Ogilvy still rules the OTL waves….?
Ogilvy "grande dame" Shelly Lazarus gets a whole long profile in the Economist (reproduced below).
Is this a case of grande dame makes an exit? Or is this a swan song for above the line? Interesting her comment about not wanting to pitch if she can avoid it….can you avoid it?
I emailed it to Rory Sutherland at OgilvyOne UK and he said "Something of an overclaim. They pitch for quite a bit…… But she is much keener - and rightly so - on growing the business held with existing clients."
so now you know the truth!
Queen of Madison Avenue
From The Economist print edition
Shelly Lazarus of Ogilvy & Mather explains how advertising has changed during her long career—and how it hasn’t
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FOR
the advertising industry, the Academy Awards ceremony on February 25th
is “the Super Bowl for women”. It is the second-most-watched television
show of the year in America after the annual American-football
championship game, and television-advertising slots are priced
accordingly. One of the advertisements that will be shown this year
will be a 30-second spot for Dove Cream Oil body wash, a new product
being launched by Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods giant. The
company is screening the winning entry in an online contest in which
consumers were invited to create their own advertisements. This follows
on from Dove’s quirky and award-winning campaign that featured
ordinary-looking women and departed from conventional notions of beauty.
The spot
captures something of the spirit of advertising today, with its
combination of old and new media, “user-generated” content and an
effort to engage the consumer rather than simply push a product. The
driving force behind the campaign is not some young hotshot, but Shelly
Lazarus, the 60-year-old chief executive and chairman of Ogilvy &
Mather, one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies. It is an
illustration of how a 35-year career demands an ability to move with
the times, without losing sight of a consistent underlying discipline.
The change is
what is immediately apparent. “When I started in the business,
television ads and three print ads were enough to advertise a brand,”
says Mrs Lazarus. Advertising was a straightforward business: agencies
had to devise a good idea for an ad and then choose the right
publication or broadcast slot in order to catch consumers’ attention.
Today advertising is far more complex, thanks to technological
advances, social shifts and the far greater sophistication of both
advertisers and audiences. Modern consumers demand to be wooed, not
berated. “We have gone from intrusion into consumers’ lives to
extending an invitation to them,” says Mrs Lazarus.
Ogilvy’s past
campaigns for Dove are good examples of this latest approach, starting
with the “Campaign for Real Beauty”, launched in 2004, which set out to
banish stereotypes and spark discussions about beauty. It became one of
the most popular campaigns of recent years and won numerous awards.
Last year Ogilvy persuaded Unilever to launch the Dove “self-esteem
fund”, a worldwide campaign to persuade girls and young women to
embrace more positive images of themselves. “Only 2% of women in the
world think they are beautiful,” says Mrs Lazarus. User-generated
content is just the latest trend in advertisers’ efforts to establish
closer contact with consumers, and with women in particular. About 70%
of all decisions to buy something are made by women, according to
industry lore. “The consumer isn’t a moron—she is your wife,” as David
Ogilvy, who founded the firm in 1948, liked to say.
Mrs Lazarus
started working at Ogilvy & Mather in 1971 and has been there ever
since. In that time the industry has consolidated and new forms of
media have proliferated. Ogilvy & Mather was swallowed in 1989 by WPP,
a British advertising giant, in a hostile takeover. (Today adland is
dominated by four giants—America’s Omnicom and Interpublic, Britain’s WPP and
France’s Publicis.) The takeover caused an exodus of executives and
blue-chip clients including American Express, which withdrew nearly all
its business. Mrs Lazarus stayed on board and helped to win back
clients. “Staying with the brand” is one of her guiding principles. It
also led to one of her biggest successes: when Lou Gerstner, then boss
of Amex, and Abby Kohnstamm, his marketing director, moved to IBM in 1994 they transferred IBM’s $500m business to Ogilvy.
In response
to the rise of the internet and other new media, Mrs Lazarus decided to
bring together previously separate creative departments in many Ogilvy
offices across the world. The idea was to offer clients what she
grandly calls “360 Degree Brand Stewardship”. Internet types sit
together with television, print, outdoor-advertising, direct-marketing
and public-relations specialists. This helps them dream up ideas that
work across all types of media, rather than devising separate campaigns
for each one. Coming up with an “integrated idea” is also handy when
Ogilvy presents a new campaign to a company boss. Chief executives are
now more involved with their companies’ brands than they were when she
began her career, says Mrs Lazarus. They realise the importance of
reputation and image, and want their companies to be seen as good
corporate citizens—all of which requires a new approach to advertising,
she says.
In spite of
all these many shifts Mrs Lazarus thinks her job is in some ways not so
different from when she started. Interactive, direct and other forms of
non-traditional advertising accounted for more than half of Ogilvy’s
revenue last year compared with about 15% ten years ago. But what you
still need is a great idea, she says. Another constant throughout her
career has been her reluctance to pitch for business. It costs five or
six times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an
existing one, so she aims to attract new clients through the quality of
her work for others. (Ogilvy made an exception when it pitched,
unsuccessfully, for Wal-Mart’s advertising business last year. Mrs
Lazarus says she does not regret the decision to break her usual rule.)
Mrs Lazarus
has given some thought to her succession. She says she believes in
running her company in a collegial way and has groomed several people
who could take over as chief executive. Some are betting on Brian
Fetherstonhaugh, head of the company’s direct-marketing branch, a job
also held by Mrs Lazarus in the course of her career. The ground rules
of direct marketing have not really changed in all these years, says
Mrs Lazarus. Nor have the principles of good advertising.