Miles Young


Peter Miles Young is a former British businessman and the incumbent Warden of New College, Oxford. Until September 2016, he was worldwide chairman and CEO of the international advertising, marketing, communications, consulting and public relations agency Ogilvy & Mather.
Young's career in advertising has spanned Lintas, Allen Brady & Marsh and Ogilvy & Mather, whom he joined in 1983.

Early life and business career

Young was born in Carlisle and brought up in Bedford, where he was educated at Bedford School. The first member of his family to go to university, he attended New College, Oxford, where he was Steward of the Junior Common Room between 1974 and 1975, and where he gained a congratulatory first class degree in Modern History.
Young went into advertising after Oxford because his family couldn't afford for him to stay in academia. Working first at Lintas: London, he moved to the Allen, Brady & Marsh agency, later moving to Ogilvy & Mather Advertising in London in 1983, where he joined the board in 1986. There he led the team which won the iconic Guinness account in one of the most publicly followed competitions of the decade.
In 1990, he was appointed as managing director of Ogilvy & Mather Direct in London. Between 1990 and 1995, he was Regional Director of Ogilvy & Mather Direct Europe. From 1994 to 1995 he was co-located in London and Paris and established the European hub of the recently-won $500 million IBM account, which at the time represented the biggest account switch in advertising and direct marketing history. In June 2020, Young was appointed as a non-executive director at S4 Capital.

Local government

In 1986, Young was elected to Westminster City Council as a Conservative councillor, representing Victoria ward. On the Council he chaired in turn the Information Technology and the Environment Committees.
In the latter role, he was responsible for the first ever tendering out of street cleaning and refuse disposal services to much acclaim, saving money and increasing standards, professionalising the workforce's image while introducing initiatives such as the UK's first ever photometric approach to monitoring litter.
During his time as a councillor, Westminster City Council, under Shirley Porter's leadership, implemented a policy known as Building Stable Communities. The policy later became known as the 'homes for votes' affair. Young was accused by opposition politicians of complicity but district auditor John Magill cleared him and four other Westminster City Council officers and members of involvement in 1995.
Young became Leader of the Council in August 1993, the youngest person ever to hold the position, succeeding Councillor David Weeks. He unravelled Porter's BSC strategy, replacing it with more flexible policies, following advice that there was room for Westminster to meet its statutory obligations to house the homeless and also sell housing to tenants.
Young's tenure as leader was marked by a change in style from his predecessors, with a more hands-off approach and an overarching policy of bringing life back into central London, balancing residential and business needs. He created the first ever tourism strategy for the City of Westminster, pushed a plan for removing prostitute calling cards, and co-sponsored the London First Centre, a body tasked with attracting inward investment to London and credited with staving off the rival claims of Frankfurt as a financial centre.
Young's tenure as leader ended in June 1995, and he stood down from the council in 1998. He has no current political affiliations.

Asia

In 1995, Young was appointed Chairman of Asia Pacific at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, a position he held for 13 years, while also representing WPP's corporate interests in Asia as Chairman of WPP Asia, in addition to his Ogilvy & Mather responsibilities. During this time, he oversaw the expansion of the Ogilvy & Mather network, doubling the region's revenue to $500 million between 2003 and 2008, and supervised building operations in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Thailand and Pakistan, while also expanding practice disciplines.
From 1997, Young managed Ogilvy & Mather's expansion into China, including the opening of its Public Relations arm. In 1999, Ogilvy Interactive was established in Beijing, with IBM as its first client. In 2002, the agency evolved into OgilvyOne and became China's leading digital agency, twice the size of its nearest domestic competitor.
Ogilvy became the first Western agency in China to make local acquisitions, including significant regional agencies such as Nanjing Yindu, and the first to move out of the traditional centres of Beijing and Shanghai.
During Young's tenure, Ogilvy & Mather Asia Pacific became the most awarded agency in Asia and the Ogilvy & Mather network's fastest-growing region.
Young was a co-founder of the Ogilvy-Tsinghua Programme for Public Branding, a joint venture with Tsinghua University, Beijing, and is a member of the Advisory Board of Tsinghua University, School of Journalism.
In 2015, Young was made an honorary citizen of Jiangsu Province, China, as a longstanding member of the Governor's Economic Advisory Council.
He also holds an Honorary Doctorate from Sophia University, Tokyo, in recognition of his leading role in the emergence of integrated marketing communications and his achievements in the fields of advertising and marketing.

