How Ogilvy Still Gives Creativity Oxygen, 75 Years On

When I catch up with Patou Nuytemans and Fiona Gordon, they’re immersed in the celebrations the agency is having around its 75 birthday, spouting quotes from their founder without a thought. Patou, EMEA CEO is full of admiration for the company’s story so far. “Such a momentous legacy,” she says. “75 years. It's hard to imagine. I'm so proud to be part of a brand that has such a legacy, but still very much at the forefront. I don't think that there are many brands that can really say that.”

David Ogilvy’s principles and guidance are central to the network’s culture today. “David said so many things and I have a litany of them that I use in all kinds of situations,” says Patou. But recently the agency has restated three core values, which she thinks really embody the spirit of everything that he said: “Do the right thing. Do it together. Do the best work of our lives.” 

All three have been active goals for both Patou and Fiona, who is UK CEO, since they’ve been part of Ogilvy. Patou’s done 28 years in total, across six countries and three different continents. Fiona’s done 30 in total, 15 in the UK and the rest spread across Hong Kong, Singapore and New York. “We both really share this lived experience of seeing the diversity of Ogilvy come together,” says Patou. 

‘Do it together’ has been an obvious driving force for as long as Fiona’s been in the agency. “Ogilvy set up offices around the world very early versus many agencies – based on our clients’ needs. But David always wanted it to be a community of people around the world to really come together like a network.”

That’s the way the 75th-anniversary came about. Early in 2023 a new community called the Ogilvy xCHANGERs came together – a shadow board of representatives from each of the network’s countries across EMEA that have a task to accelerate that do-it-together spirit. Hence they developed the campaign for the anniversary, ‘Together We Are 75’.

For Fiona, the xCHANGERs represent something core to the network’s future, as well as its global legacy. “It gives people at that mid level a way to make friends around the network,” she says. “It's been fun to watch them make the 75th communication because in a sense it's the next generation projecting forward, not just looking to the past.”

Another campaign that encapsulates these values is the Dove ‘Turn Your Back’ work, which took on the ‘Bold Glamour’ filter and the damage it can do (and is doing) to social users.

After conversations with leaders at Dove, Ogilvy’s creative leaders from across the region came together to come up with an idea to combat the negative effects a filter like ‘Bold Glamour’ could have on young people. They sent out a brief across the network, got 200 ideas back and then the #TurnYourBack idea came through. “It happened in a very short period of time with the entire network contributing,” says Fiona. “If you think about those three values – do it together, do the right thing and do the best work of your lives – that's what the David Ogilvy culture is all about in spirit. I absolutely love that example.”

The campaign built on Ogilvy’s existing commitment to tackle body confidence issues that often stem from frequent social media use. In 2022 the agency announced that it would no longer work with influencers who distort their pictures, and earlier this year launched the AI Accountability Act to ensure the use of AI in any brand and influencer content is always disclosed.

Fiona thinks the UK agency’s work for the Mayor of London to challenge misogynistic behaviour is also in the spirit of their founder. “David Ogilvy was always about curiosity,” she says. “It was obviously a societal challenge about getting men to engage in misogyny. But we used behavioural science to reframe how you could get somebody to talk about this issue in a way that men would engage with. They came in at the beginning with insights, the creatives  took that. It was also a combination of our PR creatives, influencers, creators and traditional creatives.” 

David Ogilvy always talked about his passion for direct mail, but Fiona thinks he’d be fascinated by social channels these days. “I think his whole point was actually a passion for channels that work. That was his thing. You could totally imagine if David Ogilvy was alive today he'd be on TikTok or YouTube.”

Fiona is also proud of the more recent version of the Mayor of London 'Maaate', using comedian Romesh Ranganathan and working with Vimeo to create an experience that contains around 270 branches of content sitting under one seamless narrative, repurposing the skip button for an immersive experience. “I think David Ogilvy would have loved that because it's using a channel that's super relevant to the audience,” she says. “You're really thinking about that consumer's life and making sure you're showing up in the relevant way. Taking that spirit of curiosity, thinking what channels are right and then playing a relevant role in people's lives, I think the Mayor of London work has been a good example of bringing that together.”

