AI, Integrated Services, and the Future of Marketing, According to Jos Ortega, Havas Ortega Chairman and CEO
Get inside the marketing mind of Jos Ortega, Havas Ortega Chairman and CEO, as he shares how he got to where he is today, and his vision of the future.
There is an old saying that is famous in advertising that goes, “The inventory goes down the elevator every night.” What Fairfax Cone of Foote, Cone and Belding meant when he said this was that an advertising agency’s most important assets are its people. After all, the advertising industry is built almost entirely on its people’s talent, creativity, strategic thinking and insight. One such ad man to make that elevator trip every night is Jos Ortega, the celebrated Chairman and CEO of the advertising agency with his name on it: Havas Ortega.
In the industry, few have had success like Jos Ortega. He has distinguished himself in every agency he has been part of. In BBDO Guerrero Ortega he was half of the award-winning tandem that brought Cannes Lions to the Philippines. In his years of leadership at J. Walter Thompson as CEO, he led the pillar of the industry to even greater heights. And in Havas Ortega, he transformed the media company into the integrated, full-service advertising agency that is, today, one of the industry’s leaders.
His years in the industry have much in common with entrepreneurship. He built BBDO Guerrero Ortega from the ground up. And while there, he also built the scrappy, breakthrough boutique agency BrandLab that focused on creating and cultivating brands. Finally, by joining Havas Media, he turned an agency whose core competency was media into a full-service agency with creative, e-commerce, social, content, PR, design and data all under one roof.
The Business Manual had the good fortune to talk to Jos Ortega at the Havas Ortega office in Makati and pick the brains of one of the most astute marketing minds in the Philippine advertising industry. In this exclusive interview, Jos shares what formed and informed his brand of leadership throughout his career, his thoughts on the future of advertising, and his often-overlooked link to the entrepreneurial mindset.
‘Work Harder than the Guy Next Door’
With people and talent at the very core of advertising, what created and formed Jos Ortega? Shockingly, one of the advertising industry’s famed minds didn’t finish college, foiled by his final thesis. Yet this didn’t stop Jos from learning.
“I knew I was smart,” Jos says, “but I didn’t have that diploma which my dad would always kid me about. And so what I did was, I studied even harder outside of school.”
His source of knowledge? Business books. “There was arguably a time in my life where I can say I may have had the most number of business books in the Philippines,” Jos relates with a smile. “And I really devoured every single one of them, looked at the insights from each book and created my own models by combining two or three of these models. Added a little of my juice and then created my own model.”
The Business Manual would be remiss if it didn’t ask Jos Ortega which business leaders he follows. And Jos responds by naming Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, and Guy Kawasaki. He says, “They would be the anchor of my marketing philosophy right now and moving forward.”
And yet, with that, you have only half the formula. The rest belongs to you, Jos explains, saying, “So you have tons of knowledge and experiences that are unique to yourself. Combine that with academic models that are floating around, and make it your own. I think it’s all about making things your own and taking that big leap to believe in what you know and what you can do.”
This capacity to learn, integrate, and adapt, which Jos Ortega learned early on, would serve him well throughout his career. And yet he doesn’t credit native intelligence or specific knowledge for his success. Instead, he focuses on the desire to make a difference and good old-fashioned hard work.
When asked what the entrepreneurial “secret sauce” to his recipe for success is, he says, “I think it’s really more about [how] to make a difference. I think you just have to work harder than the guy next door. And the person right beside you. There’s always a choice, like everybody’s always choosing you versus another company. And you want to be that person that they choose or that company that they choose.”
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Partnership and Collaboration
“If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”
— David Ogilvy
Any conversation about Jos Ortega wouldn’t be complete without mentioning his partners and collaborators. This is a topic that Jos jumps into with relish, sharing triumphs and credit eagerly. This attitude is mirrored by an industry that believes that it owes its success to the work that has been done before, and the work of those who labor beside you. As the David Ogilvy quote suggests, working in advertising is like standing on the shoulders of giants.
