The Andy Rice Collection

I was working at Ogilvy in the early 90s, a senior suit on the Unilever account.  Ogilvy had handled Omo since its launch some 30 years earlier, and so knew more about the brand than anyone at Unilever.  Whenever international Unilever visitors arrived in SA it therefore befell Ogilvy to present the Omo history to them.  And in due course it became my job to do so too. 

The trouble was that the brand had been so consistent in its advertising, its packaging and its positioning that it was hard to see any real change as I took people through the 3 decades of Omo history. So to put the change (or lack thereof) into context, I borrowed a selection of mid 60s to mid 90s Readers Digests from the publishers, and interspersed the Omo ads with ads for other brands and categories drawn from contemporary magazines.

These ads ended up generating even more debate than the Omo ones, and soon I was hooked on collecting historical ads, and watching SA’s social history unfold through its ad agencies and advertisers.  I sourced magazines and newspapers from auctions, antiquarian bookshops, classified ads, eBay, even flyers in postboxes in small towns up and down SA.  Modern scanning technology allows me to capture and reproduce the ads without destroying the often fragile original.

After those Ogilvy days I became a freelance creative strategist, and then a founding partner at Yellowwood, SA’s first dedicated brand strategy consultancy (recently acquired by TBWA worldwide).    I am still Chairman of Yellowwood, but I now divide my time between a number of projects – including working on a full-length animated 3D movie based on the classic South African story, Jock of the Bushveld.  And collecting old magazines.

Andy Rice
Yellowwood
011 268 5211
082 900 3214
andyr@ywood.co.za