Emotive rebrands for tenth anniversary after finally ‘nailing’ fame offering

Emotive’s ‘fame’ offering has been an evolution for the ages.

Described as integrating five areas — social, talent, partnerships, brand experience and PR — into every brief from the start, it was designed to open doors to plenty of non-traditional briefs. And, it has done just that.

Over the past 12 months, a pattern has emerged. The agency has moved away from traditional TVC-led or OOH-led campaign work, instead leaning into the weird and the wonderful — large-scale activations, talent-led creative, even taking over and renaming one of the country’s most popular liquor stores.

Emotive has now hit the ten-year mark, a great achievement for an independent in this market (backed by a 51% ownership of ARN). It has 21 brand partners, including Hoka, Altos Tequila, Google, and the recently-announced Perfection Fresh, with an average client tenure of 4.7 years.

To celebrate, it has unveiled a new brand identity, designed to reflect its ambition for the next ten years and beyond.

But while Emotive is now basking in its success, one must travel back 18 months to fully understand the journey of trial and error.

Some of the Emotive team

Industry heavyweight Matt Holmes joined as Emotive’s head of earned creative and PR at the start of 2024, where he worked closely with group creative director Darren Wright and then-head of social, talent, and partnerships Rhian Mason.

Four months later, Holmes left the agency as it restructured due to “naivety” on how to set up the offering. During that time, Mason also left, to take on a similar role at Clemenger BBDO.

As part of the restructure, Emotive hired Ashleigh Bruton as its head of fame. She worked closely with then-chief strategist and managing partner Michael Hogg — who has also recently left the agency — to oversee the whole offering.

Hogg previously told Mumbrella that the offering struggled when the five pillars were not under one person’s remit, so Bruton’s role was integral. In March, however, she left the agency to join Warner Bros Discovery as its head of social role, as it launched its streaming service Max into the Australian market.

As a response, Emotive’s leadership structure changed once again, returning to having specialism heads, rather than a single head of fame. Joyce told Mumbrella at the time: “At Emotive, this shift has given us the chance to further evolve our structure in line with our agency wide ambition for fame.”

Since then, the agency has appointed TBWA’s Sebastian Revell as its executive strategy partner to replace Hogg, named Poem’s Jessica Cluff as its new head of earned creative, and appointed Michelle Lomas as head of partnerships — the final pieces of the fame puzzle.

The structure has shifted slightly since Mumbrella last reported, with earned being brought into the ‘core capabilities’ alongside design, creative, and strategy. Then, the five specialisms “wrap around” the core capabilities. At the heart of it all, is the idea.

A visualisation of Emotive’s structure

As it stands now, Emotive’s core capabilities are led by Cluff (earned), Revell (strategy), Wright (creative), and Dan Mortensen (design). Its specialisms are led by Lomas (partnerships), Sarah Rosedale (social and talent), Rebecca Gelao (brand experience), and Hannah Devereux (PR).

“We’ve absolutely nailed it, I feel so comfortable saying that now after getting it wrong,” Joyce tells Mumbrella.

“What we learned throughout that process is we knew we needed more conceptual strength through an earned lens. But we couldn’t quite figure out how to get there. Each time, it wasn’t quite right until we decided to bring earned into the core. That was the difference. And doing that with a genuine conceptual leader like Jess, it’s been incredible. We weren’t far off each time, we just couldn’t get it there.”

Part of that, was knowing to split earned and PR, which had previously always been under a single person’s remit. And understanding the distinction between the two is paramount.

“It comes down to skill versus channel,” Cluff explains. “If we’re talking about PR in a traditional sense, the headlines, the media coverage, that’s still really important as a channel. But earned is much bigger than that.

“How I view earned is it’s what got people’s attention, what got people talking and sharing. It’s ultimately what’s earned people’s attention and shifted the dial in terms of culture, whereas PR would be the channel, the output.”

Joyce admitted that the trial and error would not have been possible without Emotive’s creative culture.

Now, feeling settled into its new and improved structure, Emotive has doubled down on its self-confidence with the visual rebrand.

The new identity is described as a “visual expression of a business-wide evolution” designed to bolster its purpose: creating ideas that change how people feel. The purpose itself hasn’t changed.

