Meet the Ogilvy One UK Leadership Team

The return of Ogilvy One last year – with a space in the middle of the name this time - was met with much fanfare as its mother-agency network realised its mistake in shuttering the ‘relationship marketing’ business, which launched in 1972.

Within its first 12 months of having resumed operating again, it has already been named; Campaign's Customer Engagement Agency of the Year. So no pressure for year two.

Under Ogilvy veteran and Ogilvy One global CEO Kent Wertime, the agency opened with a global workforce of 3,800 employees. In Europe, it was led by Claire Lawson who has since been elevated to global president, meaning the UK needed a leadership reshuffle.

The trio selected to take up the reigns are co-managing directors Charlie Ryder and Alan Makepeace, who were promoted internally, alongside Ed Turner, who is the UK head of strategy. Working alongside them are executive creative directors Angus George and Johnny Watters. 

“A lot of people do know what it [Ogilvy One] is – some of them have seen it through the industry. Now, it’s about working out how we make it as fit as it was back then," explains Ryder of re-establishing the agency’s reputation.

Makepeace credits the efforts of Lawson for putting Ogilvy One back on the map by using the equity that remained in place since it was scrapped in 2017 and now taking the next step by bringing in new talent such as Turner, who has switched from EssenceMediacom.

“But so much has changed. When I joined, it was the same set of good relationship marketing agencies within the competitive set but now that’s changed massively. There is equity in the name, but there is a job to do to re-educate everyone,” Makepeace adds of the challenge at hand in the era of management consultancies and alongside traditional specialist agencies.

Pillars and opportunities

Since the relaunch in the UK, the business has picked up work with major UK client names, including Pets at Home, Sainsbury’s and Lloyds Banking Group as well as a global sports organisation no one is allowed to talk about officially.

“The thing that really excites me about coming here is the sort of reinvention of what customer experience can mean for brands above and beyond what it has in the past,” says Turner. “it's been very easy in the past to pigeonhole it as inexpensive, direct relationships, CRM, UX. But it has the potential for how brands go to market more generally beyond just customer experience.”

In a space that was synonymous with the service industry, the CPG sector is now catching up, claims Makepeace, and the business is currently built around three core client pillars. Those include Sports and Entertainment, B2B, and Loyalty, but the expansion of those is inevitable.

The sports and entertainment side, the team agree, offers “a massive opportunity” for the business to utilise WPP’s technology services to create data-informed experiences for fans attending games and heighten those. And spaces to move into include travel, which, according to Turner, is “going through a radical reinvention” with the inclusion of AI booking agents able to design full itineraries at the booking stage.

“These spaces of technological disruption are creating opportunities for how to go and change travel and space like that where you can see the line between the individual and the big opportunity is quite exciting,” he continues.

Ryder adds that there is a further opportunity in developing customer journeys that are different from the ‘sea of sameness’ emerging due to competing businesses adopting similar tech stacks to power their systems.

“From a brand-out space, we can build everything from customer, the real person, and back. For all the data and technology in the world, we get a sense that there are millions of inputs, but not always a great deal of insight and ability to build things that work for people at scale, rather than just what a brand wants to show up and say,” explains Turner.

The role of 'relationship design'

Ogilvy One talks about offering ‘relationship design’, explained as a strategic process of designing client solutions rooted in a data-led understanding of consumers and reimagining how a brand communicates with customers in the real world. Within that, there is an ambition to build ‘empathetic moments’ to solve human needs, resulting in seamless engagement.

The team cites its work with Lloyds Banking Group as a very good example of the agency’s approach based around relationship thinking and taking customers on a journey while avoiding producing “dry” financial services work.

The most recent campaign involved a social-first campaign empowering women to kickstart their investment journeys. It featured vox pops of men and women across London answering the question; "Do you know how much more men invest than women?".

“What we want to try and do is stretch the way you can design a relationship with a financial institution, from just being what email you're getting - monthly, weekly, whatever - to the real life problems that people are facing,” outlines Turner in reference to that campaign which ran across paid media and TikTok.

“It should be about where is your customer showing up, not about what the channel is,” adds Ryder. “As an agency, we get protective about where we show up but we shouldn’t get caught up in that because it’s about finding the right channel that they [the customer] wants to engage with.”

The team has also begun to work with Sainsbury’s on an AI-driven synthetic research project that aims to help the client maximise its budget while still gaining an understanding of how it can become more trusted by customers.

Teaming up with New Commercial Arts

Meanwhile, since the re-emergence of Ogilvy One, Ogilvy has also acquired New Commercial Arts (NCA) with which, Makepeace reveals, a combination of teams has now taken place to work with Sainsbury’s as a shared client. Prior to the deal, they knew each other well from working on the account too.

“It’s a single team now,” he explains, adding that the Sainsbury’s inhouse team has also been scaling up.

Ryder adds that since NCA also has a CX team they have begun to work closely together, however, Ogilvy One can offer more of the “necessary outputs” following the initial diagnosis experience.

“We can now take more stuff to clients to say, ‘Ok, we've seen this as a problem here. Actually, we've got a whole team of people who could work on this.’ There's going to be a lot of overlap,” she continues.