Legendary Adman David Ogilvy Dead At 88

David Ogilvy, creator of some of advertising's most memorable icons, including the debonair Hathaway Man with his black eye patch and Commander Edward Whitehead touting Schweppes tonic, died yesterday. He was 88.

Mr. Ogilvy, a founder of the international advertising company Ogilvy & Mather, died at his home in Touffou, France, after a long illness, his New York-based agency announced.

Earlier this year, Advertising Age named Mr. Ogilvy No. 4 in its Top 100 Advertising People of the Century. In 1961, Mr. Ogilvy became one of the first inductees into the newly created Copywriters Hall of Fame, and in 1977 he was named to the Advertising Hall of Fame.

In addition to Hathaway shirts and Schweppes tonic, Mr. Ogilvy's advertising campaigns marketed such well-known brands as Shell Oil, Sears, KLM, American Express, IBM, Pepperidge Farm and Rolls-Royce.

To sell the British-made luxury car, Mr. Ogilvy wrote one of the most famous lines in automobile-advertising history: "At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock."

An extraordinary wordsmith and businessman, Mr. Ogilvy was widely quoted and emulated for his expertise and his creative but always fact-based approach to advertising. He wrote three books: "Confessions of an Advertising Man" in 1963; his autobiography, "Blood, Brain & Beer," in 1978; and "Ogilvy on Advertising" in 1983.

David Mackenzie Ogilvy was born in West Horsley, England.

He went to Paris as an apprentice chef in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic and returned to England as a door-to-door salesman for Aga Cooker kitchen stoves. At the age of 24, he wrote a guide for Aga salesmen that Fortune magazine later called "probably the best sales manual ever written." That achievement earned him a copywriting job at Mather & Crowther advertising agency, where an older brother worked.

After moving to the United States in 1938, Mr. Ogilvy became an associate director for George Gallup's Audience Research Institute in Princeton, N.J. He worked for the British Embassy in Washington during World War II, and afterward was a farmer among the Amish in Lancaster County, Pa.

With financial backing from his old London agency, Mather & Crowther, but no clients, he founded Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather in New York in 1948. The name evolved to Ogilvy & Mather by 1965, when Mr. Ogilvy took over his London patron, and two decades later became Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

Twice divorced, Mr. Ogilvy is survived by his third wife, Herta Lans, whom he married when he retired to France in 1973, and by his son, David Fairfield Ogilvy of Greenwich, Conn.