Since Martin Puris publicly allotted himself five years for the
task of forging a truly creative network out of the successful but
pedestrian Lintas empire, it was natural to ask how things were going
two years in. The answer, however, was surprisingly downbeat: ’It’s
difficult to change anything. It takes time. It takes belief. I still
think it’s a five-year job.’
Puris is a New Yorker, right? A veteran who’s pulled himself up from
copywriter to head of a network in the toughest market on the globe. So
where’s the bullshit? Instead of hype I’m offered realism; and, as if to
reinforce the point, a polite reference to his storming dollars 700
million run of new business elicits only a faint, self-effacing
smile.
Lintas, he says, wasn’t very highly attuned to new business as a network
when he arrived. ’The way they originally got business was by hanging
around the halls of Unilever. But if you’ve started your own agency with
no new business at all it gives you a completely different approach,’ he
says.
This approach was to build a team of regional and subject specialists
right from day one of any pitch, a team that would meet regularly as the
review proceeded. ’That way you don’t get, for example, the media man
called in for the last five minutes of a meeting,’ he says. ’It’s not
that Lintas didn’t want to attract new business, it’s that they didn’t
know how to.’
And there have been other, more high-profile changes. The four titles of
’zone chairman’ have been killed off as Puris tried to break down the
fiefdoms that built up as the network originally expanded to service its
flagship Unilever account.
Instead, Puris has decreed the world be broken up into many more smaller
regions - for example, London is now part of Northern Europe - each run
by one of the agency bosses in the area. In this way, he says, the
chairman gets to know his region intimately and each of the agencies in
it.
Puris has already changed ’dozens’ of the top people in various
countries - notably, the UK, Germany, Singapore, Argentina and Sweden -
since he took the hot seat. Nevertheless he insists he’s not a
sweep-clean merchant.
’I scout out the people who think like I do - not the Cossack method of
reorganisation,’ he says.
He aims to transplant the successful philosophy he developed through 20
years of running his agency into Lintas.
In the early 70s, Puris was a talented young creative in the then New
York hotshop, Carl Alley. ’It was fun for a kid to run riot over the
account people,’ he remembers. But, as the years passed, he realised
Carl Alley could win almost any account it wanted because of its
creative work. But it couldn’t keep them. ’All that mattered was the
creative department,’ he recalls. ’We only ever got brilliant account
people by accident.’
So Puris and his former partner, Ralph Ammirati, left to set up an
agency in which all relevant disciplines would have an equal say. It was
a phenomenal creative success, but also hung on to its clients - in
BMW’s case for nearly 20 years.
Puris calls the way the agency worked a ’democracy of ideas’. By
expecting everybody to add to the process in equal amounts, he says,
everyone thinks much harder and you get a truly collaborative
result.
It’s a daunting task taking that kind of a rethink across 147 different
offices, each with their own individual culture. Progress has been made,
though. Billings have risen to dollars 775.4 million in 1996 - 6.6 per
cent up on the previous year - and the network has pulled in a Cannes
Grand Prix for Rolo.
But Puris acknowledges there is still work to be done. Still, as he says
of his first change at the network - prefixing Ammirati and Puris to its
name: ’Even if we haven’t changed yet, it’s a sign that we’re going
to.’
THE PURIS FILE
1960s Copywriter with Young & Rubicam, Campbell-Ewald and NW Ayer
1970s Teamed up with art director, Ralph Ammirati, to work for Carl
Alley
1974 Breaks away with Ammirati, with support from Y&R, to found
Ammirati & Puris in New York.
BMW, Mastercard and George Bush’s election campaign followed over
the years
1994 Agency bought out by Interpublic and merged with Lintas New York;
Puris became the president and chief executive
1995 Puris made chairman, chief executive and chief creative officer
of Lintas Worldwide; network’s name changes to Ammirati Puris
Lintas
