Madhukar Sabnavis is Vice Chairman & Director – Client Relations, Ogilvy.
For an agency which produces such a great body of creative works, what does effectiveness mean?
Every time we do great work, the starting point is business. David Ogilvy said ‘we sell or else’ and that is the principle on which we live. We believe creativity means delivering results to clients. So effectiveness is the other side of creativity. They are not separate things.
But how do your creative folk at Ogilvy react to the fact that their work needs to be effective as well?
Actually creative people have, deep down, also imbibed the principle of saying that ‘we are in the commercial business and not in pure art to begin with’.
Ogilvy has been doing very well at the Effies over the years. Last year it won and there were many consecutive wins in the past. How do you react to this year’s showing?
It is about winning and losing, it is about a particular year and the way the cases actually pan out. This year, we lost by 14 points which is two metals. So if you look at the total number we got out of 100 entries, we had 51 shortlisted entries (which if I now make an estimate, is about 30 metals between Gold, Silver and Bronze) and sometimes a Silver here or a Gold there can make the difference. It’s a nice game to be No 1 or 2. But at the end of the day, the question is about the body of work that we put out there that’s making a difference, and it is pretty good that there are more than a dozen clients for whom we have actually won metals.
Any observations on the winners and the judging process this year?
I think the Ad Club does its best, given the scale it has to manage. I wouldn’t say anything major or dramatically new has happened this year. You know the bit of client and agency composition that the Ad Club has actually championed – it is good for the judging process to bring a lot more clients to look at it. Going across cities has also been a good thing. So, yes, the big difference is of course that the scale is building up right now and becoming larger and larger
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