Ogilvy on Advertising Book Review: Legendary, but largely (and sadly) irrelevant

Revisted this book after almost a decade. Had left it half-read the last time I picked it up; it felt quite outdated. Thought I should give it another shot now that I'm older. Turns out, my younger self was right.

Mr. David Ogilvy is often referred to as the "father of advertising". He's easily one of the most influential (M)Ad Men of the world. His work stretching over four decades till the 80s basically defined the field of advertising across the world (which is no small deal, obviously). But the world keeps changing..

Interestingly, it now seems like the world has changed so much since the 80s that a lot of Mr. Ogilvy's teachings, which were gold standard at the time, have really fallen by the wayside in this day and age. For example: In this book, Mr. Ogilvy emphasises (atleast 20 times) that whenever you're writing an ad copy, always use black text over white background, because as per his research, the opposite (i.e. white text over black background) is twice as hard to read and thus half as likely to fetch results.

But what do you do with this advice when about 82% users on smartphones use "Dark mode" to avoid eye strain?

And that is just one example. This book came out in 1982. No wonder almost all the inputs by Mr. Ogilvy on the syntactic "rules" of advertising now look pretty obsolete. Like he really cared about "ads containing substantive information about products" instead of "flash" and "hot air", so they could lead to more sales instead of merely seeming "creative". After all, as per him, an ad's job is not to be remembered as creative, but to make the product seem useful.

That sounds fair. But who really cares about that anymore?

One of the most popular ads of our times had Mr. Rahul Dravid shouting "Indiranagar ka goonda hoon mai!" on the streets of Bangalore. What did that have to do with the product? Nothing. But it was still hailed as great advertising by many, right? After all, it got people's attention. And so..

The rules of engagement have changed. Ad agencies don't have the same pull anymore (in fact, they're struggling to barely stay afloat). Buying decisions aren't happening with conscious thought cajoled by clever ad copies, they're being hijacked by platforms owning distribution. Copywriting isn't the force that drives campaigns like it used to, it's social media "influence", whatever that means.

And perhaps that's why, looking at today's world, it felt quite useless spending around 15 hours reading about which font works best in a newspaper/magazine ad, or how an illustration needs to be followed with a headline of not more than 11 words, or how long articles work better than short ones (if they're written very well), and so on...

But that said, while the advice on syntax might have gotten old, many of the core philosophies of Mr. Ogilvy still ring true. The mediums, interfaces, methods may have changed, but the fundamentals of psychology haven't.

I guess if Mr. Ogilvy was around, he'd have figured it out.

Ogilvy on Advertising Book Review

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