What 360 Degree Branding is...and is Not

All this Article rights belongs to Ogilvy

This piece was taken from Shelly Lazarus's (Ogilvy,s CEO) presentation to the Latin American Heads of Office, May 24, 2000.

· 360 Degree Branding is not just a trendy, new business promise. It's not a Soup de Jour offer that we’ve conjured up to match today’s marketing environment; it’s not just a new “term” we’ve coined; it’s a process we have been developing for years, decades even. The seeds of 360 go all the way back to David Ogilvy’s core philosophies, “Every advertisement must contribute to the long-term image of the brand.” He said that in 1955. Brand Building has always been at the heart of what we do.

· 360 Degree Branding is the logical next step of Brand Stewardship: Brand Stewardship began the earnest process to articulate this core philosophy, and finding better tools to help us fulfill that promise…But once started down the Brand Stewardship path, the logical outcome is 360 Degree Branding. Once you define a brand as the relationship with the consumer, then everything that touches the consumer, everything that affects that relationship or that communicates the brand, becomes part of the brand building agenda. It has to. 360 Degree Branding is the only way to be a Brand Steward today.

· 360 Degree Branding is not just an opportunity to cross-sell. We tried that once. Most of you probably don’t remember Ogilvy Orchestration, but I do. I can tell you it failed because it offered no inherent added value for the client. This is not about tacking on more things to sell to the client. 360 Degree Branding recognizes that there is a myriad of ways a consumer must be communicated with, and that these communication points need a unifying strategy or there will be chaos and confusion – 360 promises that multiple disciplines will work as a team for the brand.

· 360 Degree is not a code word for integration, though that must be one of the results! Integration is a wonderful by-product, but it's not the heart of 360. The heart of 360 is the fullest possible understanding of how consumers perceive the brand – and it takes all the factors into consideration. That’s why I spend a lot of my time with clients not talking about ads, but rather ideas -- about what their brand is, what it stands for, who are the consumers, what do they want and need, how do they live? How does this brand affect them, what is their experience? What should it be? That is a long way from just putting the tag-line on everything.


· 360 Degree is not a substitute for Creativity. While our ability to deliver 360 solutions is an important attribute, we must not let that obscure the central role that creativity continues to play for all our brands, online and offline. Creativity comes first. If the work isn’t good, then we have failed; creativity is still our core attribute and value. Ideas will still fuel the executions in every discipline and every media. Great ideas – delivered 360 – will create the strongest brands.

Having said what 360 is not…let me tell you what it is:

· 360 Degree Branding is critical in today’s marketplace. More channels today, more noise, more competition between products, more products crossing borders, more competitors coming out of more places. Add to that, there is less sustainable differentiation between products. Brands are the only sustainable difference – that is why they are so invaluable, and every client is riveted.

· 360 Degree Branding is giving us newfound value and importance as strategic partners to all our clients. When building brands was incorrectly defined (or rather confined) to being about creating advertising, it tended to mask our greater value. Ads by themselves are just output. At the end of the day, what we’ve really always been rewarded for, our reason for being, is that we build brands. The ordinariness of the traditional branded products has tended to mask this extraordinary value and ability. This is changing. The 360 dialogue can and does go all the way up to the CEO…where we are being welcomed in as strategic partners, not just ad vendors.

· 360 Degree Branding is essential to the Internet Age …essential to making the Internet a true marketplace. Brands, concepts facilitate. They drive a world where consumers no longer feel, touch, experience the offering save on a screen. How can you differentiate one offering from another except by the idea?

· 360 Degree Branding positions us as Facilitators of the Internet Age. Just as Lucent provides the equipment, and IBM the systems, and AOL and Terra the way in, then Visa, American Express, and MasterCard the transaction capability, and UPS and Federal Express the delivery mechanism, we provide the ideas that differentiate one offering from another in the cyber world…just as we have always done in the real world. As the Internet grows…as e-commerce grows, this represents tremendous opportunity. I just read report that in the next three years consumer spending on the web will reach $328 Billion dollars…Two thirds of that will come from outside of the United States – a lot of it will happen in Latin America.

· 360 Degree Branding is a terrific recruitment tool. This redefines what we do and how we do it…making our jobs all the more interesting, more challenging, and more dynamic. Suddenly, we find we are in a place from which people, young people, can participate profoundly in the enterprises of the 21st Century. Timing is everything. Just six months ago we would have been wringing our hands over dot.com recruiting. (28-year old multi-millionaires overnight!) The massive market corrections have proved the dot.comers as mortal as the rest of us. But their chief allure still exists. The real attractions of the digital economy are still very compelling. To be entrepreneurial; to be creative; to make a difference in your job; to be part of a team and see your results first-hand. But wait, isn’t that what our business has always offered? The truth is, we have the opportunity that young people want…we have more opportunity than we have the people to do it. That is an unbeatable recruitment proposition. We just need to tell people.

Most Importantly:

· 360 Degree Branding is Ours to Own. As branding becomes ever more central to our clients agenda, those of us who can do it, will succeed disproportionately. We not only understand and embrace the philosophy of 360 – but lots of people can “talk” that game – we that have the capabilities to deliver. We have delivered. On IBM, on American Express, on Telefonica, on Jaguar, on dozens of regional and local brands. We have the knowledge and the disciplines and the people to make it happen. We have a terrific core agency that is doing some of its best work ever done. We have one of the strongest and best direct marketing companies in the world – no wonder OgilvyOne is our fastest growing division. We have the largest and possibly the only real interactive network in the world – and unlike the competition, it is integrated into our company from both an operational and philosophical point-of-view. We are steadily bringing more public relations capabilities to the equation – and have innovative partnerships underway that will allow even greater cooperation. We have terrific design capabilities in every region, and innovative, highly strategic off-shoots such as Brand Integration Group in New York. We have access to the WPP family of companies that encompass virtually every communication discipline and specialty.