Bartle Bogle Hegarty is a British advertising agency, responsible for some notable advertising campaigns of the last 30 years. The company was founded by John Bartle, Nigel Bogle & Sir John Hegarty in 1982. Sir John Hegarty and Nigel Bogle still lead it today, together with worldwide CEO Simon Sherwood. In 1997, Leo Burnett Worldwide purchased a 49 percent share in BBH; that share is now held by the Publicis advertising group.
It has seven offices worldwide - London, New York, Singapore, Tokyo, São Paulo, Shanghai and Mumbai. BBH employs more than 800 staff globally. The agency has worked for global brands including Audi, Vodafone, Levi Straus, British Airways, Johnnie Walker, Omo/Persil & Axe/Lynx. For all intents and purposes, BBH shut their Tokyo office in October 2008.
The company was responsible for commercials such as Levi's 'Laundrette', and Levi's 'Flatbeat' featuring Flat Eric, a small yellow puppet. They were also responsible for 'Vorsprung durch Technik' for Audi, 'The Axe (Lynx) Effect' for Unilever and 'Keep Walking' for Johnnie Walker.
BBH has been Agency of the Year twice at Cannes, and has won 32 IPA Effectiveness Awards since 1988. BBH London was Campaign magazine's 2005 UK Agency of the Year, an honour it also held in 1986, 1993, 2003 and 2004. BBH also became Effectiveness Agency Of The Year for 2008 at both the IPA and APG awards, the first agency to achieve this feat. In the USA, Advertising Age recently voted BBH Global Network of the Year and, in Singapore, Ad Asia has chosen BBH as its Agency of the Year for the region.
In 2006, BBH opened what it called the first virtual advertising office in Second Life.[1]
In 2009, as a result of the financial crisis staff voted for a 3.5% pay cut rather than redundancies.[2] However later in 2009 the agency made 10% of the workforce redundant.[3]
In 2009 BBH also opened a 'marketing skunkworks' division called BBH Labs.