OgilvyOne needed an interactive art director that could think and work like a developer.

We created a website, OgilvyOneNeedsanAD.com, which was a way for us to find the best-suited candidates. The site wasn’t really a site, but a puzzle for potential art directors to solve. The design of the page was intentionally blank, giving the illusion of a broken page. We knew that an art director that thinks like a developer would check the page’s source code to find out what’s wrong. Hidden in the code was the actual job posting and an email address to apply, designed with ASCII art. Overall, the lack of design sparked suitable prospects to dig deeper.

Among hundreds of unique visitors, our response rate was successfully low, as we received 2 resumes from promising leads who were able to solve the puzzle – double our desired rate. In addition, the site generated word of mouth for Ogilvy as an agency, not only for designing a site with ‘nothing’ on it, but for pushing media further and solving problems in untraditional ways.