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By Kevin Whitlock

Another great British brand joined the Ogilvy family today with the announcement that OgilvyOne London had scooped the worldwide British Airways direct marketing and loyalty communications business.

The team – led by managing director Annette King and client services director Jo Coombs – won the business after a lengthy pitch, which ended in a three-way shootout with Carlson and WWAV Rapp Collins.

OgilvyOne will now be handling all loyalty and direct marketing work for the airline globally, run out of London. This is the first time BA has ever consolidated all of its DM and loyalty business into one agency.

Congratulations to everyone (including friends and colleagues from around the OgilvyOne global network) involved -  unfortunately there’s not the space to list them all here. Also thanks to all the managers, creatives, account handlers and support staff who kept our existing clients happy while this labour-intensive pitch went on.

Annette King said: “This is a dream account for us, one that we have coveted for many years. It is both a great British and a great Global brand which we are truly thrilled to have won as a result of this hard-fought, but very well-run pitch. We won based on our thinking, our creative, our analytics, our attitude, our commitment, our focus and our all out desire and passion to win. We can’t wait to get started -  after we’ve finished celebrating!”

We can tell this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship – the client even very kindly sent us a congratulatory cake, which Annette is watching over like a hawk (wise, as this place is full of gannets and vultures).

By Kevin Whitlock

“Get into the outdoors” is BBC2′s new series of programming for outdoor enthusiasts. To generate interest in the series, Auntie has compiled a set of trailers that see five BBC2 viewers wrenched from their day jobs to embark on an adventure in Wales.

One of the five is Tess Thomson, PA to OgilvyOne’s Jane Hodson and Mick Byrne.  Tess is a typical city girl with a dislike of mud and creepy-crawlies but gamely went for an audition and won one of the five places.

To create footage for the campaign, Tess and her four co-stars embarked on a three-day “survive and connect” course, which took place in the Brecon Beacons mountain range in South-East Wales.

The team had Ray Mears teaching them how to build a campfire and Bill Oddie organising a birdwatching trip. Participants were also given their own cameras to record video diaries, which have been spliced together to form the films.

Their footage, which appears online as well as across BBC2, is being used to promote a series of programmes including Ray Mears Goes Walkabout, Across the Andes, Springwatch, Wild China and Tribal Wives.

Watch the trails here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/noise/?programme=outdoors 

 By Jane Hodson

Welcome the latest addition to the OgilvyOne London clan - Rhian Woods, our new head of marketing analytics in the Consulting Practice.

Marketing analytics is a big growth area for Consulting at OgilvyOne – as our clients increasingly ask for ever greater accountability for their marketing spend, we need to make sure we are ready and prepared to take on that challenge.

Rhian joins with experience across an array of industry sectors, where she has helped scores of clients gain the optimum value from their data through improved insights into their customers. Her approach to developing client relationships is very much ground-up, concentrating on identifying practical quick wins, solving specific business challenges and gaining positive results for the client.

She’s a real asset for both OgilvyOne and our clients. 

By Kevin Whitlock

Here’s a nifty new campaign for British Gas. It’s become fashionable over the past couple of years to trade in your gas-guzzling motor for a more “environmentally friendly” car – a hybrid like the Toyota Prius, for example.

But figures from the Energy Saving Trust and the Vehicle Certification Agency show that an old, inefficient domestic boiler can increase one’s carbon footprint by far more than a 4×4 (27% of the nation’s carbon emissions come from heating and lighting our homes, half of which is accounted for by domestic boilers; transport, by contrast, accounts for just 15%).

So, trading in that inefficient old boiler for a new condensing one can not only save you lots of money, it can also reduce your carbon footprint. Which is the bigger environmental villain: a boiler or car?  

Using this insight, creative partners Charlie Wilson and Emma DeLa Fosse and planner Brian Sassoon came up with a neat piece of DM in the shape of a rubber door wedge bearing the message “Wedge your front door open. It’ll give you a sense of how much energy your old boiler is wasting”. Press ads (see above) created by the same team also appeared in newspapers such as London Lite, The Evening Standard and thelondonpaper.

There’s also an interactive website, www.britishgas-gasguzzler.co.uk