Among Jos’ many partners and collaborators, two giants stand out: David Guerrero and Hermie De Leon. David Guerrero, of course, needs little introduction. The co-founder of BBDO Guerrero, Guerrero is the Creative Director who won countless awards on the international stage–a first for Philippine creatives. Hermie De Leon, meanwhile, is another giant of the industry on the media side of the business.
“My first entrepreneurship partner was David Guerrero at BBBO,” Jos Ortega says. “So David was the creative guy, and that time, I was the planner. I was a strategic planner.”
Jos patiently explains the role of a strategic planner, saying, “I provided the insights that hopefully inspired him to take the next quantum leap in creativity.”
Together, the duo started the agency BBDO Guerrero Ortega with international partners. Jos recounts, “David and I kind of, like, grew up together in Ogilvy, and then moved to BBDO together to start it.”
As for Jos’ collaboration with Hermie De Leon, it took working together “in various stages in 20 years together” to finally create a partnership. This began in 2012, in what was then Havas Media.
“This was a wonderful partnership of the visionary and the operator,” Jos says of their work together. “So I was looking ahead towards what the agency will be like, what the future looks like. What are the new things that we can do? What are the trends that we can leverage? And Hermie [was] the one that made it happen.”
The two partnerships are as different as night and day, which Jos explains was partly due to where they were in their respective stages of life.
“When I was with the BBDO stage,” Jos recounts, “We were like the young Turks and like everybody [would] say, ‘Who are these two guys trying to change the industry?’”
And change the industry, they did. Jos continues, “So we played the role of Change the World, Challenge Everything, and just do everything, anything that everybody has not done… including trying to be ambitious and try to even win an international award.”
“And then with Hermie it was a little, you know, later in our careers when we were a little more stable… And so it was more of a real business partnership. We knew what business we were in, how we’re gonna change the world. Not as, maybe, aggressive, but we were definitely sure we had the different proposition to that we offered to the market.”
And together, this company of giants–Guerrero and Ortega, then De Leon and Ortega–did change the industry, and change the world.
Entrepreneurial Spirit
“The work, the work, the work. This is what the business is all about. This is the fun, the glory, the pleasure. It’s the only true measure of an agency. In the absence of great work, nothing else matters.”
— Phil Dusenberry
Despite Jos Ortega’s career being firmly in the corporate sphere, it has, on a number of occasions, crossed into the entrepreneurial world that is The Business Manual’s lifeblood. “I think I’m not really a 100% entrepreneur,” Jos says. “The spirit I embody, but in terms of the way I’ve done it, I’ve done it more or less the safer route. I’ve tied up with an international company. So I know I’d have financial stability working with me.
“I think I’m going to attribute my entrepreneurship, being a manager and leadership skills,” he continues, “from my experience in being a general manager in Olbes, Ogilvy and Mather Cebu.”
A fact that is often glanced over, Jos was general manager of a joint venture Ogilvy and Mather had with an advertising agency in Cebu, early on in his career. It was Jos’ first experience of senior leadership.
He recalls, “For me, it was like OJT [on-the-job-training in] general managership in Cebu. Quite isolated, you know. My bosses were in Manila so I can do it the way I want to, and I’ll just have to report once a week in terms of what’s happening. It was a different world for me.”
At the same time, through his time in Cebu, Jos learned valuable lessons from working with local entrepreneurs.
“Despite the brief being ‘Work with the international companies who were present in Cebu,’” Jos explains, “it was not enough revenue for me to keep the company going. So I had to learn to look for local businesses. So I ended up working with the Aboitiz companies over there and the Gaisano retail group over there, which I’ve had tremendous success being partners with. So I learned entrepreneurship with my relationships with the… owners of Aboitiz and Gaisano and the other local companies in Cebu.”
All of these lessons remained with Jos Ortega. They would prove invaluable later on when he put up his own advertising agency.
