Ogilvy Australia has announced the formation of a new commercialisation arm called OgilvyVentures, which will look beyond traditional advertising products and revenue streams to build and grow technology-based ventures in Australia and abroad.
To launch the division, OgilvyVentures has unveiled a first-of-its-kind partnership with Wipro Ltd, a global information technology, consulting and business process services company, to build and launch several products, starting with the energy, insurance and banking sectors.
Ogilvy Australia CEO David Fox said the launch of OgilvyVentures and its partnership with Wipro was a clear sign of the global scale the business is seeking to achieve in its new commercial ideas division.
“The investment into commercialising ideas is a new strategy and reflects Ogilvy’s ambition to both extend the offering to clients and generate new revenue streams for the business,” he said.
“The joint Go-to-Market with Wipro means we are starting the business at a run, with a range of commercial development and joint initiatives already underway.”
Jeffery Heenan-Jalil, senior vice president, and head of Wipro Analytics, Wipro Ltd. said: “We are delighted to partner with Ogilvy in Australia towards a joint CMO-CIO initiative. This initiative will help provide our customers better value and a differential advantage leveraging Wipro’s well recognized expertise in Analytics.”
Manoj Nagpaul, chief sales and operations officer – Asia Pacific & Japan, Wipro Ltd., further added: “Our focus has always been to provide insights for our customers by leveraging analytics. This joint initiative will help to bridge the gap between marketing and IT and deliver faster and more intuitive business outcomes to our customers.”
OgilvyVentures will be headed by Anthony Johnston, who sees the potential of using Wipro’s big data focus to drive real insights into customer, markets and technology as hugely powerful. “Wipro Analytics understands big data and its power better than anyone, and can talk credibly with any business in any country,” he explained.
“It is this scale and expertise in data that we see as presenting huge opportunities locally and abroad, and where the partnership with Wipro will be focusing.”
Johnston said the aim was to grow OgilvyVentures to a level where it is contributing revenues and helping both Ogilvy and Wipro clients navigate through the constant change seen in current market conditions.
“This is the driver; to be able to open up products and markets for both Ogilvy and clients using technology as the anchor,” he said.
Fox continued: “Both our clients and our own business are facing complex, fluid markets and are seeking additional ways of generating revenues. We want to open up new opportunities for success. So we’ve set up OgilvyVentures to take an idea, and use our teams to build and mould it into a profitable, global enterprise.”
