About Ogilvy Consulting

Each year, the Christian Aid charity hand-delivers over 7 million donation envelopes to homes all across the UK. However, donations had been steadily declining for the previous 5 years. To reverse that trend, we created 6 donation envelopes, each using a different behavioural strategy, which were distributed nationwide.

The most effective envelope was using the strategy of 'affordance cues' - simply rotating the orientation of the envelope, and counterintuitively leaving all other information exactly the same. This one small change increased total donations by 17% - which equates to £500,000 extra for the charity when scaled across all their donation envelopes.

Most campaigns target the perpetrators of misogyny. But those perpetrators typically don’t listen. By analysing the social context, we discovered that it’s the bystanders - the friends - who really hold the influence.

Friends and peers are often motivated to call out misogyny, but they don’t want to appear ‘woke’ or ruin the vibe. So, we created and seeded a piece of language into culture to make it easier. Arming men with one word they could use as a powerful tool to help tackle misogyny: MAAATE.

Odeon (AMC) are one of the biggest cinema chains in the world. Their loyalty programme is free to sign up, yet customers were still checking out as a guest each time they bought cinema tickets.

Rationally, customers would tell us that they need more discounts, points, and rewards to get them to sign up as a member. But, thinking instead like a behavioural scientist, we simply changed when we asked people to sign up: not at the point of purchase, but after they've just been to the cinema when they're in a 'warm' or receptive mindset. By telling people that their points from their recent visit were ready and waiting for them, we generated a 2.7x increase in loyalty programme signups. 

Rather than lowering the price of their OLED TVs, Samsung challenged us to use Behavioural Science to sell more TVs without giving any price discounts or incentives. We created two CRM campaigns, each using different behavioural principles, and sent the emails to audiences of around 6 million customers.

Compared to their control emails, our Behavioural Science emails increased click-through rates by 800%, and increased OLED TV sales by 54%.

Gen Z is often described as inconsistent, confusing or impossible to predict. Ogilvy Consulting’s latest research argues that we’ve been looking at them the wrong way.

Based on research with 2,100+ Gen Z respondents across the UK, US and Australia, the report uncovers four tensions shaping how young people manage energy, autonomy, belonging and presence – and what brands can do to reduce friction rather than simply add to the noise.

Ogilvy Consulting and the World Federation of Advertisers surveyed senior marketers from some of the world’s biggest brands to understand how marketing transformation is changing.

The answer? Transformation is no longer a project with an end date. 96% of multinationals are currently transforming, and 80% believe it should be treated as a permanent state. The report explores what separates constant change from effective change, and why the best leaders know when to evolve – and when not to.