Ogilvy rebrands (and drops the 'Mather')

Renowned advertising agency Ogilvy, the company behind huge campaigns for Dove and American Express, has launched a rebrand that ties into its significant internal restructuring. Created in partnership with Collins, the rebrand includes a new visual system covering Ogilvy's website, font, and logo design.

From a branding point of view, the biggest change sees the advertising agency change from Ogilvy & Mather to the more straightforward (though no easier to spell) Ogilvy. "We needed to greatly simplify the organisation around what I call an integrated enterprise agenda, not a holding company of all these different piece-parts," the company's chief executive John Siefert told the Wall Street Journal.

The rebrand, which took two years to complete, sees Ogilvy tweak its wordmark's typeface to make it weightier and more in line with a previous handwritten logo based on founder David Ogilvy's signature. "Like our strategic work, the visual identity system has its roots in Ogilvy history," the Collins team explain.

Gaps between the letters have also been reduced, with most running into one another - most noticeably the ear of the letter 'g' looping into the tittle on the 'i'. Ogilvy Red remains the core colour behind the brand, although this has been bumped up to a brighter hue to better fit in with a secondary colour palette of grey, blue, pink, and yellow.

Accompanying the logo are a pair of re-cut and customised fonts – Ogilvy Serif and Ogilvy Sans – that are both a redrawn version of the existing corporate typeface, Baskerville.

With the internal restructuring waving goodbye to global sub-brands, and a new identity that sees some of the biggest updates in the agency's 70 year history, it seems that Ogilvy is staying true to its founders' mantra: Change is our lifeblood.

Related articles:

• 5 small-client rebrands that attracted big attention
• What's your brand archetype?
• How to create brand purpose