Advertising campaigns are part of our modern cultural memory. The phrase "Can you hear me now?" is no longer a question, but a subconscious trigger to check your cell phone connection. Despite the pervasiveness of such slogans, most people would struggle to identify a national advertising agency, much less any of the copywriters, designers, or directors that produce our daily intake of commercials and billboards—with the possible exception of the fictional characters in Mad Men. The more advertising becomes central to our society, the more we take for granted its power to shape the way we think. Advertisers, like op-ed columnists, are trying to change your mind. Shouldn't you know who they are?

David Ogilvy was a pioneer of modern advertising. A high-flying British ex-pat who founded the agency Ogilvy & Mather in 1948, Ogilvy charmed his way to celebrity status on Madison Avenue in the 1950s and '60s. Fortune magazine once listed Ogilvy alongside Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and John Maynard Keynes as one of the most influential contributors to the modern Industrial Revolution. His national campaigns for Lever Brother's Dove Soap ("Dove is one quarter cleansing cream—it creams your skin while you wash"), Maxwell House ("Coffee that tastes as good as it smells"), American Express, and Shell Oil set new standards in the industry. For Rolls Royce he wrote a headline that refined the market for luxury automobiles: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise comes from the electric clock." When Ogilvy died in 1999, his obituary made the front page of The New York Times.

Like Mad Men's Don Draper, Ogilvy was a complex figure, and it is the element of tragedy that makes The King of Madison Avenue so compelling. At first glance this hardly seems to fit the subject. Kenneth Roman rather blandly suggests that Ogilvy's legacy as a creative genius was "a half dozen campaigns, revolutionary at the time, that added an element of quality and good taste into American advertising." If Ogilvy is to be judged on the amount of good taste in American advertising, his impact is small indeed.

More persuasively, Roman emphasizes Ogilvy's dedication to professionalism and foresight in championing innovative advertising concepts. Ogilvy was a superb copywriter (and more: his 1963 Confessions of an Advertising Man won critical acclaim), but he believed that managing his agency required as much excellence and creativity as writing headlines. His approach did involve a measure of good taste born from aristocratic sensibilities. He believed that customers should be respected, not manipulated, and given the information they need to make a good decision. In his classic Ogilvy on Advertising (1983) he reprimanded less scrupulous advertisers: "The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife." Ogilvy also believed strongly in the power of demographic data to gauge consumer opinions and to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. His motto was "We Sell. Or Else." If a campaign couldn't produce better sales numbers, it failed, no matter how entertaining. Ogilvy's commitment to the consumer and to attaining measurable results led him to champion a new medium—direct marketing. Junk mail was once a revolutionary way to engage consumers on a respectable level by giving them a choice to interact with the advertisement or not. Through speeches and writing, Ogilvy also did much to further the concept of "brand image," an idea we now take for granted as much in politics as in advertising. Still, there's little drama in this.

But the story deepens. Roman writes from the inside, having worked at Ogilvy's agency for twenty-six years and rising to CEO. Roman's account is much like the life of the man himself: fast-paced, entertaining, and intensely focused on the business of the agency, yet he reveals the fault lines in Ogilvy's outsized personality. One moment a philosopher king, the next moment a megalomaniac, Ogilvy had a dark side, and Roman shows us the advertising genius caught in corporate power plays, the snob and constant name-dropper who was addicted to work and often brutal with his employees.

Neither his charm nor his fanatical work ethic could save Ogilvy from the advance of technology. With the rise of television and shifts in the creative nature of the industry, his ideas fell out of fashion. The climax of the book is the hostile takeover of Ogilvy & Mather in 1989 by financiers who were more concerned about profits than the craft of advertising. After the agency was purchased, Ogilvy began a melancholy withdrawal from the work that had defined his life. His respect for consumers and accountability to sales could not halt the advance of entertainment-driven advertising. The very industry he had helped to create no longer had a place for him.

Grady Powell is executive director of the Trinity Forum Academy.

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