Tham Khai Meng is no longer worldwide chief creative officer of Ogilvy. He has been fired after the agency received employee complaints about his behaviour two weeks ago.

An internal memo was sent throughout the Ogilvy network by chief executive officer, John Seifert. It reads:

Two weeks ago, I was informed of employee complaints regarding the behaviour of Tham Khai Meng, Chief Creative Officer of The Ogilvy Group.

I found these complaints serious enough to appoint external legal counsel to investigate the matter.

After carefully reviewing the investigation’s findings with several of my partners, we concluded that Khai’s behaviour was a clear breach of our company values and code of conduct. I have decided to terminate Khai’s employment with the company with immediate effect.

Each year, we ask every employee in the company to read, authorize, and fully commit to a code of conduct that each of us is responsible for living up to. Over the past 70 years, we have institutionalized shared values and a standard of professional behaviour unique to the Ogilvy brand.

This is an important moment to reaffirm that no individual in this company is too senior or too important not to be held accountable for their actions.

Thank you for your support.

John Seifert
Chief Executive, Worldwide

Meng joined Ogilvy in 1999 as regional creative director Asia Pacific, after building his career at Leo Burnett, McCann Erickson and Bateys. He became co-chairman and worldwide chief creative officer in 2009. During his creative reign in 2012 to 2016, Ogilvy was Network of the Year at Cannes for five consecutive years. He has been a member of Facebook’s Creative Council since 2017, an advisory board member for Twitter since 2016 and a board member for Miami Ad School since 2014.