ANA Confab Seeks To Define, Illuminate Integration

Breaking down silos within an agency's communications disciplines means nothing if marketers don't understand that "consumers are driving the bus, and none of us anticipated how fast it has changed," Bill Gray, co-CEO of Ogilvy, told a roomful of them Thursday.

"You have to think like friend and foe," Gray said at the ANA's Masters of Integrated Marketing event in New York. "It's 5D tic tac toe with the lights out."

Consumers "set the price, demand performance, and now want to everything--from corporate practice, ethics, where you source labor, environment--and if you can't tell them, the blogs will," he warned.

Later in the day, Jeff Davidoff, vice president of Whirlpool, put it this way: "The monkeys are running the zoo"--a reference to the explosion in peer-to-peer media, social networking and consumer-generated content.

Gray has created one P&L for various Ogilvy communications disciplines. But it's the seismic shift in media that's driving the need as "the old intrusion model is gasping (and) confines of old media are disintegrating."

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Gray pointed to the Heinz campaign featuring a full-page ad asking people to submit their commercial ideas. "Brands are becoming media properties," he said, and stories are popping up on Facebook and YouTube from citizen authors.

The American Express campaign "My Life. My Card" was inspired by MySpace, he said.

"Here's what integration is not," Gray went on. "It's not an org chart from a holding company, or from a creative agency or media company in a holding company; it's not a go-to-market team; not a distribution or implementation plan. It's more about an ambition ... We think the biggest ideas are big ideals ... rooted in a bigger conversation going on in the world, a cultural truth or trend--share of culture, not just share of mind."

Gray also focused the spotlight on the Dove campaign, along with a just-launched global campaign for Fanta to show how an "integrated" effort leverages "the power of broadly existing but untapped sentiment."

He said for Dove, it was around widening the definition of beauty, for IBM, it was a perspective of the world as network-centric in which each individual is a de facto network.

For Fanta, the agency surveyed teens around the world about their lives and outlook, found a common theme around being forced to grow up too fast, and came up with a "Say no to grownup-ness."

Both Gray and Carole Irgang, senior vice president, integrated marketing communications at Kraft, said the success of what Gray calls "larger than life experiences," such as pop-up stores and branded boutiques, prove that integration doesn't imply merely a migration from TV to the Internet. Kraft launched a program in Chicago with a pop-up store on Michigan Avenue to promote a new pizza product.

"It worked," said Irgang, "because we had insight that consumers were looking for something as good as their neighborhood pizza. We had a round table--literally--and everyone brainstormed: how do you create the 'corner pizzeria' experience." The store was up for less than a week, she says, and the company gave away 25,000 samples. "It creates a brand experience resonating with consumers."

Ogilvy launched a Hershey store in New York's Times Square, the Helios House in LA, a 'green' service station for BP supporting its "Beyond Petroleum" identity; and a Barbie Experience in Shanghai. "Your brand is the highest form of data compression there is," Gray said.

Ogilvy has restructured, said Gray, and totally united integrated leadership across disciplines. "Yes, there is one P&L, and everyone is co-mingled. We believe in a round-table theory where there is no pecking order and ideas can come from anywhere," he said.

For agencies, it means looking at partnership relationships with clients, versus one-off tasks. Ogilvy was approached by Six Flags with $10 million for a frequent-pass promo.

"We could have taken the money but we said put it on Craigslist. They did and it sold out in one afternoon."

Each discipline has a brand name for itself, giving the agency disciplines a sense of identity, he said. Combustion is Ogilvy's channel-marketing strategy team; the design group is BIG; Neo is Ogilvy's digital production team.

"They make people feel like they are catalysts; we don't think of things as functions or departments, because it's not inspiring."

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