Opinion

Inside Colenso BBDO

The staff of Colenso BBDO outside their office.

New Zealand creative agency Colenso BBDO was this year’s Mumbrella Creative Agency of the Year and has added this award to a number of other international accolades it has received this year. In the first of a series of profiles of the 2013 Mumbrella Award winners, Nic Christensen talks to the team who run the agency about their formula and the pressure to maintain global success.  

The offices of Colenso BBDO belie the recent global success of this New Zealand creative agency. Located on a hill, about 20 minutes walk from Auckland’s CBD, the agency with its 100 or so staff is not quite what you picture when you imagine the world’s most awarded advertising agency.

Even with a view of the city skyline, complete with Auckland’s Sky Tower, Colenso BBDO is no Madison Avenue agency. Instead it is located in a fairly standard office building on a suburban street that could be home to one of 100 other companies.

However, this last year has seen the agency fend off many of the biggest advertising firms with their swanky offices and staff numbering in the thousands to achieve global recognition as the world’s most awarded advertising agency and winner of the prestigious Won Report.

But ask Colenso managing director Nick Garrett about his formula for success and you get a very simple answer. “This is what happens if you have the right number of smart buggers in one place at one time,” says Garrett.

“With the world as open as it is, technology as open as it is, you now have the freedom to export ideas in an amazing way,” he adds.

“We happen to be the right team, in the right place, and living off a legacy that Colenso has had for 43 years.”

Indeed a significant part of the success of Colenso BBDO can be attributed to a recognition that the advertising world is a lot smaller than it used to be and smaller firms, in somewhat far-flung parts of the world, can compete for the best talent and on global accounts.

Recently, the agency has been on an upward trajectory, and despite losing biggest account Vodafone in 2011, it has managed to build momentum, winning big domestic accounts such as the Bank of New Zealand and Samsung while also getting global work, as part of the BBDO network, for accounts such as Mars.

“About five or six years ago Colenso went away from traditional work and into things that had never been done before,” says Garrett.

“The starting point was probably the Yellow Treehouse for Yellow Pages and it has evolved ever since.”

In many ways the 2009 campaign, which saw the agency build a treehouse in a forest on the outskirts of Auckland using only people found in the Yellow Pages, gained global attention for its innovation and execution.

Four years on, executive creative director Nick Worthington says the campaign was a turning point for the agency. “The Yellow Treehouse completely changed the way we do things and, in particular, solve business problems,” says Worthington.

“The campaigns I’m most proud of are the ones that changed the agency or which we learnt the most from,” he says,

“The Yellow Pages campaign and another one for (beer brand) DB Export, where we re-launched a long-forgotten product, saw us begin having conversations with clients that went beyond advertising.”

“We became less concerned about what the ad would look like and more concerned about addressing the client’s problems.”

Colenso’s head of planning Andy McLeish says this focus on addressing client problems and the move to a more integrated approach has been a big factor in pushing the agency on to a global stage.

“We have some of the best creative minds in the world in our building and we use that to solve business problems,” says McLeish.

“But we are not like a traditional agency that passes work from planning to creative through to production – we work holistically and in a more integrated way.”

Managing director Garrett says the results that the agency has achieved for domestic clients by bringing all the key people together in more integrated campaigns mean they have increasingly been sought out by international clients.

“You build on success. When our work starts to build momentum and get international fame then we get phone calls from companies overseas,” he says.

“A good example is the Mars network, the world’s largest privately owned FMCG business and one of the largest BBDO clients globally, who started seeing our work in New Zealand and decided they wanted it on a global scale.”

“So they had to decide whether to pay us to export our thinking or give us a global brief.”

This global thinking approach is also paying dividends financially, with the agency quickly bouncing back from the loss of Vodafone in 2011 to pick up the domestic accounts for Samsung and New Zealand’s largest grocer, World. The same year, it also won the global accounts for Fisher & Paykel and Tourism Fiji.

“It’s all very well to do great work, and that’s what we are here to do, but we are also a business and all our clients are profitable for us,” says Mike Higgins, finance director at Colenso BBDO.

According to the agency, profits are up 36 per cent year on year and it is also pioneering new ways of making money through monetising its intellectual property.

“We work in partnership with our clients, we help grow their businesses and in return we ask that they pay for the value of our ideas, and we pride ourselves on that,” says Higgins.

“IP is one way we do that and we do share in the spoils. We have agreements in place with our clients that mean if they sell our ideas offshore, then we share the benefit 50:50.”

Already Colenso has sold a number of its ideas overseas including a technology campaign to a major bank in Portugal and a TV campaign idea to the Fox Network, which will run in 10 different countries.

Garrett says the 50:50 split on intellectual property is not a hard sell for most clients. “It means we all have skin in the game and most clients love it,” he says. “Once you hand a cheque to a client and say ‘hey, why don’t you invest this in the next (advertising) campaign?’ they look at it and just go ‘oh my god’.”

Is there pressure to maintain success? Most of the senior team at the creative agency concede the answer is yes but say they remain focused on the work.

“Yes there is pressure”, says Worthington. “But most of it you put on yourself. You end up working harder for people who believe in you and the more you do for clients the more they believe in what you can achieve.”

Garrett agrees. “The pressure is there” he says. “But what percentage is the space shuttle on course to the moon? The answer is about three per cent. The other 97 per cent of the time it is readjusting and trying to correct.”

“I think it is the same with a great agency. We are on target three per cent of the time, the other 97 per cent, our healthy paranoia and passion is keeping us working a little bit harder everyday.”

EncoreThis story first appeared in the weekly edition of Encore available for iPad and Android tablets. Visitencore.com.au for a preview of the app or click below to download.App Store

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