My career in 5 executions: Tham Khai Meng

campaignlive.com/article/career-5-executions-tham-khai-meng/1386817

vinay raj

Name: Tham Khai Meng

Title: Worldwide Chief Creative Ocer and Co-Chairman, Ogilvy & Mather
Years in industry: "Close to 30"
First job in industry: While a student in London, worked as a writer at Integral
Advertising, a now-defunct four-person agency above a truck garage in London.
Tham Khai Meng oversees the creative work of more than 500 Ogilvy & Mather oces
around the world. Under his leadership, the company has been named Network of the
Year at Cannes each of the last four years.
"Youve got to stop someone in their tracks, otherwise its a waste of money," he says,
summing up his creative philosophy. "I call it 'the three-second test.' Youve got to prevent
someone from turning the page too quickly, so you have to arrest the audiences attention.
Thats when you charm them, or make them laugh. But it has to be a very single-minded
emotion."
Here are the 5 executions that Tham says sum up his illustrious (and much awarded)
career so far.
Brand: Scrabble
Client: Mattel
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Singapore
Work: "Syphilis" and "Amnesia"
Year: 2001
These "single-minded short narratives" represent what can be done on a "tiny budget,"
says Tham. "It goes to show that all you need is an idea."
"When you are working on a really tight budget, every cent counts, every frame counts,"
he says. "The low budget forced us to take a creative leap. I always believed that you
need constraints to do great work. Given too much freedom, its dangerous its true.
More of us should do low-budget work, because it teaches us discipline. Thats the power
of the idea."
Brand: Fevicol
Client: Pidilite Industries
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Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Mumbai

Work: "Bus"
Year: 2002
Tham got used to seeing buses "lled to the brim" with passengers while hitchhiking
around India as a student. Years later, he wrote the script for this wordless, yet universally
understandable spot on the back of a napkin.
"This is a local product, and youre selling to Indians," he says. "From the deserts of
Rajasthan to urban Mumbai and Dehli, Kolkata or Cochin or Kerala everyone just
understands this ad. And the great thing is theres no narrative, no words spoken, so
everyone from a grandmother to a 7-year-old kid can understand this, not just in India, but
in New York. The idea is just timeless."
Brand: Ben and Jerrys
Client: Unilever
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Singapore
Work: "Hugs," "Purple Caterpillar," "Recipe Book," "Whale Cow"
Year: 2009

Tham was eating a pint of Cherry Garcia when the idea for this psychedelic print
campaign came to him. "Everything was so slick at the time," he recalls. "If its too slick,
its not Ben and Jerrys. And we thought, why dont we do this for real? Forget about
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illustration, thats too easy. We built it by hand."

"Each set was built in our art directors apartment," he explains. "His girlfriend was going
ballistic."
What lesson did he take from this? "To do great work, we not only have to believe in the
product, but be steeped in it," he says. "We have to interrogate it until it surrenders its
strengths. Only with this deep belief will you then have the vitality that you put into the
work."
Brand: Coca-Cola
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Sydney
Work: Share a Coke
Year: 2011
The Australian Coke promotion that became a global phenomenon worked because it
tapped into the universal desire to be famous, says Tham. "People love to hear their
name, let alone have it written. Something magical happens, because thats your brand,
and youre associating it with Coke." Now people in more than 70 countries can get their
names custom-printed on the bottle.
"We are all salesmen here," he says. "Lets not forget our role deploying art, music,
writing in the service of our brands." This promotion "put Coca-Cola sales back on track
for the rst time in over 10 years. Today, were still running this. I think its going to stick
around for a long time."
Brand: Dove
Client: Unilever
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Brazil
Work: "Real Beauty Sketches"
Year: 2013
This lm succeeded by tapping into the social media zeitgeist of the time, said Tham.
"People were so moved by this lm, that they thought, I want to share it with my loved
ones, I want to share it with my girlfriends or boyfriends, and then it went viral."
"We started the Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004," he recalls. "Unilever found the
startling truth, that only 4% of women use the word beautiful to describe themselves.
What started as an insight we called it insight then, today we call it data has given
us great leverage, and who knows where this will take us. Because this is transformative.
This brand platform is huge. Its big enough for humanity to sit on."
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