“When the opportunity for entrepreneurship came with BBDO, then that’s when all these things suddenly came back–click!” he says of how his past experience had come full circle. “And things that you were doubting, what am I doing there at that time, suddenly made all the difference for what I am today.”
This return to the entrepreneurial spirit happened again when Jos Ortega joined Havas.
“Over there [in Olbes, Ogilvy and Mather], I think the other thing that I learned–I was forced to learn–was advertising is not just about creating ads… I learned all the other facets of advertising because I wouldn’t have all the big budgets over there. So I learned public relations. I learned event management, you know, I learned direct marketing and all the other, you know, what we call peripheral or below-the-line activities before.”
If this sounds familiar, it is because all of these things are what Havas Ortega does as a full-service agency. Jos continues, “All of a sudden now that we’re in a full-service agency today I think I have a heads up with people because I’ve actually had real on-ground experiences on these particular disciplines.”
Building Brands, Telling Stories
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell.”
– Seth Godin
Jos Ortega’s entrepreneurial streak continued while working in BBDO. During his time there, he created BrandLab, a breakthrough advertising agency that was unlike any other in its time. Instead of making ads, BrandLab was focused on telling “brand stories”–an idea that was before its time.
“That was my product,” Jos says of BrandLab, “creating a brand story at the time that nobody was still talking about. Today, everybody talks about brand all the time. I was the only one talking about brand stories [then].”
Speaking more about the work of BrandLab, Jos says, “And so the clients that I had were mainly CEOs. I challenged the vision mission statements of organizations that instead of… just words that didn’t really mean anything to anyone, I encouraged them to create brand stories which were more meaningful that people from top to bottom can relate to.”
In 2008, after establishing BBDO and then BrandLab, Jos Ortega left the agencies he had built to become the CEO of the iconic advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson (JWT).
“And then the JWT call came in,” Jos recalls. “And that was rather interesting because it was like, despite my enjoying the product and the lifestyle that I had, and just dealing with a limited set of clients, I missed the agency life. I missed the interaction.”
“I missed the collaboration with big teams,” he continues on his return to a large, established advertising agency. “I missed the big creative ideas. I think it was special. That was what bit me again, and I joined. And then it was Dave Ferrer who was their CD [Creative Director] at that time who asked me to join him, and it wasn’t really much of a decision for me. I just said, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’”
Havas Ortega
Having returned to an advertising agency that had scale, Jos Ortega still craved for something more.
He recounts, “I think at that time while I was running a corporate organization, a global corporate organization in the Philippines, what I then missed was the entrepreneurship, the freedom to make my own decisions.”
And so, in 2012, Jos Ortega joined Havas Media to work with Hermie De Leon. At the same time, Jos had spotted an opportunity.
“Yes, I still work with our global partners, but at least on a local level,” he says about his position at Havas, “I have decision-making powers on where and how to take the business forward.”
As for the opportunity at Havas, he says, “The industry was going through a whole cycle. I came into the industry when an advertising agency had creative and media all in one shop. Through time, there was unbundling that happened. So there was a specific media agency and creative agency. Yes, they belong to the same holding company. But they technically still had separate CEOs for media and for creative.
“So I saw that there’s still an opportunity to go the full cycle and bring it back to an integrated operation under one management. So that’s what we brought forth when we came in. I had media, and I had creative, then eventually brought in PR. And now we have e-commerce. We have healthcare communications. but all under one roof. All under one management.”
The integrated advertising agency was born. Through the years, as media habits changed and digital gained prominence, integrating the separate agencies proved to make good business sense, with Havas Ortega nimbly navigating its way ahead in a rapidly changing world.
The Future of Advertising
There is perhaps no better person to ask about the future of advertising than Jos Ortega. With his strategic thinking and wide experience, Jos is uniquely positioned to have a glimpse of the future others might not see.
Today, with technology, AI and big data transforming our lives, advertising is also changing. Jos begins, saying, “Okay, it’s more challenging. I mean we’ve gone through the ATL [above-the-line] days of the TV-radio-print. And then digital has put in another layer to that. And now today everything’s just being merged all together. You can’t tell one from the other anymore.”
