Storyboard Exclusive: Meet Ogilvy's global CEO Andy Main, the 'outsider' scripting the ad agency's transformation

Andy Main, Global CEO, Ogilvy

“The one thing I did when I walked in (to make some friends in Ogilvy because I didn’t have any), was give everyone, all 15,000 employees, my WhatsApp number. And I just went on a listening tour,” says Andy Main. From his home in Colorado, US, the global chief executive officer of Ogilvy, shares his experience of stepping into traditional ad agency territory, at exactly this time last year.

In the thick of a pandemic, in 2020, the Scottish-born executive took the topmost job at WPP Group-owned Ogilvy after over two decades with management consultancy giant Deloitte. In short, Main was what advertising insiders call 'an outsider'. In his last role, he was chief executive of Deloitte Digital where, through key acquisitions, he brought in creative firepower that the firm needed to take on the big ad holding companies, namely WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Dentsu and Publicis Groupe.

Many saw Main's arrival in Ogilvy as evidence of the seriousness of WPP and its CEO Mark Read's intent to transform the legacy agency into a future-fit organisation. In an exclusive interaction with Storyboard, Main tells us why and how he's shaking things up.

Our aspiration is to be the world's leading creative partner and platform for growth and impact for our clients businesses. To do that we structured Ogilvy around five business groups - Growth & Innovation, Advertising, PR & Influence, Experience and Health. And we practice what’s called borderless creativity. It doesn't really matter where you happen to be or how you happen to think, let's make the world borderless to advance growth and impact for our clients.

A lot of people go around talking about integration. Agencies and consultancies have integration departments and disciplines. But we have a different perspective. We talk about the intersections. Integration means you're putting together something that is fixed and known. But when you think about intersections, it talks about how you bring talent and capabilities to explore and discover value at intersections of many different topics. That is allowing our minds to be free, and when you map that with creativity, you get an amazing Ogilvy in the marketplace. That's really what we brought to market very quickly. To have accomplished that feels very exciting to me, personally.

I have transformed and will continue to transform Ogilvy into a growth-oriented business with a growth mindset. This industry is making an amazing comeback and Ogilvy is very well positioned to capture more than its fair share of the market as it comes back in full force.

We have more women and people of colour at Ogilvy’s leadership than ever before. (Liz Taylor is the first woman to hold Ogilvy's top creative position.) Because we have that dynamic leadership, the thinking and the decisions we make and the mindset we have basically ripples throughout our organisation to all levels.

I've also been careful to make sure that many leaders from the last several years are also part of our global leadership team because we couldn't have had that much change in our business. That would be very risky. We've got a solid balance of new leadership and leadership that has been around for several years. This blend is helping Ogilvy be super duper competitive.

We actually operate in a unique space between consultancies and agencies. When you compare us to consultancies, we have so much more creative prowess. When you compare us to other agencies, we've got much more substance, insights and industry knowledge. It’s such a powerful combination. We've got great creativity and amazing speed to value. That's really our secret sauce.

If I had to put my point of view on it, I just don't think the consulting businesses have scaled creativity nearly fast enough to compete against the likes of Ogilvy on the creative scale. It's just a really hard thing to do to scale creativity and it's an easier thing to do to scale technology. Ogilvy is going to do both. That's what we're out to accomplish.

David Ogilvy was also born in the UK and moved to the United States. He has Scottish heritage. I was born and raised in Scotland. I think he used to sell gas stoves around the doors in Scotland, as one of his first jobs. I used to sell potatoes around the doors in Scotland, as one of my first jobs. (Laughs)

If I had a chance to have a Scotch with him—he was quite fond of Scotch, so am I—I think we'd have a bond around just being curious people, being inventive and wanting to take things to the next level and not being satisfied with what you've got.

When I was introduced to the Ogilvy team over a year ago, I promised to future-proof the business over the next few years. That was one of my commitments to the team. Ogilvy is an amazing heritage brand and a business that has not been merged with any others. So it's like a thoroughbred brand and that's just a wonderful thing to be able to represent.