvy once said, ‘every advertisement must contribute to the complex symbol which is the brand image’. He was a man of great charm. In the early 1960s Time magazine reported that he’d been given an account to sell the United States as a tourist destination to various West European countries, ‘Every advertisement I write for the US travel service’, Ogilvy quipped, ‘is a bread and butter letter from a grateful immigrant.’