One of David Ogilvy’s most-quoted sayings about the agency he founded is “We have a habit of divine discontent with our performance. It is an antidote to smugness.”
But as recently as two years ago, Ogilvy didn’t have much to be smug about. When Devika Bulchandani stepped in as global president and CEO of North America in 2021, she inherited a shop with a rocky new-business track record. Its offerings were disjointed and there were few notable creative hits.
Bulchandani described it this way in an interview with Ad Age last year: “We were on mute.”
Today, however, the market is hearing Ogilvy loud and clear.
Bulchandani, who has since risen to global CEO, has rebuilt the agency by hiring heavy hitters including North America President and Chief Creative Officer Chris Beresford-Hill and Global Chief Creative Officer Liz Taylor.
Bulchandani, one of the rare women of color to hold a CEO title in the industry, has worked hard to diversify the agency, which now counts among its leadership Maria O'Keeffe, global chief people officer, and Stacey Ryan-Cornelius, global chief financial officer. This year, Ogilvy hired Darla Price to become president of its New York office, succeeding Carina De Blois, who was elevated to chief operating officer for North America.
With a refreshed team in place, the agency’s new-business machine is beginning to hum once again—the shop last year picked up new business from Audi, Truly Hard Seltzer, H&R Block and SC Johnson, the last of which consolidated its global creative with the Ogilvy network. This year Ogilvy won Verizon's B2B work and produced a Super Bowl campaign for Workday featuring rockers including Ozzy Osbourne.
Buy your ticket for the Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Gala here.
The agency’s renewed attention to client service has also paid off, with organic growth from existing business up nearly 9% and U.S. revenue rising approximately 8% in 2022, its second consecutive year of growth. "The last two years have been quite spectacular as it relates to growth," said Bulchandani.
That progress has also been noticed by the agency’s parent company, WPP. On the holding company’s third-quarter earnings call, Chief Financial Officer John Rogers said of Ogilvy: “It really feels as though we have started to turn the corner in building that new business momentum, so that’s a really positive sign.”
The agency attributes the turnaround in part to getting its different disciplines to work together, via a single P&L, to offer holistic solutions for brands. “The biggest difference right now is that everything feels like it's there,” said Taylor. “We can solve their biggest problems using creativity in all the different ways that we know how. When I started, it was like whack-a-mole.”
“Every day all of us are so committed to making it safe for our teams to bet on better, bet on better ideas, bet on better talent, and push them to find the great and not worry about whatever else,” said Beresford-Hill.
In the case of H&R Block, that idea was to turn the notion of tax season as a dreaded annual rite into a celebratory event like Christmas. “What we wanted was [an agency] to make us a little uncomfortable,” said Jill Cress, chief marketing and experience officer at H&R Block.
Ogilvy, she said, “really helped us understand the psychology behind [the joy of getting a tax refund] and that created a really seamless bridge into the way we went at the creative.”
Cress added that she was impressed that the agency, which was initially brought in on an informal consultative basis, “didn't pounce on it as a sales opportunity.”
“They really got invested,” she said. “They take a very human, people-first approach to their clients.”
The agency has discovered similar human insights for other clients and brought them to life in innovative ways. For Citizens Bank, which had just opened 66 branches in New York, the agency used reams of data to create an intricate “living portrait” of the city in a space in the Flatiron District.
In the agency’s words, it "captured the synchronicity, simultaneity and diversity found in 24 hours of city life.”
The agency said that customers had a 98% positive sentiment for the bank as a result; awareness of Citizens Bank rose 7.2%.
As befits its commitment to inclusion, Ogilvy started a literal movement for the ERA Coalition called “Women Corp,” beginning with a stinging satirical video starring “Stranger Things” actress Gabriella Pizzolo. The film drew attention to the fact that corporations have more rights than women to dispel the misguided notion among 85% of Americans that women have constitutional equality.
And for Absolut, the agency turned cocktails into people with personalities befitting the brand—The Cosmopolitan, Espresso Martini, Bloody Mary, Lemonade and Madras.
Yet while Ogilvy has come a long way in the last few years, there’s still a sense, according to one consultant, that it isn’t quite there yet.
“Devika is a breath of fresh air. She is a dynamo and a new business powerhouse,” said the consultant. “Liz Taylor has fantastic credentials. CBH did really good work at TBWA, but I think the client body at Ogilvy is more conservative than that of TBWA. So it will take longer for breakthrough work to materialize. You need the talent first, and then build confidence in the creative.”
Bulchandani disagrees. "I've done the best work of my life on what everybody calls conservative clients,” she retorted. “I don't buy that. Clients walk through this door because they have confidence that this team is going to give them the kind of work that's going to solve their business problem.”
“That’s an old narrative,” said Taylor. “What I’d say to that consultant is ‘That’s what you think? O.K., game on!’”
It’s that feistiness, palpable energy and a genuine sense of camaraderie that’s perhaps the most visible change at the agency.
“I feel like the whole organization is having more fun,” said Bulchandani. “Everything feels lighter. It doesn't mean the organization is not working incredibly hard. But there's this [attitude] of like, ‘We got this. Come on, we can do this.’”
