Ogilvy: The Retirement Years
Currently, David Ogilvy is eighty-seven years old, retired and living at his 14th -century castle Touffou in the south of France. The 60-room Chateau de Touffou, is located about 100 miles southwest of Paris on the River Vienne, a tributary of the Loire. He likes to tell visitors that when Columbus landed in America his home had already been standing for 300 years.
David has lived full-time at Touffou since retiring as Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather in 1973, and while no longer responsible for the day-to-day management of the firm, he stays in touch by telex and by fax. And also by mail. His huge correspondence dramatically increased the volume of mail handled by the post office in the nearby town of Bonnes, raising the post office to a higher status and the postmaster to higher salary.
One of David's great joys at Touffou is the elaborate garden he planned, planted and tends him. All visitors get a full tour, complete with Latin names of dozens of flowers and shrubs. For his 80th birthday, the agency presented him with the David Ogilvy rose, bred specially for him in the U.S.
By the time he moved to France, Ogilvy & Mather had expanded around the world and was firmly in place as one of the top agencies in all regions. David emerges from Touffou to visit branches of the company in many countries and to deliver speeches to gatherings of clients and other business audiences. In a 1991 address to the Association of National Advertisers (U.S.) he typically continued to trumpet his lifelong themes. The speech ended:
"I once got a new client who told me to create a campaign which would make his friends at his country club congratulate him on his clever, amusing advertising. I Refused to do that. I just gave him a campaign which research had told me was likely to increase his sales. No manufacturer has ever complained that his advertising was selling too much."
In 1989 Ogilvy & Mather was bought by WPP, a British holding company, for $864 million. The purchase made WPP, which also owned the advertising agency J.Walter Thompson and a number of other companies, the largest marketing communications firm in the world.
Martin Sorrell, the Chief Executive of WPP, asked David Ogilvy to serve as the holding company's non-executive Chairman, a post he held for three years.
In an interview on his 75th birthday, David was asked if anything he'd always wanted had somehow eluded him. His reply, "Knighthood. And a big family -- ten children." (His only son, David Fairfield Ogilvy lives in Greenwich, Connecticut)
Although he has not achieved knighthood, David was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1967. He was elected to France's "Order of Arts and Letters" in 1990, and to the Advertising Hall of Fame in the U.S. in 1977.
From 1958 to 1960 he served as Chairman of the Public Participation Committee for Lincoln Center, helping raise funds to build the huge performing arts complex in New York. He was the Chairman of the United Negro College Fund in 1968 and served on the Executive Council of the World Wildlife Fund in 1975.
David Ogilvy declares the following written by Horace, as his epitaph:
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He, who can call to-day his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.