’Reasonable men attempt to adapt themselves to the world;
unreasonable men attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Progress is
in the hands of unreasonable men.’
The George Bernard Shaw quote is a favourite of Paul Simons, the Ogilvy
group chairman, and one he has been using a lot since last week’s
controversial appointment of Steve Dunn as Ogilvy & Mather’s new joint
creative director.
Initial industry incredulity at the choice of such a ’difficult’ though
brilliant creative maverick to succeed the gentlemanly Patrick Collister
has given rise to more general debate about the importance of an
agency’s culture and whether it is right to bring in a radical outsider
as a catalyst of change.
Simons had no hesitation: ’Why do you think Ogilvy appointed me? They
wanted somebody completely different from outside the Ogilvy culture
because their view was that the perpetuation of historic ’Ogilvy-ness’
wasn’t necessarily the best way to take the business forward.’
Simons says the GBS reference is particularly relevant to advertising
where you have to have a streak of unreasonableness ’not in being
unpleasant, but in not accepting the status quo or a piece of
conventional wisdom’.
Tim Mellors, creative director of Grey, agrees. He has more experience
than most of being hired as a high-level creative catalyst and believes
that bringing an unexpected element into the agency mix can be
effective, though controversial.
’I think it is a good idea, obviously, because that’s what they’ve done
here with me - less radical, perhaps, than putting Steve Dunn into
Ogilvy, but when I was brought in to replace Dave Trott at GGT that was
seen in the industry as insanity.
’It’s never clear from the outside what’s going on. Publicis was my
first big creative directorship and I really shook the agency up. In
three years it doubled in size.’
He has doubts about Dunn’s appointment, however, from a ’cultural’ point
of view. ’Can even a brilliant art director succeed in such a ’writerly’
agency?’ he asks.
Another potential problem is moving from a culture of ’cherry-picking’
clients to one where the agency’s business is rather more mundane and
extensive.
Andrew Cracknell, with a reputation for revitalising Bates in the late
80s and now brought back to do it all over again, is well aware of what
it’s like to move from a smaller, sharper-edged creative environment (in
his case WCRS) to a bigger ’establishment’ agency with a broad range of
clients.
’Every agency that Steve Dunn has been with has largely picked its own
clients and there’s a huge difference between an agency like that and
O&M,’ Cracknell says. ’I don’t know how many creative directors
appreciate that the best way to measure how you’re doing is not the very
best of your output, it’s the very worst. Has he the patience to take
something that’s not terribly good and make it less bad than it
was?’
The alternative to bringing in a radical outsider to take an agency
forward is to ensure orderly succession at the top, with each new
generation of management firmly committed to the agency’s existing
culture.
Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO is regarded as having achieved almost seamless
succession and ironically most of the current generation running the
agency have come via O&M. Peter Mead, who first brought in Michael Baulk
as chief executive, recognises the need for an agency to evolve but
believes it should be through individuals who are sympathetic to the
culture: ’We brought Michael in for two reasons: first because as a
serious management figure in a major agency he had more experience about
planning career paths than we did and, second, if you’ve had a certain
way of doing things for quite a while it never does any harm to have
them validated or nudged.’
For some agencies a creative maverick has been brought in not to impose
a different culture, but to restore the values that first led to
success.
Bob Isherwood, worldwide creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi, caused
a stir in the UK industry by transferring Dave Droga, creative director
of the network’s Asia Pacific region, to take over the creative lead in
London.
Isherwood points out that the move was actually designed to return the
company to its original culture of strong, simple ideas. ’The reason we
went outside was not the work being done by Charlotte Street, but by UK
agencies as a whole,’ he says. ’The UK performance at Cannes has not
been as good over the past few years; the work has been over-produced
and under-thought. On the other hand, our work from Latin America, Asia
and Australasia has been winning at Cannes because the ideas are very
strong, very simple and very powerful.
’Dave was used to working in markets where the production budgets are
not so big, the support of the production companies is not so great and
therefore the strength of the idea is more important.’
There is general agreement that, whatever the reasons for a
controversial appointment, it will only succeed with top management
support. As Mellors says: ’You’ve got to have the guts and clout to back
it up.’
In the end, many in the industry believe the two keys to the success or
failure of the O&M ’experiment’ will be the amount of support from top
management both here and in the US - and the luck they have in finding
Dunn the right partner.
