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One of the most recognized names in advertising, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide (www.ogilvy.com) is a subsidiary of WPP Group plc. and the world's eighth largest agency network. With over 400 offices in 120 countries, Ogilvy provides marketing services for many top global brands, including American Express, BP, Coca-Cola, GSK, Gillette, IBM, Kimberly-Clark, Kodak, Kraft, Mattel, Motorola, Nestle, SAP, Unilever, and YUM.
THE CHALLENGE
The unique competitive advantage that Ogilvy offers to clients is 360 Degree Brand Stewardship, a philosophy and practice based on the belief that every point of contact with the consumer builds the brand. Building on this holistic vision for each client, each campaign, and every brand requires a collaborative team of creative professionals working closely with their global partners and clients. Of course, this requires efficient, seamless communication and collaboration between all team members.
For Ogilvy, as well as millions of other companies today across all industries, e-mail is the de facto collaboration standard?and the only application used by all employees. So, improvements in e-mail technology have a huge impact on productivity around the company. The agency's account executives, creative staff, planners and support personnel all rely on e-mail to share work, solicit comments and edits, and in many cases, even secure client approvals on materials ranging from print ads and web content to TV commercials. In the advertising industry, the ability to work quickly is a competitive advantage since production deadlines often come down to the last minute. For this reason, the ideal means of collaboration and file sharing for an agency is one that functions transparently and flawlessly. Because advertising requires sophisticated graphic and broadcast applications, teams often must share files that range anywhere from several megabytes to several gigabytes. With Ogilvy staff regularly sending out such large files as e-mail attachments, the agency was often pushing?and exceeding?the limits of its Lotus Notes Domino Servers, which lead to huge burdens on the e-mail infrastructure.
As Yuri Aguiar, Senior Partner, CTO Worldwide IT of Ogilvy Worldwide explained, delays were becoming a serious problem: "An art director would hit send on an e-mail with a typical Photoshop file attached and immediately the mail client would get hung up and the mail server would clog up. The resulting delays could be as long as 12 hours and other e-mail users were impacted because of the network traffic that the large files would create." Many who were sending large files began resorting to costly, time-consuming workarounds such as burning CDs and sending them via overnight mail or hiring expensive point-topoint couriers. These workarounds not only cost real dollars in high shipping bills but also resulted in time delays of up to two days while the materials went out to offices around the globe. In short, the agency's ability to take advantage of the benefits of email was becoming seriously compromised.
OGILVY REQUIREMENTS
The agency began exploring alternatives to e-mail such as FTP, and even tried out a webbased solution?for a service fee of thousands of dollars each month. Still, these alternatives were not used widely because they could not provide the same ease and convenience of traditional e-mail, had poor performance due to non-distribution, and lacked seamless integration with Ogilvy security systems. As Aguiar put it, "we needed the ability to send large files to any recipient electronically across the Internet that was integrated with how we work now ? Lotus Notes e-mail." The agency began looking for a solution that would augment its e-mail capability rather than replace it, and that would not impact the performance of the e-mail network, nor require additional investments in storage or network bandwidth. Also, since one of the principal concerns of an advertising agency is digital asset management, the solution had to be secure?not only internally , but also externally with clients. Lastly, the Ogilvy e-mail network is global, so the solution could not be New York centric (the location of Ogilvy headquarters) but rather had to address the international nature of their business.
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