What you need to know 

• WPP's legacy creative brand is making a big bet on it's 'next gen' services, recently debuting a new fully integrated customer experience (CX) and commerce offering under the Ogilvy One name. Locally, it's headed by Ogilvy ANZ chief experience officer, Jason Davey. 
• Ogilvy One - the once retired moniker for Ogilvy's direct marketing arm - has seen many evolutions. The latest iteration brings together a suite of Ogilvy's martech-adjacent acquisitions into a single vertical offering that accounts for 25 per cent of the agency's global headcount, and a similar proportion of its bottom line.
• The CX unit can be activated as an independent service for clients - like has been done for the AFL - but it's ultimately an integrated proposition that the agency is chasing. 80 per cent of the agency’s top 20 clients tap into more than two of those verticals.
• Like many other corners of the industry, Ogilvy's revamped CX offering is about bringing together customer, marketing and commerce services in the one spot.
• Ogilvy One's core proposition is “creating impactful relationships by design” across delivery in four key areas: Customer Acquisition, Service Design, Continuous Commerce and CRM & Loyalty.
• Davey says the CX unit takes a cue from its direct marketing origins to bring a more personal layer to customer relationships that have become "too technology driven" - i.e. clinical and undifferentiated. It's also taking a stab at the traditional points and discounts approach to loyalty - Davey says that these days, community and values alignment are much more relevant. And getting those right comes down to having the right customer insights.
• The agency's new standardised approach to delivering better end-to-end CX - what they're calling 'relationship design'- has been encapsulated in a new cloud-based platform that's currently in development.
• That platform will allows Ogilvy's global talent to input brand elements and customer data, set up work flows, and optimise strategy. It will plug into WPP Open (the hold co's centralised marketing operating system) to "speed up the whole process" and bring an extra layer of data to "validate every aspect of the relationship design".

Back in March, Ogilvy announced the global repositioning of its customer experience and commerce capabilities under the consolidated banner of Ogilvy One. Its services encompass around 25 per cent of Ogilvy’s global headcount, and account for a similar proportion of its bottom line, per Ogilvy ANZ experience chief Jason Davey. And he says it's only growing.

Formerly Ogilvy Experience, the ramped-up offering bares an integrated proposition that centres around the concept of relationship design, working both independently and in conjunction with the broader Ogilvy offering to deliver tech and data driven projects across the customer journey.  

The move, which came with little fanfare in the local market, is a testament to the convergence trend that's been evolving now for some time – the bringing together of creative, customer and commerce functions is only becoming more urgent as clients attempt to keep pace with consumers.

Agencies have started to walk the talk of linking those services end-to-end, and it’s been paying off – it’s the reason why WPP, Omnicom and Publicis were all named leaders in the latest Forrester’s Wave research into commerce services, per Principal Analyst and author of the report, Ted Schadler. In WPP’s case, ANZ chief Rose Herceg told Mi3 that Ogilvy One is playing a growing role in the network’s commerce offering, which is spearheaded by VML and GroupM.

Davey, who helms Ogilvy One in the local market, marks a decade with the agency later this year. During that time, he's witnessed the complete evolution of Ogilvy’s experience offering.

One-to-one: from direct marketing to commerce

The Ogilvy One name hails from eras gone by. Launched in 1972, the business, per Davey, was one of the first major direct marketing propositions to come from an agency – “It was all about direct, one-to-one relationships between brands and their customers,” he tells Mi3.

The direct mail, customer comms, and later email and digital specialist became so big that it at one point almost completely independent from Ogilvy’s advertising business.

But that changed under the leadership of John Seifert, who during his stint as global Ogilvy CEO in the late 2010s saw to the complete restructure of the business – what he described as a “refounding”. Creative, social and content teams were brought together, and Ogilvy One was ditched, along with the Ogilvy & Mather and Ogilvy PR monikers.

For the next few years, the agency took its CX offering to marketing under Ogilvy Experience, until new global chief Devika Bulchandani made the case to pull in all of the agency's digital and CX adjacent services under one banner - including Bower House Digital, the Australian martech business it acquired two years ago, and Verticurl, a marketing automation firm that was acquired by the original Ogilvy One set-up in 2013. Other acquisitions have served to build out a full spectrum of experience and commerce capabilities globally. 

