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John Seifert, the chairman of Ogilvy & Mather North America, shakes his head. It drives him crazy, he explains, when people portray contemporary New York admen as sushi-munching, Scotch-slurping dinosaurs, far removed from the concerns of digitally connected consumers and out of touch with a changing industry. It happens a lot.
It's the second day of Advertising Week, the industry's bender of panels, parties, and awards shows, held every fall in Manhattan. Seifert is sitting on a short stage, in a dim room with low ceilings at TimesCenter's The Hall, not far from Times Square. Rows of conventioneers in foldout chairs are watching the event, entitled "Inside a Big Dumb Agency."
Joining Seifert on stage are two colleagues from Ogilvy & Mather—a full-service global agency that is owned by the WPP Group (WPPGY), the behemoth holding company, which has some 100,000 employees in a constellation of agencies around the world. The Ogilvy executives are taking turns calmly responding to belittling inquiries from critics—"How many Twitter followers do each of you have?" one asks pointedly—questioning the relevance of a large, traditional agency in an age when low-to-the-ground, hand-to-hand grappling with consumers, tweet by tweet, is all the rage.
Isn't it amusing, one critic asks, that Big Dumb Agency managers, while enjoying "working dinners" at the swank Japanese restaurant Nobu, brainstorm how to sell cornflakes to single moms in Mississippi?
"I don't know how many of us are sitting at Nobu anymore drinking really expensive wine and talking to clients about things that we know nothing about," says Seifert.
At Seifert's feet rests a copy of Confessions of an Advertising Man, the seminal 1963 book by David Ogilvy, the firm's charismatic founder and one of the giants of Madison Avenue's heyday. Ogilvy drove a Rolls Royce. He wore a cape. He entertained clients at his château in France. He did not follow mouse clicks. By comparison, today's New York admen look more henpecked than cocksure.
From the stage, Lars Bastholm, Ogilvy's chief creative officer for New York, says that growing up in Copenhagen, he always dreamed of someday partaking in the Madison Avenue decadence. "This is wildly disappointing," he says. "I was looking forward to those dinners at Nobu."
"If any dumb agency is sitting here thinking life is wonderful," says Seifert, a few minutes later, "I'd be shocked."
The global recession roiled ad agencies of all sizes, but the current climate seems particularly fraught—emotionally and psychically—for the Madison Avenue giants. New York ad executives find themselves navigating a lean world where the flat 15 percent commission (and all the indulgences that came with it) has long since disappeared. Penny-pinching procurement officers now tightly monitor client expenditures, driving down fees; tiny startup interactive agencies moonwalk through award shows, egged on by an adoring press; and California-based search engines and social media newcomers are gobbling up large chunks of market share, selling ads one by one.
Again and again, the executives on stage assure the members of the audience that they get it. The Internet is important. Digital matters. And so they are carefully, painfully reconfiguring their workforces to take advantage of the changing landscape.
The crowd seems skeptical. A young man stands up and reports that he recently saw a list of top agencies around the world, including Ogilvy, that don't have their websites available on mobile devices, including the iPad and the iPhone. "So with the growing importance of those devices," he asks, "why aren't you guys practicing what you preach?"
Bastholm says that he too saw the gotcha list. But the problem highlighted therein, he says, turned out to pertain to a tiny slice of Ogilvy's website. It was easily fixed. "That list was done with a little bit of malice," says Bastholm. "Those lists are always done with a little bit of making a point in mind, rather than actually being entirely true."
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