This writer never had the opportunity to meet the advertising legend but had occasion to interact with people who did. And they all gave him very high marks on his professionalism and spoke of him in awe.

Ogilvy was an advertising professional to the core. One memory that crops up is hispublic squabble with WPP CEO Martin Sorrel about the way the advertising business should be run. He was extremely chary of Sorrel's number crunching ways. And he had even called him a calculator while Sorrell had labelled him a bowtie. The confrontation was parodied well in the international media in the late eighties, especially in The Economist which harped on this by publishing an article entitled Bowtie vs Calculator, if memory serves right. Ogilvy finally caved in and let the agency enter the WPP fold. That's the direction the winds were blowing in the era of the eighties' merger mania.

Sorrell, once the finance head for the Saatchi brothers, was hungry as hell to create something on his own and he went on to acquire two precious jewel agencies, JWT and O&M, apart from several other agencies.

Apart from his characteristic and sometimes dismissive suave, Ogilvy was also instrumental for a copy that has become legendary today. "At 60 Miles an Hour, the Loudest Noise in this New Rolls Royce Comes Fromthis Electric Clock" - is amongst the most referred too. The Man in The Hathaway Shirt, Schweppes and Commander Whitehead are some others which he is known most for.He also had the habit of sending thought-provoking asides to his agency executives. Once he sent a memo to one of his partners which had his picture and asked whether any one would hire the man picture in the memo, adding that he was a college drop-out, a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer. The memo went to say that the man was interested in advertising as a career (at age 38) and was ready to work at $5,000 a year. "Yet no agency in America would hire him. However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world and in due course built the 10 largest ad agency in the world. The moral: It sometimes pays an agency to be unorthodox to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring," the memo ended.

He has also left behind a legacy of sayings or principles of advertising: Among them: "Never runan advertisement you wouldn't want your family to see."

"We prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles." "What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it."

"People don't buy a new detergent because the manufacturer told a joke on television last night. They buy it because it promises a benefit."

This is what Martin Sorrell, the CEO of the WPP group, has to say about David Ogilvy on the WPP website on the legend's passing away: "There are very few people in the world who made such an impact on our industry. David ranks with the very greatest - Bill Bernbach, Raymond Rubicam, Leo Burnett, Stanley Resor, James Webb Young and perhaps a very few others. No other Briton has made or will make such an impact on or business as David did. Not only because of his thinking in relation to advertising and the importance of strategic thinking, creative execution and effective work - but also because there, in his remarkablebooks, is further evidence of his breadth of vision and foresight. He was amongst the first, if not the first, to identify the importance of recruiting and training the best and brightest young people, the value of effective market research and the significance of direct marketing. In many ways, David foresaw the development of the new technologies which are having such an important influence on our business today. What David was proud of was the success of Ogilvy, the company he founded: Both before and after it became part of WPP of which he was chairman. What he would want us to do, and what he will continue to watch us doing, is to ensure that Ogilvy and WPP together scale even greater heights. What he will continue to expect is for his agency and our group to be the finest in the business - truly gentlemen and gentlewomen with brains."David Ogilvy, ad legend and guru, Rest In Peace.

The writer is the editor of The Indian Cab&Sat Reporter. Feel free to email with your comments to television@vsnl.comor television@hotmail.com)