The Powerful Advertising Agency Building Personal Brand c/o Gary Vaynerchuk, David Droga, and David Ogilvy
I’ve been thinking about the power of the personal brand of Gary Vaynerchuk, David Droga, and David Ogilvy. The power of their brands to drive advertising agency awareness, expertise, and new business.
What is a personal brand? There are many definitions. I went to the website PersonalBrand.com for this definition (why not go to a company smart enough to have bought the URL PersonalBrand?)
“A personal brand is a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.”
Kinda wordy but you get the idea. My definition: “How people perceive you.”
I am keen on the idea of building and managing a personal brand for agency leaders and senior managers.
One’s personal brand is how you present and control your image to your market – your current and potential clients, your competition, and your staff (and, I can’t stress this enough, your future staff.) Your personal brand puts you in charge of your professional perception and lets you highlight your skills, thought leadership, strengths, and history.
The Advertising Agency and the Power of the Personal Brand
A master… David Ogilvy.
As I’ve discussed in my agency naming chapter, many agencies are named after their founder. In most of these cases, the founder is the face of the agency. The founder embodies the agency mission and soul of the agency.
Ogilvy the global agency continues to use the brand essence of its founder David Ogilvy who passed away in 1999. The agency’s Careers page quotes David and leverages his personal brand to help sell the agency’s creative street cred and soul to future employees:
“As out founder David Ogilvy put it, we seek people who are bigger and smarter than ourselves. That’s how we create a company of giants. We’re always looking for modern marketing and brand experts with big hearts and enormous talent.”
How is this for branding? In 1962, Time Magazine called him “the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry“. Believe me, this recognition did not happen by accident. Ogilvy was a PR brand master. [Read more…] about How Does A Personal Brand Work? Ask Gary Vaynerchuk & David Droga