Born on 23 June 1911 at West Horsley, Surrey in England.His father, Francis John Longley Ogilvy (c. 1867 - 1943) was a Gaelic-speaking Highlander from Scotland who was a classics scholar and a financial broker. His mother was Dorothy Blew Fairfield (1881-1942), daughter of Arthur Rowan Fairfield, a civil servant from Ireland, and his wife Sophie Louise Blew Jones.

He was educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh and at Christ Church, Oxford (although he didn't graduate). David Ogilvy After Oxford, Ogilvy went to Paris, where he worked in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic.

He learned discipline, management - and when to move on: "If I stayed at the Majestic I would have faced years of slave wages, fiendish pressure, and perpetual exhaustion." He returned to England to sell cooking stoves, door-to-door. Ogilvy's career with Aga Cookers was astonishing.

He sold stoves to nuns, drunkards, and everyone in between. In 1935 he wrote a guide for Aga salesmen (Fortune magazine called it "probably the best sales manual ever written"). Among its suggestions, "The more prospects you talk to, the more sales you expose yourself to, the more orders you will get. But never mistake quantity of calls for quality of salesmanship."

In 1948 He founded the New York-based ad agency Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (which eventually became Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide), with the financial backing of London agency Mather & Crowther. He had never written an advertisement in his life.

Thirty-three years later, he sent the following memo to one of his partners:
Will Any Agency Hire This Man?

He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing and had never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will 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 tenth biggest agency in the world. The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.