It’s impossible to listen to Jay Pond-Jones, the Bates Dorland
executive creative director-in-waiting, without an overwhelming feeling
of deja vu. ’It’s all here,’ he says of his new agency. ’It just needs
some creative fire-power.’
Rewind the tape ten years and Andrew Cracknell, now chairman of Ammirati
Puris Lintas, would have been heard expressing similar sentiments. ’A
solid agency ... lots of good strategic thinkers ... just needs some
creativity to match ... can’t be done overnight, of course ... takes
time.’
History proved Cracknell right and, even if some of his legacy was
squandered through managerial decisions that were more expedient than
forward-thinking, the fact remains that he helped give Dorlands an
all-too-brief taste of how good an agency it could be.
Now Dorlands wants it all again. ’Cracknell changed the agency by
raising the expectations of its people and its clients,’ Graham Hinton,
the Dorlands chairman, declares.
’Once you’ve experienced that, there’s no going back.’
The high expectations of Pond-Jones are exacerbated by the turbulent
events of recent years when prolonged and public management upheavals
made the agency self-obsessed and caused its new-business engine to
stall.
If Pond-Jones is intimidated by what has been staked on him he betrays
no sign of it. On the contrary, he gives the impression that his career
so far has been a preparation for what awaits him. ’I passed the point
ten years ago when I knew I could face any challenge without being
scared.’
He’ll certainly need to draw deeply on his reserves of self-confidence,
for these are testing times for the agency. Unable to accommodate the
reforming zeal of its former group chief executive, Paul Twivy, or what
was seen as the creative Puritanism of Pond-Jones’s predecessor, Tim
Ashton, Dorlands knows what it isn’t. Now it has to reassert what it
is.
Hinton’s hope is that Pond-Jones will round off a management team in
tune with the agency’s culture. A managerial front line once described
by one of its members as ’the most dysfunctional I’ve ever seen’ has
given way to a new team combining old Dorlands hands, notably John Ward,
the vice-chairman, and John Stubbings, the chief executive, and newer
blood.
’We needed a group of people who get on with each other and share the
same ambition and one into which Jay can fit,’ Hinton says. For Hinton,
now 20 months into the job, Pond-Jones’s hiring and the other senior
changes are the clearest manifestation yet of his determination to draw
a line under the Twivy era and put the agency at ease with itself
again.
Getting Dorlands to do what it does best is the priority. In Hinton’s
view that means populist, big-brand advertising that delivers commercial
results on the back of outstanding creativity.
Pond-Jones’s brief will be to build on Dorlands’ existing creative
foundations rather than re-dig them. ’The great thing about our current
reel is that it contains great campaigns,’ Hinton says. ’But I want us
to win awards and we’ve not reached that standard yet.’
The big question is whether in Pond-Jones, a lean-limbed aesthete who
has turned introspection into an art form, Hinton has swapped Ashton for
a variant of him. What’s different this time is that Hinton has bonded
with Pond-Jones in a way he never did with Ashton. The link began 13
years ago when both were at D’Arcy McManus Masius and was strengthened
by working through the 1985 merger with Benton & Bowles. Ashton too was
a contemporary of Hinton at DMB&B but never shared his wavelength. His
perceived need for approbation within the creative village was at odds
with his chairman’s pragmatism.
Pond-Jones’s first task will be to figure out what can be changed and
when it’s smarter not to interfere, something Ashton found
difficult.
’Tim was delivering a style but there was too much stuff we couldn’t
understand,’ a senior executive says.
For his part, Ashton claims Pond-Jones can only succeed if Hinton is
prepared to find time for him in a schedule that not only includes
running an agency shortly to play a pivotal role in an independent Bates
global network but the presidency of the Institute of Practitioners in
Advertising.
’Agency morale is low,’ he warns. ’Jay will find it difficult if he
doesn’t get Graham’s time and support.’
Ironically, the Bates network’s shortage of global business may work in
Pond-Jones’s favour. Dorlands spends little time adapting work
originated elsewhere but boasts an impressive array of big domestic
accounts free of international creative rule books. At the same time,
some significant recent wins - including pan-European assignments from
Energizer batteries and the pounds 8 million UK relaunch of Imperial
Leather - may be a precursor of better times.
Knowing when to interfere and when to hold back may be equally important
in Pond-Jones’s dealings with his department’s long-serving senior
creatives - Paul Walter, Chips Hardy, Jon Canning and Dominick
Lynch-Robinson - who have traditionally controlled some of the agency’s
most important business.
Cracknell believes Dorlands may have found the creative best able to
interpret its collective personality. ’What the agency has never needed
is the spectacular quick fix,’ he says. ’What it does need is hard and
diligent work by senior people and it strikes me that Pond-Jones has the
right combination of application and high creative standards.’
