when ain’t is precisely what he means. Remember Will Rogers counseled: “A lot of people who don’t say ain’t…ain’t eatin’!” ’ The greatest compliment Leo ever paid me was to tell the Chicago Tribune that there was one agency in New York which belonged to the Chicago school – Ogilvy & Mather. He suggested we merge. His attitude to the creative process can be summed up in three things he said: 1 ‘There is an inherent drama in every product. Our No. 1 job is to dig for it and capitalize on it.’ 2 ‘When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.’ 3 ‘Steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love, honor and obey your hunches.’ He set high standards for his copywriters and art directors, and applied them through his Creative Review Committee. He once likened the ordeal of appearing before it to being ‘nibbled to death by ducks’. At the end of his life he wrote: ‘Looking back over our greatest achievements, I recall that few of them were generated in an atmosphere of sweetness, light and enthusiasm, but rather one of dynamic tension, complicated by off-stage muttering.’ He did not admire originality for its own sake, and used to quote an old boss of his: ‘If you insist on being different just for the sake of being different, you can always come down in the morning with a sock in your mouth.’ Instead of assigning a project to one creative group, he had a habit of putting several groups in competition. It was enough, he once said, ‘to send strong men staggering to buy a goat farm.’ Without any doubt, Leo’s greatest monument is his campaign for Marlboro. It made an obscure brand the biggest-selling cigarette in the world. And it is still running, 25 years after he created it. Print was always the medium which interested him most. Never having worked in direct response, he did not put much stock in long copy. Most of his ads looked like miniature posters.