8 CREATIVITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE “GIVE ME GOLD” David Ogilvy both managed his agency and acted as its creative director; and there have been others like him. But if you’re a “normal” adman or woman working up the ladder by handling clients and running offices, you need a creative partner. I was lucky to have Tham Khai Meng as mine. A charming, quiet and understated Singaporean who was passionately obsessed by the quality of the work, he had led our Asian network, creatively predominant, for 11 years. So when I asked him over dinner in the unlikely venue of the Andaz restaurant in Lahore, kebabs in front of us, and the lowering mass of the Badshahi Masjid behind, to join me in New York, I had three fears. The desk I shared with Khai at Ogilvy’s global headquarters in Manhattan: a common work surface for a shared ambition – that we should strive for creative excellence and the utmost effectiveness. The first was that I was deliberately flouting the conventional wisdom that we needed a big-ticket name. Or, worse, that an ethnic Chinese just would never pass muster in New York. And the third was that he would not come. But I knew that he was the one. He came. We then shared a desk in New York, a completely alien notion there, but one which demonstrated that we could not be divided, and that our agenda was common. In June 2008, we inherited a very average performance, winning some – but not