| Type | a WPP plc company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Advertising, marketing, public relations |
| Founded | Manhattan (1948) |
| Headquarters | Manhattan, USA |
| Key people | Miles Young, CEO, Ogilvy & Mather Tham Khai Meng, Worldwide Chief Creative Officer |
| Subsidiaries | OgilvyOne Worldwide OgilvyInteractive Ogilvy PR Worldwide Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide OgilvyAction Neo@Ogilvy Ogilvy Government Relations RedWorks |
| Website | www.ogilvy.com |
Ogilvy & Mather is an international advertising, marketing and public relations agency based in Manhattan, and is a WPP company. It operates 450 offices in 120 countries with approximately 18,000 employees.
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Ogilvy & Mather was founded in 1948 by David Ogilvy, as "Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson, & Mather" in Manhattan. The company became a leading worldwide agency by the 1960s. Central to its growth was its strategy of building brands such as American Express, BP, Ford, Barbie, Maxwell House, IBM, Kodak, Nestlé, and Unilever brands Pond's and Dove.[1]
Ogilvy & Mather was built on Ogilvy's principles, in particular, that the function of advertising is to sell and that successful advertising for any product is based on information about its consumer.
His entry into the company of giants started with several iconic campaigns:
"The man in the Hathaway shirt" with his aristocratic eye patch; "The man from Schweppes is here" introduced Commander Whitehead, the elegant, bearded Brit, bringing Schweppes (and "Schweppervesence") to the United States.; "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock"; and "Pablo Casals is coming home – to Puerto Rico", a campaign that Ogilvy said helped change the image of a country and was his proudest achievement. "Only Dove is one-quarter moisturizing cream". This campaign helped Dove become the top selling soap in the U.S.
In 1989, The Ogilvy Group was purchased by WPP Group.
The executive board of Ogilvy & Mather, as of October 2011, is composed of:
Ogilvy & Mather board has produced work for a wide range of leading brands, including:
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In 1972 Ogilvy & Mather, Sydney first developed the line "Don't Leave Home Without It" as a means of educating Australians how to use the country's first credit card. Created by Ian Latham and David Prentice. Three years later in 1975, the line was adapted by Ogilvy & Mather New York to "Don't Leave Home Without Them' ad campaign for American Express Traveler's Cheques, featuring Oscar Award-winning actor Karl Malden. The "Don't Leave Home Without It" slogan was revived in 2005 for the prepaid American Express Travelers Cheque Card. After Malden's departure, American Express continued to feature celebrities, including Jerry Seinfeld, Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro, Wes Anderson, Ken Watanabe, Ellen DeGeneres and Conan O'Brien.
In 2007, Ogilvy Stockholm developed the "Animals in the Womb" campaign for Ford Flexifuel, which was nominated for the Cannes Lion Award and for the Guldägget Award in 2008.
Subsidiary, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide (OPR) is a global public relations agency with specialties in consumer marketing, corporate, healthcare, technology, social Marketing, public affairs and 360 degree digital influence. OPR operates 69 offices in locations throughout the world. Headquartered in New York, it has a total of nine offices in North America, along with 22 offices in Europe, five in South Asia, ten in East Asia, five in the Middle East and Africa, two in Central Asia, three in Latin America, six in Southeast Asia, and seven in Australia.[5]
Ogilvy Public Relations has its own wholly owned subsidiaries:
In 2005, Ogilvy PR acquired all-Republican lobbying firm The Federalist Group LLC.[8][9] The company subsequently became bipartisan,[10] and its name was changed to Ogilvy Government Relations.[11] OGR operates from the same building as the office of its parent company in Washington, DC.[12][13] In 2010 Ogilvy Government Relations became a wholly owned subsidiary of Ogilvy & Mather. OGR had a total lobbying income of over $21 million in 2009.[14] This makes OGR the 7th largest lobbying firm in the United States.[15] OGR was named a Top 10 financial services lobbying firm in the 2010 regulatory reform debate.[16] Its top clients included the Blackstone Group, Highstar Capital, the Poker Players Alliance, Chevron Corporation, and Verizon Communications.[17] OGR employees and lobbyists donated over $230,000 to Republican and Democratic Party primary candidates, politicians and PACs during the 2008 election cycle.[14] OGR Chairman, Wayne Berman, was featured on Washingtonian magazine's 2007 list of the top 50 lobbyists in Washington, DC.[18]
Ogilvy caused some controversy in 2004 when a reportedly discarded video advertisement for the Ford SportKa hatchback began spreading virally via email. The 40-second video, which shows a lifelike computer-generated cat being decapitated by the car's sunroof was apparently rejected by Ford, but still made its way onto the internet, sparking outrage among bloggers and animal rights groups.[19][20]
Ogilvy also has been involved with the notorious Asia Pulp & Paper, a large logging company that has been convicted of illegal logging in three countries, and recently has built roads illegally into the last remaining habitats of the critically endangered Sumatran Tiger, but spent large sums on global advertising campaigns claiming 'sustainability beyond compliance'.[21]
In 2005, Shona Seifert and Thomas Early, two former directors of Ogilvy & Mather, were convicted of one count of conspiring to defraud the government and nine counts of filing false claims for Ogilvy over-billing advertising work done for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy account. In an e-mail, Seifert stated "I'll wring the money out of [the ONDCP], I promise". Seifert and Early were sentenced to 18 and 14 months in prison, respectively. Seifert also was ordered to pay a $125,000 fine, in addition to writing a "code of ethics" for the ad industry as part of 400 hours of community service. Ogilvy & Mather repaid $1.8 million to the government to settle a civil suit based on the same billing issues and continues to produce anti-drug spots for the government.[22][23][24][25]
Ogilvy Government Relations, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, is credited with playing an instrumental role in killing the controversial 2005 bid by Chinese oil company CNOOC to buy Unocal Corporation, which would then go on to merge with Chevron Corporation, an OGR client.[18]
The company was involved with a controversy in May 2009 when a Clio Award was given to a campaign for the A & E History Channel. One of the associated images compared the American deaths at Pearl Harbor with the Japanese deaths after the bombing of Hiroshima.[26]
