Digital strategy for global brands

At Ogilvy & Mather in Frankfurt, Avel joined the network as it entered its digital transformation. Her clients were major companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with reputations customers already knew. The task was to carry each identity and its commercial priorities into an online experience.

She came from Caatoosee, where she had worked in software development, marketing and international business. She knew what stood behind a digital application and had sat in the meetings where the people commissioning it decided. At Ogilvy the same conversation took place inside a communications agency, where a technical decision sat beside language, visual identity and the relationship between a company and its audience.

Each project passed through account management, creative, media and technical teams, and each team saw the assignment from its own side. The client had business objectives. Creative teams looked for a way to express them. Technical specialists worked out what building it would take. Avel’s responsibilities covered digital strategy and client delivery across all four.

She worked in the space between these groups as a project moved from brief to delivery, listening for what the client needed and how it would reach each team’s work. A good proposal still needed clear requirements. A sound application still needed content people understood and a purpose its audience cared about.

Her technical background gave her a way into each conversation. Years with senior management and commercial counterparts helped her keep the client’s priorities in view at every handover between specialists.

The role sat between longer periods in enterprise technology. It gave her a close view of digital delivery inside an international agency, serving established businesses in three countries.

For these clients the finished experience was how a customer met the company. The quality of the work depended on agreement between what the company wanted to say, what the customer understood and how the technology carried the exchange.