Running with Shelly Lazarus

Running with Shelly Lazarus

What would you ask one of the most interviewed persons in the world today if given the chance? Debbie Cai polls her team, then sets out to quiz chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Shelly Lazarus.

Making a conference call when it's 9.30pm for me and 8.30am for her was akin to taking a jog in a new neighbourhood with a new friend - you end up talking about a whole bunch of different things to find out as much as possible about her in 45 minutes.

And Lazarus is a "runner", she says, which isn't surprising considering the energy and drive it takes to be the chief of one of the largest advertising agency networks around.

She is hardly home and when she is, she enjoys watching movies, skiing, cooking sometimes, and running.

"I joined at the end of 1971 and it's almost preposterous. One thing has been unimaginable to me, to stay in the same place in the same industry for this many years," she says. "But I step back and think what is it about it and it's the constant change, the intellectual challenge of it and the fact what you're doing on any given day is different from what you did six months ago."

The main difference which sets Ogilvy apart, says its boss, is the culture which encompasses the ideas about how it should run, how the staff should treat each other and what it does for clients. In Lazarus' opinion, the Ogilvy culture has become stronger even after founder David Ogilvy passed in 1999.

Another difference is the specific point of view about what the agency does for clients which is the mission of building brands. She feels to do this well in 2008, the agency finds itself having to be an expert in all of the different kinds of communications but none of it is of any value unless there are great ideas.

"We were founded by a copywriter. We have always been focused on the work," she says.

At the upcoming World Effie Festival 2008 held in Singapore from 28 to 29 February, Lazarus will be the first speaker in the Thought Catalyst stream and her presentation will be on how communications will be effective in the future. Marketing understands a main thrust of her presentation will be on media measurability so I took the chance to ask her about the attainability of media measurement.

"We have to be accountable to our clients for results. There are so many factors that go into it. One of the things that is so compelling about the internet is that we're now dealing with media that it can be fully accountable. And I'm not sure we've been as demanding of ourselves to really try to measure what the impact of what we're doing is on actual client revenue. It's not easy but we have to keep pressing for it," she says.

"It is really optimising the money they're spending and given how much a major client spends in all its marketing activity, why not spend an extra 1% of the budget to make the other 99% work as hard as it possibly can?" she says.

Many agency heads in Singapore bemoan the fact that clients do not see the value in spending precious budget finding out what makes a campaign work and what doesn't, but Lazarus says she does not observe that.

While the clients she deals with are willing to spend on diagnostics and measures of effectiveness, the problem is "we can't really get all of the way there", she says.

"We might be able to measure an individual programme or an individual ad, but that's not the way consumers consume information and media. What we really need to measure is the impact of the whole thing together," she says.

Social media is one of the areas where the question of measurement comes to play, because it's one of the things we have the least amount of information and experience with, Lazarus says. "What is the value of the messages you put on things like YouTube or MySpace? I just don't think we know. And we have to figure it out because consumers are spending lots of time on social media."

She also has a "pessimistic view" of consumer generated content, because "most of it is not really very good" and there will eventually come a tipping point where people will get bored of watching amateur videos shot by the man in the street. The best candid videos, she feels, are made by people who are in between jobs at advertising agencies anyway.

On whether today's pitch process is outdated, she says she has a "real bias" on the subject as Ogilvy believes all its efforts should be focused on current clients, and it is unnatural for it to work with a third party consultant on a pitch and not have direct contact with the client.

"It's not the way we work. We don't do the best work this way. And so my feeling is: why even bother?" she says, preferring to grow current business and work with people who have since moved companies and still want to engage Ogilvy.

I pressed Lazarus to reveal her favourite ad and while she says they're many, the Dove Evolution campaign was one of them that "represents everything that's new in the world of advertising".

"It's kind of created a revolution in the way people think about what advertising is. It's an ad that has social meaning. Its goes beyond what the Dove products are all about - it really goes to the very important social issue of what is beauty and beyond that, how we look at women in our society," she says.