In 2012, we filmed the Unogwaja challenge, an epic journey of 5 individuals as they cycled a gruelling 1677km from Cape Town to Pietermaritzburg in just 10 days, followed by running the 98km Comrades Marathon on day 11.

This magical journey of the heart was inspired by Phil Masterton-Smith’s legendary feat in 1933, where, unable to afford the train fare from Cape Town, he cycled to Pietermaritzburg in order to run the marathon. Watch the team push themselves to the limit, both mentally and physically, as we cover the drama, the sweat, and ultimately the journey of the human spirit.

Work by Ogilvy REC

Our latest work is the above commercial for the National Sea Rescue institute (NSRI).  The NSRI is one of our pro bono clients, it’s an organization of approximately 900 unpaid volunteers – on duty 24/7, ready to save people off South African shores. Thanks to the NSRI, South Africans can enjoy the ocean more safely.

Poem: “Sea Fever” written by English Poet Laureate, John Masefield in 1901.
Song: “The First Days of Spring” written and recorded by Noah and the Whale.

Executive Creative Director: Chris Gotz
Agency Producer: Cathy Day
Agency Art Director: Justin Enderstein
Copywriter: Cuan Cronwright
Production Company: Velocity Films
Director: Tristyn von Berg

Over the weekend our work with Volkswagen for the Street Quest campaign bagged one Gold and two Silver Pencils at the One Show Interactive Awards in New York. In addition to the 3 pencils we also managed to pick up 10 merit awards at the One Show for Heinz, Kraft, and Volkswagen (across Print, Radio, and Interactive).

Recent Volkswagen work for Street Quest and BlueMotion has already received a number of local accolades, and is now also being recognised internationally, including one Gold and three Bronze awards at the recent CLIO Awards. Huge thank you and congratulations to all the teams involved at both Volkswagen, and Ogilvy.

Quote from our MD, Gavin Levinsohn – ( @Gavlevie)

“These successes are the outcome of a long game we’ve been playing for a while now, which is building digital competency in-house and integrating it with other capabilities we have. You can’t outsource a project like the VW Street Quest,”

Quote from our Executive Creative Director, Chris Gotz – ( @MrChristiffa )

“Just to be nominated at One Show is an honour. To win three Pencils is simply amazing, and testimony to our agency’s wonderful creative talent and the long-standing partnership we enjoy with a client who is open to innovation,”

Big Data is a term that has been doing the rounds for a while now in ad land. Above is a nice infographic put together by Wipro. The image looks at results from a global survey on how companies think about / have been using big data, and highlights some of the benefits it has provided. Click on the image to zoom in.

With a 40% year on year growth expected for the amount of data produced globally, this is one topic you must read up on if you haven’t already.

Today we thought we would share a brilliant talk from behavioural economist, Dan Ariely.
Learning more on this topic will help you a great deal in understanding why people think and behave in the way they do.

In this short TEDx talk he discusses how perception can alter our reality.

Having won the Ogilvy Graduate Programme last year, I was placed into Ogilvy Cape Town’s most coveted digital workshop last week – the ODMA. The challenge given to us in the workshop was to create a digital piece that teaches people something useful.

The first thing I did when trying to figure what I should teach people was to ask myself: If I was looking through my Facebook or Twitter newsfeed and a ‘How to’ guide appeared – what kind of guide would I be interested to see

For me, the answer was simple.

I’ve only been in this industry for about three months, and as a newbie I thought that it would be extremely valuable to hear perspectives on the challenges and expectations that make up this incredibly fast and demanding environment.

Furthermore, I know that the feelings and challenges that I’ve been confronted with are felt by many other people in my position and even people who are still studying and who have yet to enter the industry.

To gain insight into how to truly be successful, I interviewed some of Ogilvy’s most well-known employees including Roger Makin (founder of Ogilvy South Africa), Gavin Levinsohn (managing director of Ogilvy Cape Town), Chris Gotz and Nicholas Wittenberg (creative directors).

Some of the best pieces of advice gained from them in the video are:

“Learn, unlearn, relearn.” – Chris Rawlinson

“I had to stop being an intellectual, and be a person that wrote from the heart, from the gut.”- Roger Makin

“If you keep focusing powerfully on what’s in front of you, the job becomes manageable and you don’t get overwhelmed.” – Gavin Levinsohn

This is an honest look into what makes these successful people who they are, and I am sure that a lot of people would benefit from seeing it.

Incredible work from Ogilvy Brazil for Dove, our very own ECD Chris Gotz says it’s one of the best pieces of work he has seen for a long time.

They found that only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful, and that women are their own worst beauty critics. To help show women that they are more beautiful than they think, Dove conduct a social experiment using a FBI-trained forensics artist, that explored how women view their own beauty in contrast to what others see.
Watch more at:http://dove.com/realbeautysketches, & join the conversation at #wearebeautiful

Above is an activation we recently put together for Intel South Africa.

We were asked to come up with a activation for malls across South Africa so we created an interactive digital Easter hunt game using a custom touch screen and an invisi-screen ( un-polarised LCD screen).

People were then challenged to find 3 hidden Intel items in a futuristic animation of Cape Town in under 30 seconds. Over R 100,000 worth of cash vouchers, and hundreds of Intel prizes were given away to people playing the game, or buying Intel PC’s. Watch the above clip to see how it went.

The units were kindly constructed by our partners at KilowattAV.

Basically Home is going to be a app with a difference. The Facebook Home app will act as the main Screen on your phone, displaying newsfeed items with large images, as well as conversations / messages. The app integrates throughout the phones software, so even if you are playing a game in another app you can still easily chat to your Facebook friends without closing the app and switching to Facebook.

Below are the two ads from W+K made for the launch of Facebook Home.

The app launches on the USA’s Android’s Google Play store on the 12th April, Facebook plans to roll out the launch of Facebook Home on Windows Phones, and iPhones at a later date. To read more about Home just visit https://www.facebook.com/home