Relatively unknown to the advertising world today, Martin Nisenholtz has done more for digital transformation than most. Part-academic, part businessman, he set up Ogilvy’s first “interactive” department in the 1990s, guiding the agency onto a more digital path. Students at Boston University, where he now resides as Professor of the Practice of Digital Communication, would struggle to find a more digitally enlightened mentor. MARTIN NISENHOLTZ Martin Nisenholtz must find it difficult to make up his mind whether he is the accidental academic or the accidental businessman. His life has moved between the two in a remarkably fruitful way. Quietly, but with conviction, he has been a major force in the digital era of communications. But no one’s erected even a virtual statue to him; and yet maybe they should. If you ask the average employee of Ogilvy & Mather today if they know who he is, or was, I am afraid the answer would be “no”. Such is the fickleness of corporate memory! More than any other individual, he laid the foundation for the company’s digital transformation. But, more importantly, he brought digital into the realm of big traditional agencies, or, as the inimitable George Parker described them, big dumb agencies (BDAs).