The World: Trial that shook advertising and its practices.(Ogilvy and Mather's Shona Seifert and Thomas Early in fraud case)

Industry observers believe Shona Seifert and Thomas Early were indicted merely for being in advertising.

Shona Seifert and Thomas Early are two names destined to go down in the annals of advertising history. Though, unfortunately, not for the reasons they would have liked.

On 22 February 2005, Seifert, a former senior partner and executive group director of WPP's Ogilvy & Mather, and Early, the company's former finance director, were both convicted of instructing their employees to falsify timesheets to cover a dollars 3 million shortfall in revenue.

The pair were found guilty of all ten counts of plotting to overbill the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, the body responsible for advertising campaigns designed to persuade teenagers to stay away from drugs. Sentencing is set for 16 May, and they face potential sentences of either five years or a fine of dollars 250,000 for each count. Both intend to appeal.

The case stems from events in July 1999, just before Ogilvy & Mather sent its White House client its first bill. At that time, Ogilvy executives discovered the agency was projected to spend around dollars 3 million more servicing the account than it would make in revenue, even though billings were around dollars 150 million a year.

The prosecution's case was that Seifert and Early instructed 16 Ogilvy staffers to resubmit their timesheets with increased hours billed to ONDCP owing to 'careerism and greed'. Much was made of an e-mail in which Seifert promised to 'wring the money out of' the ONDCP, and 16 former employees testified that they had been told to falsify timesheets.

The defence focused on character and argued that the lax way the advertising industry conducts its business was as much to blame for anything, along with the sheer size and complexity of the ONDCP account; one that, it argued, had confused Ogilvy executives. In the end, almost 600 employees, more than one million documents and more than 300,000 e-mail messages were involved in the case as part of what prosecutors called the 'breathtaking' scope of the government's investigation into Ogilvy billing practices.