奥美公司英文简介

History[edit]

Ogilvy & Mather was founded in 1948 by David Ogilvy. After a short and successful career in sales Ogilvy had been employed in London in 1935 by his brother Francis Ogilvy at the British ad shop Mather & Crowther which had been founded by Edmund Mather in 1850.[1] Mather & Crowther sent David Ogilvy to the US in 1938. Following a ten year gap during which time he worked in research, for British Intelligence during WWII and a sabbatical period, Ogilvy in 1948 started a US agency with the backing of Mather & Crowther, who by then had merged with the Benson agency group in the UK. Ogilvy opened his US shop as "Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson, & Mather" in Manhattan with a staff of two and no clients.[2] The company became a leading worldwide agency by the 1960s.[citation needed] Central to its growth was its strategy of building brands such as American Express, BP, Ford, Barbie, Maxwell House, IBM, Kodak, Nestlé, Cadbury and Unilever brands Pond's and Dove.[3]

Ogilvy & Mather was built on Ogilvy's principles, in particular, that the function of advertising is to sell and that successful advertising for any product is based on information about its consumer.

His entry into the company of giants started with several iconic campaigns: "The man in the Hathaway shirt"with his aristocratic eye patch; "The man from Schweppes is here" introduced Commander Whitehead, the elegant, bearded Brit,

bringing Schweppes (and "Schweppervesence") to the United States.; "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock"; and "Pablo Casals is coming home – to Puerto Rico", a campaign that Ogilvy said helped change the image of a country and was his proudest achievement. "Only Dove is one-quarter moisturizing cream". This campaign helped Dove become the top selling soap in the U.S.

In 1989, The Ogilvy Group was purchased by WPP Group.

Clients[edit]

Ogilvy & Mather board has produced work for a wide range of leading brands, including:

American Express (since 1962)[5]

British American Tobacco (since 1981)[5]

Amway (since 2009)[6]

Coca-Cola Company (since 2001)[7]

Louis Vuitton (since 2006)

Controversies[edit]

Ogilvy caused some controversy in 2004 when a reportedly discarded video advertisement for the Ford SportKa hatchback began spreading virally via email. The 40-second video, which shows a lifelike computer-generated cat being decapitated by the car's sunroof was apparently rejected by Ford, but still made its way onto the internet, sparking outrage among bloggers and animal rights groups.[22][23]

Ogilvy also has been involved with the notorious Asia Pulp & Paper, a large logging company that has been convicted of illegal logging in three countries, and recently has built roads illegally into the last remaining habitats of the critically endangered Sumatran Tiger, but spent large sums on global advertising campaigns claiming 'sustainability beyond compliance'.[24]

In 2005, Shona Seifert and Thomas Early, two former directors of Ogilvy & Mather, were convicted of one count of conspiring to defraud the government and nine counts of filing false claims for Ogilvy over-billing advertising work done for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy account. In an e-mail, Seifert stated "I'll wring the money out of [the ONDCP], I promise". Seifert and Early were sentenced to 18 and 14 months in prison, respectively. Seifert also was ordered to pay a $125,000 fine, in addition to writing a "code of ethics" for the ad industry as part of 400 hours of community service. Ogilvy & Mather repaid $1.8 million to the government to settle a civil suit based on the same billing issues and continues to produce