[Interview] Matteo Maggiore, Global Creative Director, Ogilvy Paris

With 17 years of experience across major global markets and more than 100 international awards, Maggiore brings a focus on creativity, cultural relevance and business impact.

Matteo Maggiore has taken on the role of Global Creative Director at Ogilvy Paris, as the agency seeks to strengthen its international creative ambitions.

In this interview, he discusses his vision for Ogilvy Paris, balancing global consistency with local insight, the impact of generative AI, and how the agency can build a culture that challenges convention while delivering work that matters.

What attracted you to Ogilvy Paris, and how do you see Paris shaping Ogilvy’s global creative ambitions?

Paris is one of the few cities that still influences how the world thinks, looks and behaves. Yet its international creative potential remains bigger than what the advertising industry has fully unlocked.

That is what made the opportunity so compelling. Benjamin did not approach me to fill a position. He invited me to help build something: an Ogilvy Paris with international relevance, global connections and the ambition to shape work far beyond France.

The ingredients are already here. Extraordinary talent, cultural tension, global clients and the strongest creative network in the world. My role is to connect the dots.

How do you plan to preserve Ogilvy’s creative legacy while pushing it to evolve?

You protect a legacy by using it, not by worshipping it.Ogilvy’s heritage is not a visual style or a collection of famous campaigns. It is a belief that intelligence, craft and effectiveness belong together. That principle remains essential. The methods must continue to evolve.

The danger begins when reputation becomes a source of comfort. Legacy should create responsibility, not entitlement. David Ogilvy was an innovator, not a nostalgic person.
The most respectful thing we can do with his legacy is keep moving.

What has working across markets taught you about creating global ideas that remain culturally relevant?

The best global ideas are not culturally neutral. They are built around something deeply human that different cultures can recognise in their own way.

Love, pride, fear, belonging and humour exist everywhere, but they do not look or sound the same everywhere. An idea travels when its emotional core is universal and its expression remains flexible.

A global idea becomes tone deaf when consistency is confused with uniformity. Translation changes the language. Cultural understanding changes the meaning.
You cannot create meaningful work for people if you have already decided who they are.

How do you balance global consistency with local creative freedom?

A strong global platform should have a clear centre and open edges. The centre is the human truth, the brand’s point of view and the role it wants to play in people’s lives. The edges are where markets find their own stories, tensions, talent and cultural expression.

If every market produces the same execution, you may have consistency, but probably not relevance. If the platform can mean anything, it means nothing. The goal is a framework strong enough to be recognisable and generous enough to invite reinvention.

What separates award-winning work from work that drives real business impact?

Awards matter. They establish standards, attract talent and create momentum. But an award is evidence of creative excellence, not the complete definition of success.

The work that really matters changes something: perception, behaviour, conversation, sales or what a business believes is creatively possible. At Ogilvy Paris, we should know what we are trying to move before we begin and be honest about whether it moved when we finish. The ambition is work so powerful that the industry cannot ignore it and so effective that the client wants to become even braver.

How will AI reshape creativity, and what should agencies protect from automation?

AI is making answers cheaper. That makes the quality of the question much more valuable.It can generate hundreds of images, lines and variations, but abundance is not originality. Someone still needs to recognise what is fresh, culturally meaningful and worth fighting for. That is where human taste and judgement become essential.

We could automate mechanical work, but not curiosity, intuition or disagreement.
If we use AI only to produce more of what we already know, we will become extremely efficient at being average.

What do agencies still get wrong about culture, and what must Ogilvy get right?

Agencies often treat culture as a trend report rather than a living system.

Culture is not simply what is popular this week. It lives in tensions, rituals, contradictions and the codes through which people understand the world. You cannot manufacture relevance by borrowing a meme or adding a celebrity.

We need to turn our global scale into genuine local intelligence. International creativity is not about filling a room with different passports. It is about filling it with different ways of seeing.

What would success look like for Ogilvy Paris in three years?

All of those things are connected. Reputation changes when the work changes.
The work changes when the culture changes. And culture becomes sustainable when creativity has a visible impact on the business.

I don’t know whether it will take three years, five years or less, but I hope that, at some point, Benjamin and I can look back and feel that we helped Ogilvy Paris become a place where ambitious international work can thrive, where global clients feel confident bringing us their most important challenges, and where talented people are given the opportunity to do some of their best work.

www.ogilvy.com

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