“We want to make the purpose louder,” Joyce explains. “We’ve been working our socks off for a long period of time, and we’ve outgrown our brand identity. We weren’t doing enough to celebrate our purpose.”

Developed in house by design lead Mortensen, it reflects Emotive’s commitment to pushing clients to make bold, unmissable work.

“It’s a call to arms with our clients,” Joyce says. “We’re asking them to be brave with ideas, so now we’ve done the same thing with our identity. It’s a reflection of the standards we want to set for clients, and our desire to make people feel something.”

Creative lead Wright says it would be hypocritical of an agency with feelings at its core — especially considering it is literally in its name — to not have it emotion in the visual identity.

“If you stand for it, you’re saying that’s what you are, you’ve got to actually be it, not just say it,” he says. “We are humans with emotions, and we need to feel the things to come up with the ideas.”

The rebrand, as well as the structure evolution, were both major “refounding moments”, according to Joyce.

“There’s a line I love, ‘Never Stop Starting’, and that’s the attitude we’ve got now. You never stop refounding the business, and this has all been a part of the process.”

The new identity

The new identity is also underpinned by other key evolutions: the formation of an advisory team, the launch of a new agile retainer model, the creation of a specialist AI unit, and the construction of a new measurement system.

Emotive is forming an advisory team, beginning with the appointment of Sarah Scott Paul as director of people and culture. “Embedded” into the business on a part-time basis, Joyce stresses this is “not about HR and red tape”, but about helping the team connect in deeper ways than they thought possible.

The advisory team will have another member, to be announced in due course.

“What we’ve realised is we don’t need a traditional board structure,” Joyce says. “Sarah will be here to ensure we’re doing everything possible to keep elevating the creativity, and by extension, improving our creative culture”.

As for the retainer model, Emotive has rebuilt it to match how modern clients operation. It removes the traditional “use it or lose it” dynamic, and has been paired with a performance-based incentive that puts billings at risk and rewards results.

The specialist AI unit will be led by head of production Hayley-Ritz Pelling and creative director Paul Sharp. It is designed to embed AI across every stage of Emotive’s process, to accelerate workflows, unlock creative potential, and sharpen effectiveness and efficiency. AI was used to help create the 19 variants of the new logo, with limitless iterations to be developed.

“I don’t know whether I’m a naive optimist here or not, but I see AI as a tool. AI is there to bring human ideas to life. I’m a big fan of saying time, and this gives creatives more time to think,” Wright tells Mumbrella.

“The creative brain in a human being is always going to trump AI, when it comes to actually thinking of an idea and how it emotionally connects. AI can almost be used as a measure of figuring out if something is good or not. If something feels like it could have been written by ChatGPT, you go again.”

That is what the unit will essentially decipher — where AI can add value, and how the team can feel empowered to use it effectively.

Finally, the measurement system, according to Revell, will be a way for Emotive to ensure its fulfilling its purpose of creating ideas that change how people feel.

“That’s our purpose, great, but how do we prove that? The whole point of this is to both help inform creative briefs and creativity with the exact feelings we want to elicit. And then also prove our work is changing those feelings later on,” he says.

“It’s early days at the moment, but at the start of a process, we want to talk about the feeling we want to elicit, make sure we’re designing the work properly to elicit that, and then post-idea, prove through a series of quant and qual metrics that we did elicit that feeling.”

Credits: 

CEO Simon Joyce
COO Ben Keep
Executive Strategy Partner: Sebastian Revell
Former Chief Strategy Officer: Michael Hogg
Group Creative Director: Darren Wright
Marketing & Business Director: Alison Daly
Head of Design: Daniel Mortensen
Senior Designers: Chris Cooper, Eunice Nie
Head of Production: Hayley-Ritz Pelling
Producers: Sophia Delimihalis, Rebecca Love-Williams & Jenna Fisher
3D animation: Oscar Brookes-Luscombe
Editors: Sam Gadsden, Tim Chivers & Tim Seller
Retouching: Mark Sterne
Sound design: Electric Sheep
Website Development: Hyphen

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Lauren McNamara

Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.

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topics ai anniversary creative Darren Wright emotive Fame fame offering Jessica Cluff rebrand restructure Sebastian Revell Simon Joyce ten years

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