Ogilvy's Reunion

The latest sensation in the advertising world is the new Google India 'Reunion' ad., which you can catch on YouTube. It's definitely worth taking a look at. In many respects many of today's film-clip adverts are more engaging and interesting than a lot of modern day full length feature films. I guess unless producers are prepared to take risks and actually buy and pay for some new script or storyline that isn't a total re-hash of something already done, dead, buried, resurrected, gone to heaven, fallen back to earth, and then beginning a whole cycle all over again – movies are just going to go the way of everything else sucked dry by this parasitic era.

Google India's 'Reunion' ad -
check it out on YouTube

Ogilvy Mather created and produced this ad for Google and there are certainly one or two things worth noting about this agency. David Ogilvy was the absolutely nonpareil advertising guru of all time, really – the man who created the 'Man in the Hathaway' shirt concept.

The standard biographies claim that Ogilvy worked for the British Secret Service and he may have done...

But his original employers and business partners, the Mather and Crowther and Dawson families, have more interesting histories. The actuality of who in that crowd worked for secret agencies was that one of these families possessed sets of twins, who were stage performers, and who travelled all over the world, coming into close contact in those days, with the dying-out Bohemian families – which consisted of Russians, Pomeranians, Armenians, Hungarians, the Belgian aristocracy, even some French remnants of the Louis' aristocrats. It was never that these groups lost entirely the wealth they once overtly possessed, rather, the major wars in Europe, invasions, political aggression, all caused them to take their wealth underground. The word 'hotel' in French history did not quite have the same sense of a place open to the travelling middle classes, and the Majestic Hotel in Paris served as more or less, the administrative Capital of every ruler of France since Napoleon until and including Hitler.

This hotel ( The Paris Majestic) was built and owned by an Armenian who said he was a Tunisian, and it was here that the famous Sarkies family got their training in hotel management and I suppose, entrepreneurship.

Secret services to this day employ twins...

Nostalgia is a funny thing, some people get taken over by prejudices of childhood or youth and young adulthood implicit in marketing that exploits nostalgic visions and end up missing out on the rewards of the future being born.

Another old guy's nostalgic vision?

I would compare and contrast Lily Allen's latest music video 'Hard Out Here' side by side with the Ogilvy 'Reunion' ad. The Ogilvy ad relies on viewers suspending some disbelief at certain points, in order to get the emotional messages through in a short time-span – and it's getting a lot of positive response. Allen's music video is copping a huge amount of criticism, on the other hand. Her vision is probably not as kind, on the surface, to the historical subject that she deals with. Personally I find the two examples virtually equivalent. I don't think there is anything underhanded in Ogilvy's nostalgic vision, and neither do I see anything underhanded in the way Allen treats her subject matter. The public's reaction though, seems vastly different.

Lily Allen

My own perspective may have something to do with the peculiarity that absolutely nothing at all has changed in the cherished components of my life, over considerable time and through horrendous external ructions. I presume I tend to see which things are inclined to remain, and which, time and fashion are bound to jettison. I could be wrong. I'll have to wait a little longer to find out. But I can see myself nodding sagaciously to the others who waited with me... Waiting, let me tell you, is a vastly underestimated thing.

 

Fabius (the Waiter) Maximus.