“And in our organization, we’ve recognized that, and we’ve actually come up with tools that leverage AI, data privacy and all the other concerns, merged them together and we have a product now called Converge in Havas globally and which we are rolling out already here in the Philippines today.”
For Jos Ortega, the future isn’t something that will happen eventually one day. Instead, it’s something that’s happening all around us. It’s products and technologies that he is using and rolling out in the next weeks or months.
The Opportunities of AI
“So AI is here,” Jos Ortega says. “Don’t run away from it. It’s happening. It’s real. It’s a tool.”
Much has been said about AI, about how it causes job displacement, and how generative AI is a cause for concern among creatives. But Jos Ortega isn’t worried. Clearly, AI is a challenge that needs to be surmounted, but Jos, instead, sees opportunities.
“It’s not the final product,” he says about AI. “It’s just a tool to make things happen. And that’s what we’re doing right now.
“We see a lot of AI opportunities that are already happening…. In media, we’re using AI for machine learning so you run [a] campaign for two months, and we learn. And then we start optimizing and we come up with more accountable, better performing media activities.”
Of course, AI isn’t limited to numbers and optimization. It has also evolved as a tool for creation.
“Now what’s happening with creativity?” Jos asks. “That’s relatively new but [our] creatives now are starting to use AI to come up with more visuals that they haven’t imagined before. There is now even technology that we’re gonna get into pretty soon where, as you change elements in your creative product, right in your layout, iIf I change a little of this, there’s a score on the side that says it’ll be performing better… So you can actually learn, right, there and then, whether or not your work will perform in the media space. So that’s going to be happening in [the] next three months already.”
For Jos Ortega, the future isn’t something to be afraid of. With characteristic positivity and a smile, he says, “Look at AI as a tool. It’s not going to change your job. It’s there to enhance and allow you to do more things at breakneck speed. That’s really what AI is all about.”
Nevertheless, well aware of the pitfalls of AI, he adds, “It’s a matter of how you use it, how you apply it to the things that you need done. At the end of the day, it is still a human being making these decisions. It is how you use AI to do that. Yes, maybe some of the manual labor might disappear because AI will cover that, but these people will learn to do other things along the way. Anyway, but that will be a minority compared to all the new things and the new jobs that will be created because of this new technology.”
‘Remain Curious’
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Never let go of your appetite to go after new ideas, new experiences, and new adventures.”
― Steve Jobs
In the end of the interview, when asked what advice he wants to impart to young entrepreneurs, Jos Ortega–ever the integrator–returns to the beginning, to people, to the assets of the advertising agency taking that ride down the elevator.
“I think despite all the technology, our business is still all about people,” he says. “Yeah, that’s really something I picked up from the very very beginning of my career and that I truly believe in up to this very day. Technology will help us improve, help us do great products and everything. But at the end of the day, it’s still about people, it’s about relationships, it’s about partnerships. It’s still the single most important thing in every business.”
“In terms of the future, [one of the] things that I believe is that you should always remain curious. Steve Jobs said it. And you know what? He’s right. Remain curious. Be always curious. Because the next big thing, it’s always gonna be around. Everything’s happening right in front of you. It’s just a matter of whether or not you identify it or you don’t. And you know sometimes, as somebody once said, sometimes the best ideas are just right under your nose and you just didn’t notice it. So sometimes, just be curious and stop. Stop. Stop and look around and freeze the frame. And recognize which are the opportunities that are available to us, and then bring it back to your office.”
Text VINCENT SALES
Photography ED SIMON of KLIQ, INC
Videography OMAR VILLANUEVA assisted by RJ CRUZ
Art Direction ANDREA SANGCO
Sittings Editor RJ LEDESMA
Shoot Coordination TONI MENDOZA
Shot on Location HAVAS ORTEGA, MAKATI
