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David Ogilvy, the all-conquering British ad man and author whose agency Ogilvy & Mather was an inspiration for TV drama Mad Men, would have expected nothing less on his 100th birthday.
At last week's Cannes Lions festival of advertising and creativity, Ogilvy bosses celebrated their founder's legacy with a series of lectures and parties.
They also painted the town red (the agency's signature colour) with a red carpet which ran more than a mile along the Croisette beachfront, along with red lighting - to ensure rival agency bosses and clients took notice at the ad industry's annual pow-wow.
There is little risk that Ogilvy, whose memorable campaigns for clients such as Schweppes, Rolls-Royce and Dove soap brimmed over with panache and confidence, would be forgotten after his death in 1999.
His books, notably the million-selling Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963), are still fresh - full of pithy points about not only advertising but also business. Sample quote: "Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it." Underpinning it all were Ogilvy's core beliefs in creativity ("unless your campaign contains a Big Idea, it will pass like a ship in the night"), the need for risk-taking and mavericks ("tolerate genius"), the importance of a financial return for clients ("we sell - or else"), and civility ("we like people with gentle manners").
With such a treasure trove of bon mots, it is no surprise to learn that when Ogilvy's 18,000 global staff log onto their email, a quotation from the founder pops up on screen every day.
But history alone is not enough to sustain any business. On the Croisette, there were plenty of reminders of the new competition, not least from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, each of which took over a swanky beachfront spot to entertain during Lions week.
The digital upstarts from the ad agency world are very much at the forefront of the minds of Ogilvy's present leadership, chief executive Miles Young and worldwide creative director Tham Khai Meng, when we meet at Cannes. The duo believe their agency, founded in 1948 and part of Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP since 1989, has the rich legacy and innate culture of creating big ideas that the new breed of digital agencies sorely lack. What's more, now that digital pervades everything, the "pure-play" digital agency no longer has a unique selling-point.
"We've suffered from five years of vendor-led digital propaganda," says Young, a Briton, who has been at Ogilvy almost 30 years and became chief executive in 2009. "Digital is seen as a separate channel, a discipline in its own right, and it isn't. Clients are beginning to understand that.
"Digital pure-play is silo-thinking. It is doomed to dissolve into the system."
Khai, born in Singapore but trained at Central St Martin's and the Royal College of Art in London, chimes in: "In the end, the Emperor doesn't have any clothes." Pure-play digital agencies don't understand the importance of narrative and ideas, he adds. "Digital agencies really want to be like us. They want to understand big brands and they don't."
Ogilvy's founder would be pleased to see his successors come out fighting. Young, who is based in New York, where he shares a long desk with Khai, admits: "In the digital revolution, after a period where agencies completely lost confidence amid the confusion and uncertainty, there is some sense of reality coming back." The group remains one of the world's biggest ad agency networks. Close to 1500 work in London and there are now 4000 in China. More than a quarter are involved in digital.
The group has five main businesses: ad agency Ogilvy & Mather is still the largest; direct-response agency Ogilvy One is next biggest; and then there are public relations, healthcare and a shopper-marketing arm, Ogilvy Active.
The company keeps the legacy alive by holding regular meetings at Ogilvy's Château de Touffou. His widow, who still lives there, was in Cannes for last week's events. Young even used an old video of Ogilvy "presenting from the grave" for a recent client pitch.
Like many agency bosses, Young and Khai see the lines blurring between traditional advertising and other marketing disciplines. They talk about Ogilvy moving "from being the generator of messages to the producer of content" which consumers can share.
Examples include staging events and making a film for toy-maker Mattel's Scrabble and a publishing venture for computer firm IBM, called Smarter Planet, "in which advertising is just a part". Young explains: "We're deploying art, we're deploying design. We're partly becoming journalists, producing long-form documentaries, essays and white papers."
Looking to the future, Young is adamant that Europe "should not be written off". The London ad agency, which has new leadership, has won business from Europcar, BP and The Spectator.
But with the best from global advertising on show in Cannes, Young and Khai are convinced that emerging markets are a growing creative as well as economic force. Ogilvy's Tunisia office, won a Gold Lion last week - a first for the country - for a campaign, imagining how the country would look in three years' time after the government was ousted in this year's Arab Spring.
Ogilvy left Cannes as the second-most awarded agency network, with 60 Lions across all categories.
Digital might be changing so much but Khai says: "In spite of all this, creative is still the king and that is our strategy. If you do great work, you build great brands." David Ogilvy would approve.
Postcard from Cannes: sun shines on emerging markets
As the drinking on the Croisette goes on into the small hours at the Carlton Hotel and the Gutter Bar every night, it is easy to think the Cannes Lions is all play and no work in the sun.
More than 9000 attended, with clients now making up as much as 20% of the delegates and a big contingent from Brazil. Attendance at the Lions, which is run by British media group Emap, was up from the low of 6000 in 2009 but it was still not at 2008 levels when 10,000 paid.
Yet Cannes veterans said the town was more packed than ever. With a delegate's pass costing a four-figure sum, insiders reckon that many thousands came just to network - rather than pay to attend the daily round of seminars and talks from industry chiefs.
Few deals are done. Instead, it's a chance for some rare face-to-face contact - like BBH creative boss Sir John Hegarty spontaneously beckoning Sir Martin Sorrell to join him for lunch at the Z Plage restaurant when the WPP boss happened to drop by. No wonder many PRs and headhunters hang around too. The rise of emerging markets was one of the big themes at this year's Lions as China won its first top award - a Grand Prix - and countries such as South Korea and Tunisia also did well.
The suspicion is that agencies and clients in some of these faster-growing markets have the confidence to take creative risks that some in the West are reluctant to match.
But two of the most-awarded pieces of work came from independent US agencies. Wieden+Kennedy got multiple Lions for its witty internet viral for Old Spice cologne, featuring a man on a white horse, and Droga5 picked up a clutch for its campaign for the launch of rapper Jay-Z's biography, which involved consumers having to find each page of the book which were "seeded" across digital and outdoor media. Some criticised Droga5 because the client, Microsoft Bing, didn't seem central to the campaign.
Digital permeated everything - so much so that the judges complained that every entry seemed under obligation to mention Facebook and Twitter traffic.
Ad agency Cheil in South Korea won with a clever integrated idea for Tesco Homeplus - virtual supermarket shelves on digital billboard posters on the subway, from which a consumer could order items via smartphone for home delivery within hours.
Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam walked off with the top TV award for its intense two-and-a-half-minute Nike ad, "Write for the Future", which imagined how stars such as Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo might score or miss at last year's World Cup. Proof that when a client is big and bold, it can pack a punch.
One source of concern ought to be that, in the main, London agencies didn't do brilliantly. Some loyally suggested that Europeans are more picky than some of the emerging-markets firms about submitting genuine ads, rather than work aimed chiefly at winning awards. But it is also clear the competition for ideas is now global.
