Cast Iron Ranges How AGA Became an Icon
Wren by his brother, Francis, and earned his spurs by
using his chef ’s uniform from his stint in a Paris
restaurant to persuade a London club to keep their
AGA cookers. It was with the 1935 launch of the
New Standard AGA that Ogilvy produced some
quite exceptional work in preparing the company
and its dealers for the launch and then providing the
required consumer literature.
In e eory and Practice of Selling the AGA Cooker
– setting out the argument on the attack and on the
defence when winning over a sales prospect – he
concluded that the successful salesman “needs the
tenacity of the bulldog and the manners of the
spaniel.
“If you have any charm,” he wrote, “ooze it”.
q
DAVID OGILVY
16
How e AGA Became An Icon
BOARD MINUTES, June 1945
In these minutes (below) of a meeting of the board of
AGA Heat Ltd, a resolution is passed to “recapture the old
originality” of previous AGA advertising. Previous
advertisements had worked, the board agreed, because
the company had made liaison with their ad agency more
of a “personal affair”. The new campaigns would focus on
three main messages: the ease of using the AGA (lack of
servants); fuel economy (national lack of solid fuel); and
better cooking. With modern AGA advertising campaigns
focusing on the launch of new programmable models,
their improved fuel efficiency and the wonderful cooking
results that can be achieved, it would seem the AGA
legacy very much continues today
Francis Ogilvy (pictured left with his family, c 1950)
introduced his younger brother to W. T. Wren. Francis –
the leading player at advertising agency Mather &
Crowther and the force behind its regaining the AGA Heat
Ltd account in 1946 – was also a talented copywriter in
his own right and went on to become one of Prime
Minister Winston Churchill’s speechwriters during the
Second World War.
This ad creative – drawing on Édouard
Manet’s Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe – was
David Ogilvy’s first ever advertisement.
It demonstrates how the advertising
pioneer was not averse to esoteric and
challenging campaigns. Looking back
on it, however, he confessed it was
“some way short of his best”
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