Can Ogilvy CEO Devika Bulchandani Overcome Challenges Faced by Major Ad Agencies

September 12, 2022

Devika Bulchandani takes over as Global Chief executive of Ogilvy at a testing time for major advertising agencies. As CEO she is overseeing the management of Ogilvy’s advertising, public relations, consulting, and health units across 131 offices in 93 countries.  

Clients include Coca Cola, Burger King, Samsung, British Airways, Audi and in India, Cadbury -with Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan as spokesman – and Hindustan Unilever. The agency has its head office in New York and employs more than 10,000 worldwide. It is part of the WPP Group, a public company which has its head office in London.

“David Ogilvy changed the industry 74 years ago when he founded this iconic agency,” Bulchandani, 53-years-old, said in a statement announcing her appointment as CEO last week. Writing the next chapter in the history books of Ogilvy, together with our clients, we will use “creativity to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”  

From the 1950’s up until the 1990’s, major advertising agencies, especially in the U.S., Europe and Japan, saw strong growth in revenues and profits. They were a beneficiary of the post-World War ll economic boom. Companies, ranging from consumer goods to car manufacturers, paid them substantial fees to create and place ads on TV shows, magazines, and newspapers.

The agencies were agnostic about which business or specific company emerged as a winner. In fact, the more competitors selling a product the greater was their need to try to gain market share and build widely recognized and lasting brands through ads created and distributed by agencies. Not surprising that the agencies saw several decades of strong revenues and profit growth, which was reflected in the stock price of those companies that were publicly traded. For instance, one dollar invested in the stock of Inter Public, a New York based group of ad agencies, returned roughly $60 by 1999, excluding annual dividend payments. 

However, since the late 1990’s, the widening use of the internet led to several developments that hurt the revenue growth and profit margins of major advertising agencies. Using an Apple computer, small upstart agencies could create ads for digital media at a fraction of the cost charged by the big agencies. Also, the marketing departments of big budget advertisers, like Procter & Gamble and Ford Motors, began creating some of their digital ad campaigns in-house, including by sourcing film, photographs and other creative work from freelancers – again at a far lower cost than charged by major ad agencies.

Simultaneously, audiences shrank for newspapers, magazines and many TV shows, while growing rapidly on Facebook, YouTube and other digital media platforms. So major advertisers started reducing their spending on ads in the traditional media – the key business of major ad agencies. Most digital media platforms provide tools that make it easy for small as well as big advertisers to create ads in-house. Also, the platforms provide algorithm-based tools for advertisers to place digital ads as well as access and analyze data about the reach and effectiveness of their campaigns. Google, Facebook, YouTube, and other major digital platforms have engineers and other staff who produce detailed analytical reports for their major ad buyers. 

Over the past twenty years, these trends - of digital platforms taking away advertising dollars from the old media and dominating the ad business - have continued to accelerate. Today, digital platforms get roughly two-thirds of the annual global ad spending, about $600 billion.

So, Ogilvy and other major traditional ad agencies face a shrinking market and intense competition, especially from digital platforms who have far bigger financial resources. In 2019, before the pandemic, the net revenues of WPP Group, the parent of Ogilvy, was 10.9 billion British pounds. This was down from 12.4 billion GBP in 2016. Today, the stock market values WPP at around $10 billion, down from more than $25 billion in 2016.

This is the business environment in which Bulchandani, 53-years-old, will be running Ogilvy, an agency founded in 1948 by David Ogilvy. Most recently, she served as CEO of Ogilvy North America, having joined the agency in 2021. Earlier, she spent 26 years at McCann in various leadership roles, including President of McCann North America. McCann is part of the Interpublic Group, which has a market value of $11 billion.

At McCann, Bulchandani was the driving force behind Mastercard’s long-running “Priceless” campaign. In 2017, she helped launch “Fearless Girl,” an ad campaign for State Street Global Advisors, a Boston based fund management company, to honor International Women’s Day. The bronze statue of a young girl, hands on her hips, “was dropped on Wall Street in the middle of the night,” to face a statue of the charging bull in downtown New York. “Fearless Girl,” which got worldwide media attention, has become a symbol of women’s equality.

Statue of the Fearless Girl, left - an ad campaign under Devika Bulchandani while she was at McCann. Courtesy D&AD Awards.

Bulchandani earned a Masters from the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, 1992; and a BA in English and Psychology at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, one of the top private colleges in India. She returned to India after earning her Masters in the U.S.

Devika (Dev) Bulchandani was born in Amritsar, Punjab, India.  She attended the Welham Girls’ School in Dehradun, India, a residential private school where the current annual fees total more than $11,000. In 1993, she married Ashwin Bulchandani and moved to the US; they have two children, a son, Arhaan, 23, and a daughter Anya, 17, according to Forbes.

“You can’t really study advertising” in college, Bulchandani told an interviewer for the Association of National Advertisers. Instead, she hires people who may have studied architecture because they have the tools for what advertising actually does - “creativity mixed with analytical” insights - and who love to solve problems..

Several media outlets, including in India, stated that Bulchandani was “the first woman of color to lead a global ad agency.” Apparently, Mark Read, CEO of WPP, the parent company of Ogilvy, viewed her as having the skills needed for the CEO role. In a statement, he noted that Bulchandani’s “track record of delivering growth for agencies and brands, make her the perfect choice to lead Ogilvy.”

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