Role: Global advertising, marketing, and public relations firm Parent (historical): WPP plc Notable executive referenced here: Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Group)
Sutherland's 2022-12-04 post uses Ogilvy's decades of direct-marketing experience as evidence for the new-is-better bias argument: the same accountability/measurement pitch that lost in the 1980s (direct marketing era) won in the 2010s (digital era), purely because of the newness tax. Ogilvy's institutional memory of both eras is the empirical anchor.
Ogilvy is one of the largest global advertising networks, founded by David Ogilvy in 1948. The firm pioneered "research-based advertising" and is associated with several enduring creative principles (long copy, the headline-as-promise, brand-image theory). It is now part of WPP plc and operates as a global network across advertising, PR, consulting, and experience.
Rory Sutherland's role as Vice Chairman is largely an intellectual-positioning post: Sutherland is a public-facing advocate for behavioural-science-informed marketing, with a long-running column (The Spectator's "Wiki Man") and a Substack (The Alchemist) where he develops the framework that advertising has under-exploited cognitive psychology.
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