In search of a suitable image for this year's Best of Ogilvy I did what I quite often do when seeking inspiration: I went into the secret Ogilvy attic on Floor 18½, which is accessed through the wardrobe at the back of the creative director's office.
(Those of you who have seen the movie Being John Malkovich will understand how this works.)
There's some fascinating bric-a-brac up there. Piles of Rembrandt paintings, shrunken heads, elephant foot umbrella stands and stuffed dragons...and this intriguing picture of David Ogilvy.
What is going on in this picture? It appears to be the great man, plotting on a whiteboard a performance parameter so good it threatens to go off the top of the chart.
I'm tempted to think he must have been forecasting our 2011 Cannes and business performance.
Yes, this year really has been a dream year. We achieved our best year creatively not only in Cannes, but also with many of our clients. We won 61 Lions, including 12 Gold Lions (the most awarded to any agency!) and came in second overall in Network of the Year.
Appropriately, we achieved this on the week of David Ogilvy's 100th birthday. It also followed close on the heels of the Gunn Report and IPA research which confirmed that creatively awarded ads sell a whopping 11 times more than non-awarded ads.
It's hard to imagine a more categorical endorsement of our creative resurgence.
It was particularly gratifying to see the tide of Pervasive Creativity reach the furthest tips of the Ogilvy realm. We had a record 48 offices winning a Lion or a Finalist. EMEA and Latin American regions both excelled thanks to some great work by our management there.
Yes, whoever engraves the trophies at the award shows had a tough year thanks to us. Just look at all the new names he had to learn to spell: Panama City, Lima, Bogota, San Jose, Guatemala, Budapest, Tunis, Kiev, Ho Chi Minh City and offices such as Chengdu Apex Beijing - they all stood up to be counted. I wish to thank every one of our creative and business leaders who helped us achieve this record result.
In this edition, you will see we are making great strides in print again, in outdoor and activation. What we need to work on is our digital, film, integrated and PR.
How will we do that?
Well, for a start, we could look to the example of David Ogilvy. I must admit I did a double-take when I first saw this picture of him. Nutty, professorial, eccentric, unconventional, passionate, totally focused... precisely the qualities and attitude that we need to call on to raise our game.
Up in the attic there is a framed quote from him, too. 'Be more ambitious, don't bunt. Aim out of the park. Compete with the immortals.' To that I would add one more requirement. Guts. Yes, or grit, determination, courage, chutzpah...whatever you call it, no great enterprise gets very far without this vital ingredient.
With this in mind I have invited Miles to write a few words on the subject of courage, which you will find below.
It is in keeping with this spirit that I have the greatest honour to present you with our third and latest edition of Best of Ogilvy. It was a great privilege to work with the Worldwide Creative Council in September in New York to select the work.
I wish to thank the Council wholeheartedly for the long hours they put in judging. And to everyone, I salute the courage you have shown in breaking free from convention and rules, and achieving the great ideas presented here for our clients and for us.
I shall now return to the attic to see what David Ogilvy has forecast for us next year.
Tham Khai Meng
Worldwide Chief Creative Officer
I also went up into the attic this week.
For that, I have to thank Doug Weekes, our Kraft client. We were chatting after hours in Daisy May's BBQ, across 11th Avenue from the Chocolate Factory, and Doug mentioned that he used a training video featuring David Ogilvy's "Man in the Hathaway Shirt" ad.
Intrigued, I searched the attic for it.
I found it.
It is hilarious. It is sobering. And it is timeless.
At this point, the readers of this foreword will split into two groups: those who go ogilvy.com/rr and devote time to watching it, and those who will not really know what I'm writing about from now on.
It's part of a film called Risk and Responsibility.
The astute amongst you may have noticed that one of the actors in the Hathaway Shirt sketch is Jeremy Bullmore, still serving as a member of the Advisory Board of WPP.
I asked Jeremy about the background of this piece, and this is what he wrote to me:
Back in 1966, The Advertising Association belatedly thought of including some advertisements in its annual conference in Brighton. So it asked The Creative Circle, President Ronnie Kirkwood, if we'd fill a one-hour slot before lunch. Ronnie recruited David Bernstein, Sam Rothenstein and me (all different agencies) and together we met and put it together.
It went well. We did it again in London. A trade paper featured it. And then Unilever asked us to film it for their training courses - at their expense. We did it on 16mm film in one afternoon - cost £900. Since then it's gone through countless tape transfers with consequent loss of quality - but the arguments survive.We all sound strangely posh.
14 years after we did it, I got a telex from DO in Chicago. It read: "Just seen R&R in company of young MBA. Congratulations. Thought you'd like to know that young MBA in total agreement with you that final Hathaway ad great improvement on the original."
Now the lesson of this piece is very clear. It is all about courage. The ever so patient and glam account director is pained but emotionally distant from the destruction wrought on that ad by fear masquerading as reason.
What a courageous idea it was to dress up Baron George Wrangell in an eye patch to sell a shirt. It's quite frankly mad.
Then the "clients" proceed to dismantle the idea, piece by piece, until there is nothing, but nothing left at all. The question for every account person watching or
reading is this: at what point would you have the courage to say "no"; "no, it cannot be done"; "no, it would not be right to do it"; "no, I do not believe we should"?
Behind all the best work in Best of Ogilvy is a sense of courage: the courage to break a few rules, to surprise, to connect the previously unconnectable, to cut through the sludge of normalcy, to look at things from a totally unexpected point of view and to express them in a startling way.
As our work gets better and better, it is only an absence of courage which holds us back: the courage to create and the courage to sell.
Miles Young
Worldwide Chief Executive Officer
Return to Best of Ogilvy Volume 3
Previous editions: Best of Ogilvy Volume 1 and Best of Ogilvy Volume 2