Dove and Ogilvy’s open relationship—inside the evolution of brand-agency conflict policies

The Super Bowl was noteworthy for its focus on Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. But another relationship backstory played out during commercial breaks in the first quarter, where WPP’s Ogilvy was the agency behind ads for both Unilever’s Dove and competitor L’Oréal USA’s CeraVe. Those two brands compete directly in skin care in the U.S. Having the same agency handle creative for both, particularly on such high-profile assignments in the same country, wouldn’t have been tolerated under most marketers’ agency conflict policies years ago. Ad Age A-List and Creativity Gala Buy your ticket to the in-person event Click here That everyone involved appears to be cool with it now says something about the changing state of marketer-agency relationships, at least in parts of the marketing world. It’s not quite as shocking as if, say, Swift had left the Super Bowl with San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle instead of Kelce. But it does show how brand-agency pairings today often are less like monogamy and more like open relationships. There are many reasons why, including the growing prevalence of project work and the reality of assignments that often span multiple units within giant agency holding companies serving competing brands. The trend may also represent the long-developing change in marketer-agency relations from long-term strategic partnerships to more temporary transactional dealings. Also read: Inside brand-agency relationships Personal care’s multiple partners Dove and Ogilvy in particular are interesting, given their long relationship dating to 1956, and that both now are seeing other people. Ogilvy’s work for a L’Oréal brand follows Dove working with a variety of new partners on its U.S. creative roster in recent years. That includes Dove inviting work from independent Curiosity in Cincinnati and recently assigning a project to Accenture Song’s Droga5 New York, according to people familiar with the matter. In at least one case, Ogilvy and sibling agency David worked together. Watch Dove’s Super Bowl ad below: Curiosity, by the way, also is agency of record for Procter & Gamble Co.’s Native, which also competes with Dove in skin care, hair care and deodorant in the U.S. According to people familiar with the matter, everyone within the packaged-goods triangle is OK with these arrangements. Representatives of Unilever, P&G, L’Oréal USA’s CeraVe and the agencies, however, declined to comment. None of this evolved overnight, and it doesn’t reflect a problem in the longstanding Dove-Ogilvy relationship, according to people familiar with the matter. Ogilvy remains Dove’s primary agency of record, with the core team based in London, but work is handled by offices around the world at times. But Dove also has given work in recent years to Curiosity and, most recently, Droga5. So it probably wouldn’t be fair to restrict Ogilvy from working on a competing skin care brand. And, indeed, Unilever’s former CEO Alan Jope laid out a vision in 2019 where such work would be permissible. He said Unilever wanted to have work from across its holding companies, not just agencies of record, acknowledging that requires relaxation of old conflict rules. L’Oréal’s CeraVe drove a truck through that opening to the Super Bowl. The widely lauded Michael Cera ad for CeraVe began with a WPP-wide project, starting with a social and influencer campaign headed up by administratively separate Ogilvy PR, with the TV creative ultimately coming from Ogilvy. But the Ogilvy team that works on Dove did not work on CeraVe, according to people familiar with the matter. Going with the ‘Flow’ For Unilever, and at least in the case of CeraVe for L’Oréal, it’s not unlike what rival P&G refers to as its “Fixed and Flow” model, with a primary AOR but frequent projects open to new, often small agencies. As that system has evolved, according to people familiar with the matter, so has P&G conflict policy to allow agencies doing project work to handle brands that compete with P&G consecutively, albeit generally not at the same time. Curiosity, based near P&G headquarters in Cincinnati, has worked for years on P&G’s Native, which competes across most of Dove’s categories albeit with a different, natural premium-price conditioning. The success of that brand appears to have attracted interest of other beauty and personal care brands, with Curiosity also having picked up work for independent Dr Teals and Dove. For that matter, Native has been seeing other agencies, too, including for a recent deodorant campaign from VCCP. But, according to people familiar with the matter, the new Curiosity clients were added with full knowledge of the necessary P&G executives, and with digital and physical firewalls in place to avoid any accidental leakage of confidential information. It may help that Native, while acquired by P&G in 2017, hasn’t been fully integrated into the system, with much of the original San Francisco-based team of the startup still in place in a Silicon Valley marketplace where agency conflict is often seen as less of