Todd Herman Voted World's Greatest Salesperson

Receives a Fellowship at OgilvyOne to Craft the Sales Guide of the Future

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Jun 21, 2010, 10:31 ET

CANNES, France, June 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Todd Herman, an international performance coaching and training expert from Edmonton, Canada, was today voted the World's Greatest Salesperson. Using real-time SMS voting, a live audience selected the winner during the OgilvyOne "Can you sell, or else?" seminar at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

Mr Herman and the runners-up – Eric Polins, managing partner of a marketing consulting firm from Tampa, USA, and Lee Abbas, a former Panasonic marketing executive and most recently an English teacher in Hokkaido, Japan – all presented live on stage their pitch for selling the Motorola Milestone (Droid in the USA) phone.

In addition to receiving the title of World's Greatest Salesperson, Mr Herman receives a three month fellowship at OgilvyOne Worldwide to help craft a sales guide to the 21st century. The principles of the guide will be presented at a thought leadership session during the Direct Marketing Association's annual conference on October 11, 2010, in San Francisco.

Moments after winning the contest, Mr Herman remarked, "I honestly can't believe I'm standing here with the World's Greatest Salesperson award. It's been such a fun experience and I'm really excited for the fellowship and to be working with OgilvyOne over the next three months crafting the new sales guide for the 21st century. It's such an honor to be working with a company whose founder has been such a huge influence on my business philosophy."

"From the very first time we saw Todd selling a humble brick in his YouTube video, we knew he had potential," said Brian Fetherstonhaugh, Chairman & CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide. "Todd is a true student of persuasion and motivation. It shone through at every stage of the World's Greatest Salesperson competition. We look forward to working with Todd as we create the guide to selling in the 21st century."

The World's Greatest Salesperson contest grew out of OgilvyOne's mission to reinvigorate the noble art of salesmanship and the credo of its founder David Ogilvy who said, "We sell, or else." To that end, OgilvyOne launched a global search to find the World's Greatest Salesperson through an online video competition on YouTube where contestants were asked to submit a two minute pitch on how they would sell a red brick. The multi-platform contest generated over 230 submissions on YouTube from 12 countries, more than 100,000 visits to the YouTube brand channel, and 90,000+ video views.

To celebrate Motorola's involvement with the contest, Ogilvy developed an Android app for Cannes attendees. Named Cannesdroid, the app provides detailed information and maps for festival activities, a live twitterfall that will allow bloggers to share their views of speeches and workshops as well as useful recommendations for the surrounding area. Cannesdroid uses "Wikitude" type technology to act as a guide to events at the Festival, in which users can point their device at venues as if they were pointing the camera, and relevant information about what's occurring in the areas, myths from Cannes in years past and tweets from attendees in the area are seen through the viewfinder and will appear on-screen. The app will be free to download from the Android marketplace for all Cannes attendees with an Android device. Cannesdroid will also be pre-loaded on 35 phones that will be distributed to industry VIPs.

About OgilvyOne Worldwide

OgilvyOne Worldwide is the strongest, most experienced and most highly awarded one-to-one marketing network in the world, with over 120 offices in 50 countries. It provides clients with a full range of direct, consulting and interactive services to deliver profitable customer relationships. The roster of clients is equally balanced between global clients including American Express, Cisco, IBM, Lenovo, Nestle, SAP and Unilever, and leading clients in our local markets. OgilvyOne Worldwide is a unit of The Ogilvy Group, a WPP company (Nasdaq: WPPGY), one of the world's largest communications services groups.

SOURCE OgilvyOne Worldwide