Read Online Adland by Mark Tungate - Free Book Online Page B

on his gentlemanly appearance – something his upscale clients liked. Yet he remained a salesman at heart, constantly promoting his agency in speeches, in books, and socially. Although he disliked cocktail parties, he forced himself to go to them, because he claimed he could ‘smell billings’. In the 75th-birthday interview with Viewpoint (the agency’s internal magazine) he recalled, ‘I once went to a… thing called the Scottish Council. They had a lunch in New York… And from that lunch I eventually got Shell, because Max Burns, then president of Shell, was at the lunch.’
    In fact it took another lunch, this time in London – where Ogilvy had flown to doorstep Burns after hearing that he’d sacked his existing agency – to secure the account. But the story does justice to the Ogilvy charm: and he claimed he got three other clients from the same event.
    Practically from day one, Ogilvy was approached by rival agencies with offers to buy him out. Over the years he fended off overtures from almost every big name in the business: Interpublic, J Walter Thompson,BBDO, Leo Burnett… ‘I guess the real fundamental reason was a rather personal one,’ he told Viewpoint . ‘I liked Ogilvy & Mather. I thought it was in the process of becoming the best damn agency in the history of the world. And I didn’t want to muddle it up with any other agency.’
    When WPP finally acquired the agency in 1989, Ogilvy took it as a personal affront. Yet he calmed down enough to accept the post of non-executive chairman, still unable to let go. He died in 1999, an advertising legend who began his career when he was almost 40.
    The science of selling
    In the process of establishing his agency, Ogilvy often spoke of the need to ‘reform’ advertising, well aware that people were as repelled by the business as they were fascinated by it. This was hardly surprising, given that thanks to TV they were being bombarded by more advertising messages than ever before.
    It also explained the success of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders , which became a bestseller when it exposed the ‘motivational research’ techniques agencies were using to probe the minds of consumers. ‘Large-scale efforts are being made’, Packard warned, ‘to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes…’ He claimed that scientists were furnishing advertising agencies with ‘awesome tools’, with the result that ‘many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives’.
    One can almost hear the eerie wail of the Theremin on the soundtrack. Indeed, in retrospect the book makes amusing reading – rather like one of those paranoid 1950s B-movies in which white-coated scientists do battle with unconvincing aliens. (‘It was clearly all crap,’ chuckles John Hegarty, the British creative and co-founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty. ‘If everything in the book was true, we’d be able to sell anything to anybody.’) Yet The Hidden Persuaders was by no means pure fantasy. The father of motivational research was Ernest Dichter who, in the late 1930s, pioneered the use of ‘depth interviews’ to explore consumers’ attitudes to products. (Dichter’s work is said to have directly inspired a slogan for Ivory Soap, ‘Wash your troubles away’. Dirt, guilt, anxiety… you get the idea.) By the 1950s a number of agencies – McCann Erickson, Foote, Cone & Belding and Leo Burnett among them – were using motivational research techniques to hone their campaigns.
    McCann Erickson is thought to have been the first to hire psychological research staff. The agency developed a reputation for data-driven efficiency rather than creative flair under its post-war boss, Marion Harper Jr. This somewhat straight-laced man (don’t be fooled