EURO RSCG LONDON

When I took over as the CEO of Euro RSCG (London), the agency had been through a prolonged period of decline, which had seen management teams and clients come and go. Unsurprisingly, the agency had lost its confidence and it showed in the work. I arrived at the agency with my long term planning partner, Russ Lidstone, and we started the task of turning around the agency. One of our early observations was that we needed to inject a spirit of "positive dissatisfaction" into the agency. If the work wasn't good enough, we wanted people to say so, but with that came the responsibility of personally leaning in and making the work better. 

We made the work our personal focus and moved into the creative department, where we worked alongside the brilliant and immensely talented Gerry Moira. We also hired Mark Hunter to be the agency's ECD, to work alongside Gerry. It was probably the toughest challenge any of us had ever faced, but with a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, we really turned the agency's creative product around. Within three years, we had won 9 new clients and were shortlisted by Marketing Magazine for Creative Agency of The Year. I hope that this short selection of work speaks for itself......

AT&T

Every year we produce over 5000 pieces of work on AT&T. I have featured the big campaigns I am most proud of within "my top 10", but wanted to share a selection of other work we have done on the business.  

If variety is the spice of life, I have lived rich over the last four and a half years.........

"It's not complicated"  This campaign had just broken when I arrived at BBDO. At the time, the category was embroiled in the map wars which were characterized by claims, counter claims and hyperbole. This was a war that we were unlikely to win given that network performance has been owned by Verizon for some time. However, Verizon had a very real chink in their brand armour - whilst they were highly respected, they were not liked. AT&T was far more likable and so, if we could find a way of delivering our network message in a more likable and engaging way, we felt we had a very good chance of taking the high ground in the map wars. 

The creative solution was to employ the disarming charm of kids talking about why bigger is better than smaller, why faster was better than slower etc. These discussions were brilliantly curated by Beck Bennett. Huge credit has to go to the client who allowed us to shoot with a sample script and let us see where the conversations went with the kids. I would say that 80% of the scripts that ran were unscripted. 

When I joined the account, we had launched the first 4 commercials. My focus in my first year on the business was helping protect and nurture the campaign. I think it ended running for about 18 months, which is a veritable advertising marathon for AT&T. We managed to extend it to key events, like Mother's Day, and leveraged it for our big March Madness sponsorship. 

One of my regrets is that we didn't evolve the campaign for longer. It was often referred to as the kid's campaign, but the real equity we should have nurtured was the notion of "it's not complicated". Kids was just one way of executing this strategic thought, but I am sure there were many other ways to bring this thought to life. On this occasion, my powers of persuasion were clearly not quite up to the task.

"Ticket Twosdays"  The inception of the Ticket Twosdays campaign was a breakfast meeting with Cliff Marks from National Cinema Media. Cliff was keen to build a deeper relationship with AT&T and I suggested to him that we should develop a program similar to Orange Wednesdays in the UK. This was a hugely successful loyalty play by Orange, who gave their customers a free ticket when they they went to the movies on a Wednesday night. The timing for such an initiative was perfect as the wireless wars were in full swing and churn was becoming an increasing concern for us. Also, following the DirecTV acquisition, AT&T wanted to pivot to become more of an entertainment brand. Thankfully, the stars were all aligned and we were able to launch AT&T Ticket Twosdays. 

"The Present"  A few years ago, we introduced a new partner agency to AT&T: Sparks & Honey. They are a really interesting company that monitors the essential elements of culture impacting brands. They provided us with a constant stream of inspiration and insight, often from outside of our category. 

One of the emerging trends they identified was the growing consumer need to detox from their digital lives. We heard about spa weekends, where phones were locked away, and the emergence of concierges in restaurants who could take care of your phone while you enjoyed an interrupted dinner. This insight inspired a lovely piece of communication that we ran in 2015 in which we urged our customers to give the gift of being present that holiday season. We ran this work for 24 hours and, unsurprisingly given the topicality of the message, it was enthusiastically shared in social media.
 

"5G World"  The 5G arms race is just starting to heat up. AT&T have consistently invested in their network infrastructure (a whopping $135 billion over the last 5 years) and wanted to start telling their 5G story in this year's Masters. 

Every "new G" is usually greeted with a modicum of cynicism as each new G tends to be heralded by over promise, new claims and hyperbole. In the face of this, we wanted to give our customers a meaningful glimpse into the future that 5G would enable. We wanted to avoid being too far fetched and depict a world where everyday events were made a little more amazing. 

Network Guys The wireless category is characterized by claims and counterclaims that are fleeting at best, complicated at worst, and increasingly viewed with a measure of disbelief by customers. We persuaded AT&T that we needed to break with the category's obsession with claims and create a campaign that focussed on the "substance of better". We wanted to avoid hyperbole and give customers substantive reasons why our network was better, based on the technology upgrades that AT&T was rolling out at the time.

The "Network Guys" campaign delivered the substance of our network in an entertaining and human way. The comedic tension between the younger, more technological savvy Charlie, and the more down-to-earth, pragmatic Frank, gave rise to work that built on AT&T's more likable personality and provoked meaningful reappraisal of our network. 

CHEROKEE

As part of Tesco's shift into non food, they decided to launch the Cherokee fashion brand from the US. Moving into the world of fashion was a bold and somewhat challenging move for a company that was a grocery retailer at heart.

I have to be honest, we struggled with this brief at first as we wanted to create an authentic fashion brand. We created some beautiful outdoor for the launch that was centered around the idea of relaxed clothing. 

(Insert 3 posters here)

The ads were beautiful and arresting (and they picked up a few creative awards), but the work was a little too quiet for the clients and so we took a very different approach for the follow up work.

One of the things I always loved about Tesco was that they were always very clear about what their proposition was - "the solid" as they called it. When we asked them why they wanted to launch a fashion brand, they said they wanted to offer their customers high street fashion at about one third less than the prices charged by high street brands. That made sense to us, but building a credible fashion brand, available at the country's largest grocery retailer, and build value credentials at the same time, was not one of the easier challenges we had taken on.

In many respects, this work is a great example of "brand cross dressing" (see the article under the observations section). We borrowed the value "clothes" of grocery retailers and crashed them with the codes of aspirational American fashion brands, like Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren. A beautifully simple strategy, well executed.

EVIAN

This was a lovely brief. Evian were the official water of Wimbledon and we needed we help them promote this sponsorship. 

This is a beautifully simple campaign that tapped into a truth that everyone who has ever watched Wimbledon knows all too well.......