One of the themes of Ogilvy One’s Verge Digital Summit, which made its first appearance in Dubai last month at the Burj Al Arab, was that digital media consumption patterns often move faster than agencies can adapt. By the time a campaign is planned, budgeted and executed – on My Space or Facebook or whatever the Web flavor of last month was – consumers, and the fickle youth market in particular, have moved on to something else.
So it was an initial disappointment to see Brian Featherstonhaugh, the chairman and CEO of Ogilvy One Worldwide, showing Ogilvy’s famous Grand Prix-winning “Evolution” spot for Unilver’s Dove to the guests assembled in an air-conditioned tent in the Burj’s backyard. “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted,” the spot intones. “Evolution?” The Campaign for Real Beauty? How passé. You might as well be talking about Napster.
Fortunately, Featherstonhaugh saved the day by showing us something a little more fresh: “Slob Evolution,” a shot-by-shot spoof of the Dove ad in which a hot young male model is stuffed in fast-motion with pound after pound of burgers, fries and beer, made to look pale, wan and pimply, then digitally altered so his forehead is more squat and his shoulders more droopy – until finally he looks like your average Neanderthal. “Thank God our perception of real life is distorted,” the spot concludes. “Nobody wants to look at ugly people.”
The Verge summit, which comes to Dubai after taking place 23 times in major advertising hubs like New York, London and Tokyo, is a signal that Memac Ogilvy, Ogilvy’s Middle East partnership, is finally catching up with digital, having missed the bus its competitors have been riding. “There are so many things we did as a first,” says Edmond Moutron, chairman and founder of Memac Ogilvy Group. “This one slipped. It’s just one of those things, but as they say, it’s better late then never.
“We were late in introducing digital as a discipline,” he continues. “But we will speed up. Everybody we’re hiring is digital-literate in every discipline, and within six months I think we’ll be the biggest and, if not, then certainly the best at it.”
All Ogilvy’s creative directors are receiving crash courses in digital media, and Memac Ogilvy recently brought in Hannalore Grams, who ran Ogilvy Interactive in Frankfurt, to head up Ogilvy One, the company’s direct marketing, interactive and consulting arm, in Bahrain.
Among the media gadgetry on display at the Verge summit was a flat-screen monitor that delivers startling three-dimensional hologram-style advertisements – without the funny glasses. Ogilvy promises to limit use of this technology to indoor displays, lest 3D billboards lead to fatal traffic accidents.
Stuff like this may inspire “gee whiz” reactions in onlookers, but it’s difficult to use new advertising technology effectively without proper insights into media consumption habits. And that’s lacking in the Middle East, especially in the youth segment. Too many speakers at the Verge summit relied on research consisting of anecdotes about “my 12-year-old.”
Yes, lack of research has been and, to a degree still is, a problem, concedes Moutron. But he also says the need for traditional research has lessened in the new media environment.
“It doesn’t have to be formal research,” he says. “It’s no longer the way it used to be, where information was not available and we had to do survey after survey to reach the Saudi woman. Saudi women are talking to us: They’re on our Web sites, they’re on the blogs, they’re giving us their opinions.”
Having launched Memac Ogilvy as Middle East Marketing and Mass Communications in 1984, Moutron is now one of the elder statesmen of Arab advertising. “The world is changing so fast,” he says. “Old men like me, if it wasn’t for our wisdom, and our entrepreneurial spirit to suddenly give the green light and provide the funds and make commercial sense of it, we would be dead. If I was running the business on a day-to-day basis today, we’d be dead. This is why the business is in the hands of young people, who can understand and communicate with young people.”
Moutron says he’ll step down fully “when I’m tired.” He’s already in the midst of negotiating a deal to sell half his 60 percent stake in the agency to WPP. “I’m getting there,” he says. “The spirit’s not tired. The legs are sometimes.”
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