Shelly Lazarus

SHELLY LAZARUS
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide

Shelly has been working, as she would say it, "In the business I love," for more than three decades, almost all of that time at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

Shelly started at Ogilvy when the agency's legendary founder, David Ogilvy, still walked the halls, and preached that the purpose of advertising is to build great brands. David Ogilvy was ahead of his time in his belief that the best way to build brands was to pair big creative ideas with deep consumer insight. But it made sense to Shelly, who had studied psychology as an undergraduate at Smith College and then earned an M.B.A. in marketing from Columbia University (one of only four women in her class).

That she would attain the Chairmanship of Ogilvy was certainly not a foregone conclusion given Shelly's rather unconventional path. After rising through the ranks of account management and playing a pivotal role on many of the agency's signature accounts - including American Express, Kraft and Unilever — Shelly took the surprising step of leaving the general agency to become the General Manager for Ogilvy & Mather Direct in the US. Her success there led to positions of increasing responsibility, from President of Ogilvy & Mather Advertising in New York (1991), to President of Ogilvy North America (1994), to Chief Operating Officer and President of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide (1995). She was then named CEO in 1996, and became Chairman in 1997.

Most importantly for Ogilvy, those years in Direct cemented her belief in integrated marketing, which has become the backbone of Ogilvy's 360 Degree Brand Stewardship; philosophy and practice. Ogilvy's ability to deliver integrated marketing services is recognized as the driving force behind most of the agency's commercial success in the last decade, including the huge wins of IBM, Kodak, Morgan Stanley, and DuPont, as global clients. The strength of Ogilvy's integrated marketing services was also the rationale cited by Advertising Age when it selected Ogilvy as North American Agency of the year in 2002.

All this success has not gone unnoticed. Advertising Women of New York selected Shelly as Advertising Woman of the Year in 1994. She was honored by Women in Communications with their Matrix Award in 1995, was named Business Woman of the Year by the New York City Partnership in 1996 and the Direct Marketing Association named her Woman of the Year in 2002. She has appeared in Fortune magazine's annual ranking of the 50 Most Powerful Women in American Business since the inception of the list in 1998. And most recently, Shelly was the first woman to receive Columbia Business School's Distinguished Leader in Business Award.

Shelly serves on the boards of several business, philanthropic and academic institutions, including General Electric; Merck & Co., Inc.; New York Presbyterian Hospital; American Museum of Natural History; Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy; World Wildlife Fund; and on the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School. She recently ended her five-year tenure as chairman of the Board of Trustees of Smith College; however, she continues as a special representative to that board. She is a member of Advertising Women of New York; the Committee of 200; the Council on Foreign Relations; The Business Council; Women's Forum, Inc.; and Deloitte & Touche Council for the Advancement of Women. She has also served as chairman of the leading industry trade group, the American Association of Advertising Agencies — one of only two women to do so.

Shelly spends a great deal of time on the lecture circuit, proselytizing for the power of brands, as well as commenting on leadership, women in business, and on career and life issues — something she speaks to from experience as the wife of Dr. George Lazarus, a New York pediatrician, and mother to their three grown children.