Ogilvy Becomes TM Forum Member and Joins Advisory Board

Major advertising and media group to help unblock barriers to online advertising

Morristown, NJ – May 21st, 2008 – The TM Forum announced today that one of the world’s premier advertising companies, Ogilvy has joined the TM Forum as a member. Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chair of Ogilvy Group UK will also join the Forum’s Advisory Board to advise on emerging TM Forum programs to enable online and mobile advertising.

With 3.5 billion people now owning mobile handsets, online and mobile routes to market offer a huge opportunity for both the advertising and communications industries. Yet many barriers exist that can only be removed by collaborative action between communications, cable media and advertising companies. Ogilvy will help kick-start the Forum’s role in developing collaborative programs agreeing industry-wide standards and approaches to overcome those barriers.

Rory Sunderland puts this succinctly, “This is a fabulous opportunity to shape the way the communications industry talks to the advertising industry and it would be insane not to be involved.”

Greater personalisation of adverts and content coupled with a two-way relationship with consumers is driving new possibilities for advertising. The TM Forum, with almost 700 member companies in more than 70 countries, provides an excellent arena to consolidate requirements and to shape thinking. “The communications, cable and advertising worlds’ futures are becoming intertwined” said TM Forum CEO, Keith Willetts. “Rory Sutherland and Ogilvy represent one of the world’s thought leaders in the advertising industry. I am delighted that we have this tremendous asset for helping us break down the current barriers to making real progress in online and mobile advertising” he concludes.

About Ogilvy Group UK
Ogilvy Group UK represents the aggregated capabilities of 12 operating companies across the total spectrum of brand communications. With approximately 1,300 employees, it is the largest UK employer in the sector.

Each group company maintains its own client base and strives for best-in-class excellence in its own discipline, but it is the group’s shared philosophy, tools and working practices that truly set it apart from other so-called “integrated” offerings.

Ogilvy’s 360 Degree Branding approach focuses any required combination of the group’s companies totally on the brand and its needs, avoiding any bias towards a particular channel. Bespoke brand teams can be set up depending on the individual needs and priorities of each client.

Communications disciplines housed within the Ogilvy Group UK include advertising, direct marketing/CRM, public relations, sales promotion/brand activation, design, interactive, business-to-business, internal communications, healthcare, digital media and associated state-of-the-art studio and creative services operations.

About Rory Sutherland
Rory Sutherland was born in Usk, Monmouthshire in 1965 and educated at the local Haberdashers’ school and at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

At this point, promising parallels with the life of Martin Sorrell begin to break down. Avoiding Harvard Business School, he spent a probationary year teaching at a grammar school in Aylesbury. The pupils were fine, but the contents of the staff room (and of the staff car park) proved too depressing to bear, and he duly applied to various advertising and marketing agencies in early 1988. In September, he joined what was then Ogilvy & Mather Direct.

In 1990, having been fired from the Planning Department, he joined the agency’s Creative Department as a junior copywriter, working on American Express, Royal Mail and an obscure American company called Microsoft. In early 1993 he and his art director suggested that perhaps Microsoft might extend sales of its Office suite by bundling it with “a modem thing”, hence enabling people to share their files over something called the Internet. This was eventually presented to some people in Redmond, WA, who rightly decided it was a very silly idea indeed.

Happily, that wasn’t his last foray online. He achieved a certain international notoriety in 1996 when his credit card details were stolen during an on-line purchase of chilli sauce. Perhaps surprisingly, then, he remains an enthusiastic advocate of new media and new means of advertising and customer engagement (he is a devotee of the late San Francisco copywriter Howard Luck Gossage). He is a great champion of Ogilvy’s 360 Degree Branding approach.

Rory was promoted to Head of Copy in 1996 and Creative Director in 1997, where he was closely involved in the agency’s relaunch and restructuring as OgilvyOne. He was promoted to Executive Creative Director in 2002 and, more recently, also became Vice-Chairman of the overall Ogilvy Group in the UK.

About the TM Forum
With almost 700 member companies in 72 countries, the TM Forum is the world’s leading trade consortium focused on enabling digital services. Serving the information, communications and entertainment industries, the Forum provides leadership, strategic guidance and practical solutions to improve the way that services are created, delivered and charged. Members include the majority of the world’s service providers, network operators, software suppliers, equipment suppliers and systems integrators.

The Forum currently facilitates over 80 technical projects and provides extensive training, conferencing and information services to its members. Through its initiatives to help providers move to low cost, high quality ‘lean’ processes, the Forum helps its members automate business processes and work seamlessly across various parts of the service delivery chain. The organization provides industry benchmarks, guidebooks, process and software frameworks and downloadable software standards. These give service providers the direction and specific roadmaps to achieve much greater business efficiency and operational flexibility.

For further information regarding the TM Forum, related programs such as the Prosspero initiative and its Management World conferences, please visit www.tmforum.org