Shelly Lazarus on the Responsibility of a Powerful Brand

When Shelly Lazarus became worldwide CEO of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather in 1996, she likely didn’t realize that along with the usual responsibilities accompanying the top position in a large company, she would also be acquiring a new passion: conservation.

“I came to WWF in sort of an unusual way, but also kind of a wonderful way, when I started to get into the leadership of Ogilvy,” Lazarus says. “I came to discover there had been a longstanding relationship between David Ogilvy and the company he founded—Ogilvy & Mather—and World Wildlife Fund.”

Indeed, O&M wasn’t the only entity David Ogilvy could lay claim to: He had also helped found WWF.

And Ogilvy & Mather was one of WWF’s first conservation partners, contributing its creative services over the years to help raise WWF’s profile and build brand awareness.

“So while my involvement with WWF started professionally, the closer I got to the organization, the more fascinated I was by the work being done,” Lazarus says. “It was such an easy thing to become personally involved.”

Lazarus recalls that after attending her first WWF Board meeting, a fellow member asked for her impression of the experience. “The honest answer was that my head was spinning,” she says, laughing. “But probably the biggest takeaway was how something I may only have considered to be a stand-alone problem—species loss, for example—was actually part of a much bigger chain of issues.

“And in order to be solved, that whole chain had to be dealt with together. I think that’s what is really fascinating about WWF’s work—this holistic view, this integrated approach, to putting all the pieces together to ensure we save the planet for the future.”

One of the key pieces WWF has identified is citizen involvement. “The flip side of having such a powerful brand is the responsibility to do something powerful with it,” says Lazarus. “And WWF wants to mobilize hundreds of millions of people in support of conservation.”

Along with strong brand identity, Lazarus also identified the urgency of WWF’s message as an important asset—that what the organization is doing and what it has to say is important to the future of the world. “Urgency instantly elevates your every action and gives people a reason to pay attention, if only for a moment. What you do with that attention—and that moment—is what makes the difference.”