After all the chopping and changing, Ogilvy One was returned this year as one of five core business units, alongside Ogilvy advertising, Ogilvy PR, Ogilvy Health, and Ogilvy Consulting. It’s not the single offering that Seifert envisioned, but Davey says that providing an integrated offering is the ultimate end goal – it’s “commercially good” for Ogilvy, but also tends to reap the best results for clients, he says. 80 per cent of the agency’s top 20 clients tap into more than two of those verticals.

But while Ogilvy One’s services tend to sit horizontally across the agency’s broader offering, i.e. work in conjunction with PR and advertising functions to deliver end-to-end for clients, the CX unit is also quite happy to go out on its own.

That’s what its done with the Mecca, a client that was brought in through the Bower House Digital acquisition. Ogilvy One recently worked on a product replenishment program for beauty powerhouse, using data analysis to develop predictive models for skincare replenishment to members of the Beauty Loop loyalty program. The project achieved a 273% increase in effectiveness for the replenishment program and was recognised by Salesforce in its recent world tour event.

"We've been able to demonstrate that genuine customer data analysis and insights, combined with the technology smarts of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, can deliver significant commercial impact for brands who invest in their CX," Davey tells Mi3.

Relationship design

Davey says that the entire Ogilvy One offering is underpinned by a proposition of “creating impactful relationships by design”.

It addresses what the firm sees as the core threat to modern customer experience – that relationships have become too “technology driven”.

Trillions of dollars of investment in tech and innovation by marketers and agencies, Davey says, has made relationships between brands and their customers too clinical – and it’s made for a lack of differentiation.

The culprit, he says, is the mass rollout of best-practice solutions – relationships managed through email or SMS that focus on transaction, not engagement.

“Brands need to design the relationship they shouldn’t be managing it,” says Davey, noting that the opportunity for Ogilvy One is in picking up the gaps that are being missed by brands in their “customer circuits”.  

Part of that, he explains, is taking a more “fluid” view of loyalty.  Rather than ask how to make customers more loyal to their brand, Davey says clients should look at how they can be more loyal to their customers.

Transactional loyalty not enough

“You can't just buy loyalty in progressive markets. It's not effective enough, you need to have a really meaningful relationship,” he says. And meaningful relationships, he suggests, are more than financial or points-based incentives (though there’s still a time and place for those). Customers want brand community and values alignment – “it's about being far more responsive…really understanding your audience through better quality insights”.

At the same time, clients need to derive the maximum amount of value from their data to fuel those “insights”, as well as “media efficiencies”, especially if they are to “start to wane off of the dependence of third-party cookies”. They’re also looking to drive greater connection between their online and offline experiences and stimulate sales. “Everyone's under sales pressure,” says Davey. “[Clients need] to push through more through on a quarterly basis.”

The new Ogilvy One offering attempts to address all of that under four key service areas: Customer Acquisition, Service Design, Continuous Commerce and CRM & Loyalty – each designated to their own section of the customer relationship spectrum. Respectively, they cover first-party data services, innovation at the points of service and transaction (designing subscription pricing model, for example), stimulating sales and building commerce infrastructure, and a “modern take” on the traditional loyalty model. Davey says the approach takes cue from the Ogilvy One brand's origins in direct marketing - it's all about one-to-one connection points with the customer.

Those connections are carefully planned via relationship design, which per Davey is not just an “ethos” but also the standardised delivery methodology that Ogilvy One is set to deliver via a platform that’s currently in development.

“Our staff will be working on a standardised platform where data can be ingested, but also shared,” explains Davey. “So when we do global brand management, when you set up a workflow for a specific use case for global brands, then the whole planning community can basically tap into that.”

In effect, he says, the platform is “leveraging the power of the global brains trust of Ogilvy”.

It’s not a dissimilar concept to the concept of WPP Open - the centralised marketing operating system of Ogilvy’s parent network. But Davey says the two will work in parallel – the relationship design platform will “tap into the WPP Open AI offering”.

"We've got this platform that's learning from the Ogilvy community, and then it's also ingesting information from WPP Open to speed up the whole process and make sure that we're using data to validate every aspect of the relationship design." 

But as Davey points out, it's not all about the tech. With all of the big hold cos, and the likes of Accenture Song, all investing big to get in on the end-to-end digital opportunity, Ogilvy One will continue to hold on tightly to it's creative origins as a key point of difference.

"Our understanding of brand, I think is superior - it's our heartland and heritage," he say. For that reason, the agency isn't afraid to challenge best practice if it's what's "actually best for the brand and for the customer".

"I think we're a more creative organization at our heart, and that comes through in the work. We strive for differentiation for the brands we look after."