OgilvyOne's San Francisco office is housed near Union Square at 111 Sutter St., the same art deco building where Sam Spade hung his hat in “The Maltese Falcon.”
It's a fitting location since the agency's main local client is Yahoo!, which helps consumers do their own detective work online. Mark Yesayian has headed the office since it opened in November 2004.
The Michigan native has been based in the Bay area since 1999, previously running Digitas' office and working for online marketing firm Digital Impact, with clients like HP and Microsoft.
The day after he graduated from Michigan State University in 1984 with a degree in telecommunications, Yesayian hopped in his car and drove to Boston, beginning a 15-year stint split between Beantown and New York, working for Bronner Slosberg Humphrey (now Digitas) and Wunderman. As with a lot of young marketers at the time, DM was the last thing on his mind.
“I actually planned on doing alumni events, development and fundraising, and started in direct mail there, at Boston University,” says Yesayian, 44, a father of two sons, ages 5 and 9.
While Yahoo! is the office's primary client, OgilvyOne (part of WPP) also handles several other big accounts in San Francisco, such as the recently won Barclays Global Investors iShares business. And the office supports other Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide branches, doing local work for clients such as BP and Mattel.
Having worked on both coasts, Yesayian says he doesn't see a huge marketing culture rift between the two locales.
“Maybe there's a bit more of a spin here toward the online space,” he says. “But I interact a lot with the New York OgilvyOne team, and certainly they're as thoughtful and deep as we are on the world of digital.”
Naturally, Yesayian is seeing a shift of marketing dollars online. “It's just more cost effective, its instantaneous and its easier to measure in some cases, depending on the channel,” he says. “But I don't think the paper media is going to go away. There's a chance to see how the two can compliment each other and work together to get the customer to take action. Direct mail is still there but it's part of a mix.”
Like all the agency leaders we spoke with for this report, he's seen not only a convergence between brand advertising and direct marketing but an increased need for accountability.
Clients want to know, “How can I measure this?” he says. “How can I show my team and senior management what I brought in for the business, whether it's sales, or leads or assets, whatever the metrics might be? There's a greater sense of how to drive ROI. Even brand managers are looking for a way to measure the impact of what they're doing.”
Online line communities are a major way Yesayian says he's seeing clients using to make their mark.
“I think there's a big opportunity in the blogging-MySpace-YouTube world to bring people together who have like interests and provide them with your product or service,” he notes. “The consumer is going to a Web site essentially to do a task, so you have to find a way to make them interact or engage, pull them in to actually have some sort of significant impact. You'll see a lot of that in what Yahoo is doing, with Yahoo! Video and Yahoo! Answers, to make Yahoo special and interesting going forward.”
Of course, it's vital to measure the marketing impact of those communal touches. “We can all measure the clickthrough of a banner, but now we need to measure the yield of posting a question answer on Yahoo! Answers, downloading a toolbar or buying a Web hosting,” he adds. “We need to go beyond the traditional clickthrough rate to understand what you need to do to get them to come back and be a part of that community.”
Online marketing is easier to track from an acquisition perspective, Yesayian adds.
“You can look to see whether or not that customer became a lead and did they then take action, whether its opening an account or buying a product or downloading a service or whatever,” he says. “But I would say you're seeing more sophisticated marketers being able to do it from a retention part of the funnel as well, to keep their brand in front of their audience.”
Personal Best: Yahoo!
The Yahoo! “Ask the Planet” campaign really pushes the notion of what direct marketing can be.
From traditional offline to interactive video online, everything worked as a cohesive whole under Yahoo!'s leadership. This Yahoo! pillar campaign to promote the new social search product Yahoo! Answers was developed by Soho Square New York, OgilvyOne San Francisco, and Yahoo! Buzz.
The promotion kicked off with a Plexiglas brain in Times Square, filled with Yahoo! Answers' most ardent users answering questions from the site. It turned heads and provided a living example of what Answers is: real people and real questions. For a new product in a new category, this was invaluable.
Print covered general awareness, radio, Web banners, and e-mail drove quality leads and engaged users. The targeted e-mails outperformed all other components.
Viral banners with high-end, interactive video let users get friends in the answering mood by sending questions, interpreted by humorous characters. Even better than the idea was the execution. Rather than pulling users to a separate microsite to create these funny videos, we pushed the functionality out, letting them create and send right from the banner.
Altogether, “Ask the Planet” was the most successful campaign in Y! Search group's history, exceeding its 2 million new-user goal and increasing daily unique users by 30%.
— Mark L. Yesayian
