Small dilemma: Recession arrived – and we wanted to impress prospective partners. We just needed a self-promotional tool to show them we can provide creative solutions for smaller budgets.

Big Idea: We created undersised business cards that broke the ice with clients and directed them to ogilvyonrecession.com; a website offering smart strategies to deal with the economic downturn. With a number of different designs on the back, each card highlighted our ability to deal with the recession creatively and effectively.

The cards - constantly pried from our hands - had to be reprinted again and again, proving that a big creative idea doesn’t need to break the bank to be effective. By year-end many thousands of undersised business cards had been handed out directly to their precise target audience all over the Middle East.

This was the first recession-themed idea covered by both Campaign and Media Week magazines, where the desired audience celebrated it as relevant, smart, insightful and engaging. In 2009, Memac Ogilvy participated in more pitches than ever before.