ogilvy on internet advertising

As transparency and choice have turned communication on its head, David Ogilvy’s seminal book on advertising is being revisited in a sequel that charts the digital revolution

Ogilvy & Mather non-exec chairman Miles Young channels the agency’s founder to re-examine communications.

What would journalist and author Vance Packard have made of the digital revolution?

The “hidden persuaders” he railed against in his book of the same name, published in the late 1950s, allegedly used television to bewitch their audiences with “manipulation” massaging. No matter that St Vance’s most influential accusation – that subliminal ads increased sales – turned out in the end to have been based on falsified experiments.

Of course, some advertising has always been pushed to the ethical edge of what’s illegal, indecent, dishonest or untruthful. Like any other tool, much like a domestic hammer, advertising can be subject to misuse. But, in most jurisdictions, it would be difficult to argue that the ethical safeguards in place around advertising today do not offer very reasonable protections to consumers.

That doesn’t placate those who believe that advertising itself is unethical. Author and social activist Naomi Klein still – presumably – would prefer a world of “no logos” and believes that the unbranded space is a luxury, unethically awarded only to the very rich.

I always think of the work that Ogilvy does for Lifebuoy in India, changing attitudes to hygiene, persuading people to wash their hands before they eat – and saving lives. At some religious festivals in the country, bread is eaten in traditional formats. The idea was simple – why not stamp those flat loaves with the message: “Did you wash your hands with Lifebuoy?” Millions became engaged at a tiny cost, but the appearance of the “logo” was doing the exact opposite of what Klein has argued. Try telling a consumer in India that there is something unethical in that.

Like advertising or branding, the internet is only a tool, a means to an end, not an end in itself. Fons et origo [source and origin]; it is ethically neutral. Arguably, the biggest perceptual problem it faces is overcoming the grossly inflated idealism of its early advocates who saw it, in itself, as a force for good. Of course, it wasn’t necessarily so. The liberal reluctance to see the internet regulated in fact led to ethical compromises, dark zones and systemic abuse, just as it would have done if television or magazines were unregulated.

For anyone on the agency or client side in this business, let’s be clear: a clean, regulated internet is 100 per cent in our interest, as much as it is in the interest of consumers. Anyone who seeks to push the limits into “grey” areas of data-collection, of profiting and targeting, is doing the industry a grave disservice. That imposes heavy responsibility, in particular on the new-media behemoths.

But all this still sidesteps the real significance of the digital revolution. In my book Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age [see extract on the following page] – the sequel to Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy (pictured, left) – I try to evoke just what has happened, with the benefit of some hindsight.

Quite simply, it has turned communication on its head. The world of Packard, where consumers were passive victims of communication, never really existed, but there was a sense in which advertising could be directive and one-way, despite often tending to argue to the contrary.

But now it ain’t. Transparency is the great gift of the internet to ethical communication. There is no longer any hiding place for the exaggerater or the misclaimers – or the manufacturers with a corporate vision that says one thing, but a behaviour that does not live up to it. Now, if you don’t like what you are being told, you can talk back and be heard, and that is a more powerful protection than any volume of regulation.

With transparency comes the other dividend – choice. Communication has become, more than ever, elective. The consumer can choose what content she wants to watch – or not. So “content” has become the ultimate defence against Packardism: the viewer chooses.

That, of course, puts a burden on the communications business. It cannot afford to produce content that consumers ignore. And yet, often, that is still exactly what they do.

The vast majority of content produced for the internet remains unread, unwatched, unseen and unheard – and what our industry produces is no better than average. This has made content a rather dirty word. In presentations, we have even used the image of landfill to stigmatise bad content…