Former Naked guy Ben Richards joined Ogilvy to take on the new post of Worldwide Head of Strategy Integration, where he will focus on the agency’s multinational clients and “catalyze the growing shift in the agency’s output towards cross-discipline strategies.”
Richards’ bosses will be joint WW planning directors Colin Mitchell and John Shaw and of course, global CEO Miles Young, who kind of explains in a statement what Ben’s role means to Ogilvy. “Too often much of what is described as ‘integration’ in the communications business is a very superficial and flimsy thing. We have evolved a business model which provides ‘deep integration’ between the worlds of advertising, DM, PR and activation. Ben’s appointment will help take us to the next level of this, rooting our solutions in the business needs which sometimes get lost in traditional briefs.”
Prior to the Ogilvy move, Richards spent a half-dozen years at Naked Communications, a firm that regularly told large companies that their ad campaigns were failing miserably according to a 2008 New York Times piece. In that piece, Richards said, “We get up in front of a group of agencies and tell them, very nicely, that they have wasted tens of millions of dollars.”
Along with the task of passing judgment, Richards served as director of strategic services at Naked and led assignments in London, Tokyo and New York for clients including Kimberly-Clark, Sony, Virgin, Unilever and Coca-Cola.
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