Post #645152 by Cammo on Sun, Jul 22, 2012 4:05 PM

PART 5
Real Life Spies

The Roald Dahl saga became even stranger with the addition of Ian Fleming and David Ogilvy to the Martini mix, both of whom worked out of a top secret office in New York’s Rockefeller Center building. Fleming seems to have snuck around the city with an explosive gas-spewing pen, mostly doing the books for Stephenson, but what Ogilvy did was creepier; he invented a way of perfectly gauging American’s reactions to wartime news. Keeping America excited and enthusiastic about being England’s partner in the deadliest war ever fought was a careful, very delicate business indeed, and David Ogilvy made it into a science by studying the common man’s responses to a list of friendly inquiries. Paid two bits to fill out a questionnaire, the typical man off the street was given a list of 20 questions, most of them about sports or current movies. Only one was about England’s role in the war. That was the key question.

Ogilvy began by throwing out the other 19 responses and studying the results to that one exclusive question about England, which worked and gave him the answers he wanted. Then he started looking at the other 19 responses and noticed something interesting; nobody’s answers were EVER the same! He became obsessed with defining a pattern that would describe or categorize these other answers, finally realizing that they were telling him - indirectly - almost everything about the person answering them; their economic status, the firmness of their marriage, their age, intelligence level, sense of humor, political leanings, EVERYTHING. In the hands of a serious master spy, these became statistical tools capable of estimating within a few percentage points the attitudes and responses of very different classes and subcultures within the entire nation, and reporting to Churchill directly the help he could expect in any Allied endeavors with them.

What’s astounding and futuristic here is that Ogilvy didn’t just categorize the answers, he sort of did the opposite by using the answers to categorize the person giving them.

His weaponized propaganda tools developed into random sampling, subliminal persuasion and iris tracking devices that became the foundation of Ogilvy and Mather, post-war Madison Avenue's most powerful new advertising agency. Check out the outrageous Subliminal Seduction for a look into what the real Mad Men of the 60’s and 70’s were up to...