an issue. Managing conflict across tech partners Indeed, tech clients long have had a reputation for being more lenient on agency conflict. And one place that’s clear is within the client ranks of Known, a full-service agency that works with Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok, which have all kinds of competitive overlaps. The first four of those companies were research and analytics clients of Schireson Associates before the three-way agency merger that created Known in 2020, said Kern Schireson, CEO of Known. “What they came to understand and trust and occasionally audit was that our existence was dependent on our ability to maintain and manage client confidentiality, and to keep those teams appropriately aligned,” Schireson said. “Each of those teams that were serving each of those clients existed in a massive ecosystem of other vendors, and as soon as our research wasn’t as sharp as the next guy’s, we were going to lose the business.” Part of what helps Known navigate conflicts today, Schireson said, is a compensation model in which clients pay for employees and costs on their business but any profit comes from performance against pre-determined key performance indicators. Employees on those accounts are “working in their own self-interest,” Schierson said, which is fully aligned with the self-interest of the clients that way. “They just have to worry that I’m competent enough to manage in my own self-interest, which it turns out is also theirs,” he said. Also read: 14 agency mergers, purges and acquisitions of 2023 Not everyone on board Despite these examples, not all marketers by any means have dropped their objections to agency conflicts. In general, Tom Browning, president of search consultant JLB+Partners, said he hasn’t seen a clear trend in clients loosening conflict standards in agency searches. “It’s all over the board, because it’s very personal,” Browning said. It can vary by industry, the number of major competitors, and sometimes even based on the individual within a company. He recalled a recent assignment in which a senior CMO had a much stricter outlook on what kinds of conflicts could be tolerated than a junior marketing director. At the most extreme level, in days of old, he recalled McDonald’s prohibiting DDB from working on Oscar Mayer Lunchables even in a part of the world where DDB didn’t handle McDonald’s. “We used to be frustrated that in ad agencies it’s called conflict, and in consulting it’s called ‘category expertise,’” Browning said, noting that it’s common for McKinsey & Co. and other consulting firms to handle, at least consecutively, multiple competitors’ projects. He acknowledged that the rising power of tech companies and their looser standards on conflict may play a role in changing perceptions over time, but also that there will likely always be industries where, he said, “there are conflicts, and then there are ‘f--- you conflicts’” that will never pass muster. Pete Carter, a former P&G executive who’s now a consultant with Creative Haystack, which matches small agencies with brands, said several changes among marketers and agencies make conflict more common and easier to navigate than years ago. The complexity and variety of agency holding companies make it easier to cordon off work from competitors in different shops and cities, he said. Even within small agencies, the rise of remote work has made it easier to keep teams that are working on competing clients to be physically separated, Carter said. The rise of project work has made it necessary for clients to loosen conflict standards, at least on consecutive assignments, Carter said. But looser conflict rules may recognize another reality—that marketer-agency relationships are just less important today than they used to be. “If you think of an agency as a supplier, which I hate, you’re less concerned,” Carter said. “It’s like, I’m buying this resource, so I’m less concerned if they’re doing it for somebody else.” The Peltz effect Realistically, agencies often have only a limited view into one part of a broad business and never see the most sensitive competitive information. And even within packaged goods, where agency relationships among the biggest players have gotten more fluid, so too have board memberships, at least in one notable case. Activist investor Nelson Peltz pushed his way onto the P&G board in 2017 and played a role in engineering that company’s turnaround. He left P&G’s board in October of 2021, and within nine months was added to the board of Unilever. P&G was known, and still is, for its “irresistible superiority” framework for evaluating product and marketing performance of its brands. Unilever’s new CEO Hein Schumacher, hired on Peltz’s watch last year, in addressing investors for the first time in October, talked about his company’s new “unmissable superiority” framework. Agencies, board members, superiority and news travel fast these days. Contributing: Brian Bonilla See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here

Dove and Ogilvy’s open relationship—inside the evolution of brand-agency conflict policies

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