Ogilvy India CEO says transformation efforts will help draw ~60% of revenue by 2034

Creative agency Ogilvy is embracing all things technology, digital, commerce, content, & data to offer a full-funnel solution to all its clients — old and new.

Keeping up is to relevance the way that bees are to pollination.  

Ads by Ogilvy have been instrumental in building some of India’s beloved brands, such as Cadbury Dairy Milk, Fevicol, Asian Paints, Vodafone, and Brooke Bond Red Label, among others. These television ads captured the zeitgeist of the eras in which they came out. 

As times changed, the ads changed, and soon technology, media tech platforms, and everything in between became intricately linked with advertising. And Ogilvy wasn’t going to be left behind in this game of keeping up with technology. 

Remember the first AI-generated ad that captured the imagination of the advertising world? It was the 2021 Ogilvy ad for Cadbury — NotJustACadburyAd — where actor Shah Rukh Khan’s voice was used to create ​​130,000 ads featuring 2,000 stores. The ad that was made in collaboration with Rephrase.ai went on to win many accolades at international ad festivals including the coveted Cannes Lions for effectiveness. 

It is this magic of creative effectiveness that Ogilvy is chasing as it transforms every time the requirements of the market change. To transform the agency, one needs to rethink the fundamentals of the business.  

The agency’s India CEO, VR Rajesh, puts it succinctly, “We have to change the way we think and approach work — effectiveness and creativity today sit at the intersection of culture, technology, commerce, and platforms.”

Rajesh, an agency man through and through, has been at Ogilvy for 20 of the 27 years that he has been working. From 2018 to 2022 he was heading the agency's Mumbai and Kolkata units. He was then appointed group president in 2022 when Kunal Jeswani, the erstwhile India CEO, moved to Singapore as group chief executive, Ogilvy Singapore & Malaysia.

A year later, Rajesh was named CEO of the India operations. His appointment as CEO coincided with adman Piyush Pandey taking on the role of chief advisor of the agency.

The agency has undergone several big changes in the last three years and has been working on improving its business. The agency marked a year-on-year (YoY) growth of almost 9% over CY22, as per its disclosure to the Registrar of Companies.

The company seems to be on a path to recovery since the pandemic. The agency grew by only 6% (YoY) in CY21 and registered a YoY growth of 10% in CY22.

Cultivating talent and partnerships

When Rajesh speaks of transforming an organisation that has a storied history and strong legacy, he talks of incubating talent over acquiring talent; he values reverse mentoring and wants to foster a culture “where people are comfortable and open to learning”. He says, “To change the output, our input needs to be different."

What he says is obvious — and sometimes it is necessary to say the obvious out loud. But why? Because, as Rajesh puts it, "When you are successful, it is very difficult for one to unlearn everything and change."

Partnerships with enablers and platforms have become integral to achieving flawless execution of creative ideas. For teams that traditionally have “kept the creative idea very close to their heart”, being open to collaboration has been a vital part of the transformation journey. Rajesh cites the example of the award-winning Taj Mahal Megh Santoor billboard that needed 150 different people to come together and work on the idea. “The team told me only 1% of the work was from Ogilvy, the rest was the efforts of our collaborators.”

To aid such collaborations Ogilvy introduced a new discipline called 'creative tech' about four years ago. A team of nine people from tech backgrounds such as gaming, UI/UX, and AI has been put together to “give our larger teams the confidence to think beyond the traditional and use technology to create defining work,” says Rajesh. 

Integrating content and commerce

Not just technology, but content too has become a key pillar of Ogilvy’s transformation. Over the last 3-4 years Ogilvy has incubated a 120-people strong content team to create social-first, platform-specific ads. This team will also generate ideas for social and live commerce, performance campaigns, and CRM.

When the CEO of Ogilvy India, the agency that has been synonymous with a flavour of advertising that is Indian at its core, builds brand love, and wins creative awards, utters the words 'performance,' 'CRM,' and 'commerce,' you tend to do a double-take. 

Is this the new global mandate? Rajesh responds, “It is the necessary next step as these are increasingly becoming key imperatives for driving client business.” To that end, Ogilvy is now approaching annual operating plans for clients from a full-funnel point of view, informs Rajesh. 

The agency has introduced OgilvyOne as a specialised service to enable digital-led solutions. Ogilvy India, with the help of Verticurl — the customer experience and martech enablement division of Ogilvy, which has 1,500 specialists sitting out of Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Bengaluru, and Gurugram — is working on delivering solutions across consulting and delivery services. OgilvyOne will offer solutions in the areas of: customer acquisition through enriching first-party data, service design for creating personalised experiences using technology, continuous commerce, and CRM & loyalty. 

The agency is focussed on upselling these new solutions to its existing clients with a desire to become an end-to-end partner for brands. While the digital solutions are not big money spinners just yet, Rajesh predicts that in 10 years the transformation efforts will bring in about 60% of the agency’s revenue. Today, he says, this number stands at about 15%.

“Transformation is not about how much revenue you will generate but how you will insulate yourself from losing out opportunities in the future,” he says. 

The existential crisis of advertising agencies

Every advertising agency is looking inward and trying to answer the question “How do I make myself relevant to my client?" The problem is that the ad world is doing this soul-searching at a time when it has also resigned itself to being a low-margin game. So the question is: Is there a way to recover from this and rewrite the destiny of advertising agencies?

Rajesh knows the problem here. He says, “Everybody is delivering table stakes. The day agencies are able to demonstrate strategic and creative excellence across all interventions, that day we will be looked at as consultants and not just those who are delivering creative solutions.” He identifies the lack of differentiation in offerings as another weakness of the sector. 

And what according to him is the biggest existential threat to ad agencies today? “Drowning ourselves in the chatter of data, technology, and digital.” He explains, “We need to understand what we are doing with data. What are we using the digital ecosystem for? In this race for transformation the fundamental thing that agencies are forgetting is that we are about creating disruptions in the consumer’s mind creatively. That is what we should keep doing.”