How Ogilvy Uses the Meeting Owl for Better Brainstorms and Equalized Meetings

Written by Sophia Barron | Feb 8, 2021 7:16:57 PM

One of the things the Ogilvy team had noticed was the fact that working remotely (not necessarily from home, but simply working from another place other than the office) was automatically perceived by people as a concession. Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, noticed with his own staff that, even if he said they were completely free to work flexibly from home, nobody took him up on it.

It was then that he realized it was because they had framed it as a concession, so they felt they were burning brownie points every time they took advantage of it. 

 

Long before COVID-19, Rory discovered that it wasn’t enough to say, “You're free to work from home and that I don't mind if you do.” He had to say that I actively wanted them to work remotely for one or two days of the week. It was only when he framed remote work almost as a requirement that people took him up on the option. Little differences in phrasing can have a huge effect on how people behave, and that's one of the areas which Ogilvy would extensively study as a behavioural science practice, both for our clients and ourselves.

 

Asking for a video conference instead of an in-person meeting before COVID-19 wasn't seen as a normal thing to do. It's something you can now reasonably request with an expectation of a yes, without feeling weird about it, but a year ago, it simply wasn't like that. You felt that you were part of the awkward squad by saying, "I can't attend the meeting in person, but I'd like to attend remotely."

 

There was a degree to which being the lone remote attendee made the Ogilvy team feel a little bit awkward, and that was what brought them to the Meeting Owl.

 

As Rory explains: “When I discovered the Meeting Owl, it overjoyed me. Here was something that left the physical meeting untouched, but allowed the remote participant an extraordinary level of engagement and participation, because they were virtually sitting in the middle of the table, making eye contact with whoever happened to be talking in the room at the time. When I saw the 360° camera, the array of omni-directional microphones, and the big, loud speaker, I knew immediately it was a complete game-changer for meetings.”

The Meeting Owl is a complete upgrade to the telephone conference call. Not only is it a cheaper alternative to meeting people in person, but it’s also a great alternative to too much email.

 

Ogilvy is a massive international agency, and the need to travel placed an enormous tax on the value they could derive from their unified company culture. The tax of transportation, particularly if they wanted to have a meeting with multiple people across different countries, was enormous. The Meeting Owl struck Rory as the perfect way for his team to hold hybrid meetings without excluding anyone due to their location.

 

Other applications for the Meeting Owl have continued popping up for the Ogilvy team. Podcasts are a particularly great use case for including a video element of your host and your guests speaking face-to-face. His colleagues in market research have found it to be a brilliant way of unobtrusively recording research groups gathered around a table or in a circle to discuss different companies and products as well.

 

“When we acknowledged that meetings with the Meeting Owl were not only just as good, but that they're arguably vastly better in terms of the range of people who could attend and contribute, our ability to work well across our team and our organization was completely transformed.”

The Meeting Owl makes Ogilvy’s meetings more democratic so people feel freer to speak. There's less hierarchy involved, because you don't have the usual head of the table leading the meeting. There’s less time involved in planning the meeting because they don’t need to worry about conference room size or a shortage of seating. There’s also more flexibility to schedule multiple meetings without worrying about meeting space or travel costs so they can have a proper brainstorm before scheduling a kickoff meeting, for example, instead of trying to cram everything into a single meeting and preventing people from thinking creatively.

 

As Rory puts it: “There's no weird software required, and there are no strange remote controls that go missing. Everything is achieved with only a Meeting Owl, a power cord, a USB connection to your computer, and that's it. The genius of the Meeting Owl resides entirely within the device, which makes it easy and pleasant to use.”

 

The Meeting Owl helps distributed creative teams brainstorm, problem solve, and workshop to help them do their best work.