Primary: Create an agency manifesto for employees to coincide with the announcement of the agency’s restructuring and reorganization.

Secondary: create a self-promotion piece for potential clients and a recruiting tool for new talent. Agencies have a lot of success using their expertise and creativity to market their clients, but they rarely successfully harness these things to market themselves. The real brief was to not only explain the Ogilvy brand and the differences between it and other agency brands, but to create a concept that in itself would be a proof point of our thinking, creativity and problem-solving abilities.

Oversized to make it obtrusive and inescapable. A poster-like quality to each spread/ single page. A diverse group of designers worked on the project and purposely gave the piece a range of looks so the final piece felt as diverse and “paradoxical” as possible. As a final touch, each cover of the magazine was stamped with a raised seal of the “Ogilvy Paradox” logo. In short, everything possible to make sure it would never be spotted in a trash bin, where most of this sort of thing goes.

The “Ogilvy Paradox” acknowledged and confronted a lot of questions people had about the agency. How nimble can a big global agency really be? Can an agency of Ogilvy’s size actually have a unified point of view on anything, and more importantly, really care about the work? The piece in itself was a stake in the ground regarding all of these things.The piece was a huge hit. It was cut apart into posters and pinned and plastered onto office walls, exactly as intended. People were inspired and proud. The mood in the air was that something was afoot.