This draws on the fact that the influence team at Ogilvy has quadrupled in the UK in the last year, while the agency’s TikTok lab feeds the kind of work that is relevant for that platform. This is the thinking that CEOs need to do to ensure the values of the network are playing out in the work. “It's operationalising our strategy of collaboration or borderless creativity,” says Patou. When we say borderless, we mean that we innovate and operate at the intersection of our people, our capabilities and our geographies. Fiona's and my job is to operationalise that so it's not just based on our culture, but it goes beyond the intent of all of our people. We bring together diverse skills locally or internationally on behalf of any client. It's fun then when we both have been here for such a long time, worked across so many different things. Because we've personally experienced that's what Ogilvy is at its best. Now in our leadership roles we think about how that can be a lived experience for each of our clients and each of our team members.” 

Patou grew up within Ogilvy One, when the philosophy was different. “We wanted to have the same skills in each of our offices everywhere,” she says. “Over the last few years, we've really shifted that perspective to be way more collaborative. We can have centres of excellence in different parts of our business, within the market or across the geography. And really tap into that.” 

That takes some management. “Operationalising sounds like a terrible word, but it is a question of knowing we benefit when we know each other,” says Patou. “But how do we make that a lived experience for so many of our people? That's where that dirty word of operationalising comes in. It's through centres of excellence, creating communities, creating new types of workshops, cultural initiatives such as the xCHANGERs, communication around it. We do a lot of work on it. Then we make it really happen on the client project and that's when we can see that the change accelerates.”

Switch Up is a format that puts diversity of thinking and borderless creativity into practice in this way. Beginning at Ogilvy, it forces people to shake up their perspective, “open up that lens and see the variety of things that we do, which becomes a way of working that then we steal from the UK and try to use in other parts of the network,” says Patou.

When Ogilvy’s trying to crack a client's problem in a condensed period of time, the agency hosts a Switch Up. David Ogilvy famously said ‘We sell or else’. Switch Up is like "We solve or else," says Fiona. The sort of client problems it’s used for are less about ‘launch x product on date y’ and more like “the kind of end of the day conversation when they're like, 'I'm really worried about this competitor,' or 'I'm really worried about this dynamic that's happening in the market' or 'this audience group are not so engaged with us as they used to be'. It's those bigger business problems,” says Fiona.

The team writes a very condensed brief and they fill up The Yoke in Sea Containers – a big yellow workspace – with a whole set of different brains. “We get data scientists, we get art directors, we get photographers, we get some of our new creatives who have just joined who are filmmakers, we get behavioural science and we get the strategists. So we get a bunch of different brains in a room.” They’ll often start the day with a bit of meditation or something to make the brain think differently. Then they issue the brief. People split into squads and spend the day running at the problem. “And sometimes you can call a friend if you're stuck. You could call Rory [Sutherland, Ogilvy UK vice chairman] or maybe get one of our media agencies from WPP, who you can call. Sometimes we do it in partnership with some of the tech platforms. Basically the idea is to take a different solution back to our clients.

“It gets us great ideas at great speed, so that's very good. And so we help our clients solve their problems. But actually teams love working on it because you get to work with people you don't work with every day, you get to think in a different way.”

Working like that has to energise people, because it’s the essence of good advertising. Global CEO of Ogilvy Advertising Antonis Kocheilas recently spoke about the AI revolution in a way that Patou loved. “He says we used to be in the information economy and now we're heading into the inspiration economy. Isn't that beautiful? He's just so incredibly eloquent. I really feel it's the truth. We can see it all across our network. As we talk about how we attract talent, isn't that a cool thing to say? Come join the inspiration economy!”

As CEOs, Fiona and Patou are excited to be assembling the talent and building the structures to continue inspiring their clients and talent. “We're one of those industries which is all about creativity,” says Patou. “When people say advertising has a problem attracting talent, it's because we haven't brought that to life, and how amazing it is to be part of this business. We've made it all about the mechanics and the complexities. But in essence, the magic of ideation is big ideas that change brands, people and the world. It's good to be here.”

Her focus is to remove barriers in the way of that. “We can re-appreciate creativity and create the oxygen to make creativity come to life – by operationalising and eliminating the distractions and making creativity the lived experience again for each of our clients and talents every day. That is my mission. That's really the essence of what our job should be about.”

Having looked back at the history of Ogilvy, Fiona’s equally inspired. “We've only got to do that for the next 75 years now,” she says. “We've had the dancing, now back to work.”