Worldwide

In 2008, the then-WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell appointed Young as CEO of Ogilvy Worldwide. Young turned it into an award-winning machine, with a $1 billion-a-year-plus turnover for WPP, its parent company. Ogilvy won best agency network for four consecutive years at the Cannes Lions awards and also dominated other awards, such as the Clios, this year. He subsequently became Chairman of the Group, succeeding his long-time mentor, Shelley Lazarus. Young was, and remains, the first non-American CEO of the agency and the first non-American chair since David Ogilvy.
Young was widely credited with repositioning Ogilvy from a legacy business "imbued with a kind of insular elitism reflecting one of the bluest of advertising's blue-chip clubs".
When Young arrived, Ogilvy had not won significant new business for some years. Young overhauled day-to-day operations and recalibrated focus on winning new clients; improving Ogilvy's creative output, championing integrated marketing and transitioning Ogilvy's business model away from one reliant on traditional advertising services to one that also offered marketers broader business consulting.
Large global accounts won under his leadership included UPS, IHG, SC Johnson, Coca Cola and Philips.
Young's strategy introduced a focus on overseas growth in so-called BRICS markets and also the N-11 – the Next Eleven emerging markets – such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Turkey.
He is credited with coining the term the "third one billion" in reference to the world's "largely-untapped" 1.8 billion Muslim consumers and set up the world's first bespoke Islamic branding practice, Ogilvy Noor.
During Young's tenure, he oversaw an overhaul of the Ogilvy graduate scheme, championing diverse young talent while diminishing a culture of expatriate management in Ogilvy's overseas agencies.
He was one of the first large agency CEOs to embrace the challenge of the digital revolution, putting it at the centre of Ogilvy's operations and articulating a belief in digital as something which transcends traditional communications disciplines. He was a strong advocate of large networks being able to leverage their strength to provide superior product to the small shops.
Having served as a member of the Board of Directors, in 2012, Young was elected Chairman of the US-Pakistan Business Council in Washington, D.C., in recognition of his expertise and guidance in advancing the Council's policy agenda in strengthening US-Pakistan relations.
Young retired as Chairman of the Board and a Director of Ogilvy & Mather in 2016.
Before departing Ogilvy, Young authored Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age, described by industry blog More About Advertising as "an exhaustingly researched and masterfully written guide to how we got where we are now, and where we might possibly be going in the future". Publishers Weekly said of the book: “Ogilvy would be proud, with Young achieving his stated goal of convincing a new generation to look back at Ogilvy’s classic work, while also adding his own canny take on the contemporary advertising game.”

Higher education

Young was elected 48th Warden of his alma mater, New College, Oxford, in September 2016, succeeding Sir Curtis Price. He is the first person from the world of business to hold the role and the first ‘classic’ businessman to head an Oxford College.
Within the University, he is the Chair of Voltaire Foundation and Chair of Disability Sub-Group, Chair of the Development Panel of the Conference of Colleges and of the Committee to Review Donations of the University.
Young is overseeing the construction of New College's £36m new campus, the Gradel Quadrangles, which includes additional student accommodation, student study space, a 100-seat music hall and facilities for the adjacent New College School, plus a 21.8m tower and gatehouse.
In 2019, he was elected Chair of the Conference of Colleges, succeeding Sir Rick Trainor, the Rector of Exeter College.

Personal life

A lifelong supporter of the arts, Young is known for his Asian art collection, particularly of contemporary Chinese sculpture.
In 2001, he purchased a cinnamon estate in Sri Lanka, restoring it to working order and persuading renowned Sri Lankan architect Anjalendran to remodel it, design a museum and visitor centre, staff quarters and workshops as well as a bungalow complex recognised as one of the leading examples of contemporary Sri Lankan architecture. Young and Anjalendran own the largest and most representational private collection of contemporary Sri Lankan art and sculpture.
Young sponsors the annual Geoffrey Bawa Award for architecture in Sri Lanka, a tribute to the late architect which aims to "encourage good new architecture of whatever complexion".
From 2009 to 2016, Young served on the Museum of Arts and Design Board of Trustees in New York.
Young is co-chairman of the American Friends of the Château de Compiègne, a charity raising funds for restoration works to this royal French château built for Louis XV and restored by Napoleon.
In 2013, his work for US-French cultural relations was recognised by the award of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres during a ceremony at the French Consulate in New York.
Young became President of the Friends of Hermione-Lafayette in America. In 2015, he organised the American tour of a handcrafted replica of l’Hermione – the 18th century frigate that brought the young Marquis de Lafayette to America in 1782 – a historic voyage that changed the course of American independence.
He is honorary chairman of the Lafayette Club, based at the University of St Andrews.
In 2018, he was awarded the Legion d’honneur by the French Republic, invested by the Grand Chancelier in the Hôtel de Salm in Paris.
In 2019, he was elected Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple.
In January 2020, Young took on the role as President of the Oxford Literary Festival.