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Back in the day, Ogilvy turned out
classy ads like these for classy
clients. Today, alas, not so much.
Keep reading for the Hitler part.
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If you follow the advertising trade press — or pass your time reading Buzzfeed — you may already be aware of the brouhaha that’s been kicked up at the advertising agency, Ogilvy.
The agency was founded in 1947 by the late, utterly charming, and brilliant advertising great, David Ogilvy. One of its founding principles was flat out integrity. “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife,” Ogilvy thundered.
Another of the agency’s principles had to do with quality and class. Perhaps the only thing David Ogilvy ever stole was his agency’s motto. And Ogilvy, with disarming honesty, admitted outright that he stole it. He lifted it from, of all people, the banker J.P. Morgan. “Only first class business, and that in a first class way.”
Alas, the definitions of what is first class, what is business, and even what advertising is all about, have changed since then. There are many forces at work, from the merciless advance of technology, to the greedy consolidation of ad agencies back in the 1990s that switched the focus at most ad agencies from doing great work for great clients, to making damn sure management hits its financial targets, no matter what else you have to do to get there.
The commotion
about Ogilvy
Which brings us to the sort of semi-scandal brewing around Ogilvy today. Long gone are Rolls Royce, Hathaway Shirts, Schweppes, and some of the other accounts that made the agency famous. In its place are clients like — God! I hate even to write the name — U.S. Customs and Border Protection. You know. Immigrants fleeing persecution getting busted and handcuffed Kids ripped from their parents' arms and stuffed into cages. Adults in lockups squeezed so closely together they can’t sit down or lie down. Cool stuff like that.
Some of the folks who actually do the work, in Ogilvy’s Eleventh Avenue boiler room in a repurposed Manhattan chocolate factory, and around the world, balked. Buzzfeed got hold of the story and initially did some fairly egregious misreporting, ranging from the age of the agency (It was founded in 1947, not 1850), to the notion that Ogilvy was handling the PR for the border guards. They’re not. Ogilvy’s assignment is to do ads recruiting more people to the border patrol's ranks. For some reason — I can’t imagine what it might be — Trump’s government seems to be having a problem doing this.
Nevertheless, the report kicked up such a hullaballoo that on July 9th, Ogilvy’s CEO, John Seifert, decided to calm the roiling waters by holding a company meeting in New York, with people in remote offices plugged into the conversation.
Early on in the meeting, Seifert pleaded for “confidentiality” and asked that no one record the conference. So of course, somebody made sure to do just that , and then turned the recording over to Buzzfeed, which printed a transcript of it. If you have some time to read it all, it’s worth a perusal. But for me, two points stand out.
First, well into the lengthy meeting, Seifert in effect said that if you don’t like the way things are, leave.
Seifert: Let me give you a separate view. If your line is no company, whether it's product defect, whether it's breakdown of operational safety, whether it's a formulation that didn't serve a particular constituency, if your line is we should not work for clients at that risk level, then you shouldn't be here. Because the fact is we cannot hold that line of expectation and assume that we'll work for anybody.
Which isn’t all that different, when you think about it, from Donald Trump telling the Congressional squad of women of color to leave and fix the countries “they came from” if they don't like it here. Never mind that three of the four come from the United States.
Second, there was a vague echo from a line in the old movie Judgment at Nuremberg, about the post WWII Nazi war crimes trials. An old German woman tells an American judge, played by Spencer Tracy “I won’t say that Hitler was all bad. He built the autobahns.”
Here’s Seifert:
Seifert: What I'm saying is that as an employee of the company, you can look at this all on a spectrum. Right now, we as a company have made the choice to work with a variety of government agencies, that we believe, in the main, they have the intention, a mission, a commitment to do the right thing. You have one aspect of this particular agency that is absolutely overwhelmed and failing to deliver on what most of us would agree, they should be, a standard they should be trying to live up to.
See, they’re not all bad. I mean, sure, they have this little thing about busting up families and turning little kids into virtual orphans, and imprisoning people in crowded, filthy spaces, and chattering about it approvingly on social media. But I won't say they're all bad. They have a commitment to do the right thing.
Listen, without going into details, I’ve met Seifert. He comes across as a nice guy. In most respects not pertaining to this matter, he is a nice guy. And given that his own survival and that of many of his employees, in part depends on his turning over to his parent conglomerate, WPP, the income that Ogilvy makes from the border cops, he’s got a real problem. Whether inadvertently or not, he got his dick stuck in a wringer. And now he can’t seem to get it out.
David Ogilvy's not-so-secret
secret confession
David Ogilvy must be turning in his grave. Late in his life, in 1994, he gave an "off the-record talk" to his company's board of directors at Touffou, the medieval castle in France that he bought with some of the proceeds from taking his company public. Like just about every secret off-the-record talk, the record has leaked out. I happen to have a copy of it.
Ogilvy was nearing the end of his life, almost certainly knew it, and felt the need to do some confessing. Here's one of his confessions:
"I made a terrible mistake in going public." (Underlining his own.)
It was from that mistake that all other tragedies at the ad agency sprung — from the hostile takeover of his company by WPP, to the necessity of bedding down with clients controlled by the Trumpistas.
Were he still living, Ogilvy might abandon his First Class Business motto for another:
Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.
But I won’t leave you
on that grim note.
So instead, Donald Trump.
No doubt many people who’ve listened to and watched Donald Trump have wondered how they, too, could become very stable geniuses.
Like everything else Donald Trump does, it’s easy. Take real estate transactions, for example.
As the shopworn maxim about real estate goes, they’re not making any more of it. So most of the time, if you buy a piece of real estate, and just hold on to it, you’re almost certain to make money when you sell. Ask nearly any American who’s bought and some years later sold a house or a condo.
What's more, if the real estate in question is an iconic landmark that also happens to be a hotel where people will pay top dollar to stay, who knows how many millions of dollars you could make?
