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‘It was naivety on our part’: How Emotive’s restructure created a ‘stronger’ offering and set up future success
Despite the self-proclaimed "gimmicky" language of it, Emotive's 'fame' offering has strengthened the independent agency, captivated its clients, and intrigued the wider industry. While this year has had its fair share of challenges, the new structure has, more importantly, opened a number of new doors.
Head of fame, Ashleigh Bruton, and managing partner and head of strategy, Michael Hogg, sat down with Mumbrella's Lauren McNamara to chat all about it.
Increasingly, clients are seeking creative campaigns beyond just advertising. With shrinking budgets, shortened attention spans, and saturation across the board, leaving a mark on audiences has obviously never been more important. The traditional model is no longer viable for so many, and the way agencies creatively solve problems for clients has therefore had to evolve greatly.
Enter Emotive’s ‘fame’ offering – a five-prong approach to advertising “as a whole”.
Across the five specialisms – social, talent, partnerships, brand experience, and PR – the agency looks to change the way consumers feel, leaning into the idea that good advertising doesn’t actually look like, well, advertising.
It’s about delivering impact, and while the core pillars are not the be-all and end-all, they are used as levers for pulling ideas and generating talkability, allowing the agency and its clients to embrace non-traditional ways of advertising, engaging with consumers in a way Emotive claims they realistically want to be engaged with.
Acknowledging that the “gimmicky” language has somewhat muddled the meaning of ‘fame’, Michael Hogg, managing partner and head of strategy at Emotive, explains it in layman’s terms: “Marketing doesn’t work unless it gets noticed, so that’s what we’re doing. We’re getting our clients noticed.”
He says the lines between creative, influencers, PR, and more have blurred immensely, so making the pillars clear has helped Emotive nail client briefs, as it lets the agency know which lever to pull.
“Each exists individually though, with independent briefs that aren’t about fame,” Hogg mentions. “So we need to still separate them, but ultimately, when it works together, it works. They do naturally blur and run into each other – and for us, having one person running that rather than five – one for each specialism – makes more sense.”
Michael Hogg
When Emotive made the decision to reshape its approach to advertising and double down on ‘fame’ at the start of 2024, Hogg says it was a natural next step for the agency and its way of working. The agency has always strived to be a non-traditional creative agency – it started as a content agency, worked in the talent and social amplification space, evolved into creative, and dabbled in brand experience – but with it all not coming under one person’s remit, Emotive’s structure began to blur; much like the lines between the disciplines.
“There wasn’t anything missing as such, it’s been a natural evolution. We just needed the ambition for clients to get noticed to be so much bigger and clearer.”
Despite now being settled, Emotive’s ‘fame’ offering started off somewhat rocky. With a strong PR focus at the start of the year, and the appointment of Matt Holmes as head of earned creative and PR, it hit the ground running – but with its rapidity came the realisation that it may not have been fully fleshed out.
“His [Matt’s] role was one of PR, not fame, so it wasn’t necessarily bringing everything together,” Hogg continues. “It was naivety on our part.
“The step to get to a holistic head of fame was always in the plan, but we were naive to think how we could structure it at first. It wasn’t any one significant thing that happened that led to a need to change the structure, it was a simple evolutionary thing.”
Four months in, despite being described as an “integral part of this launch” and a “terrific operator”, Holmes left the agency due to the restructure. A month prior, Rhian Mason had also departed, Emotive’s then-head of social, talent & partnerships. Shortly after, in August, Ashleigh Bruton joined in the official head of fame role.
Coming from a holdco background, Bruton says moving to an independent was a huge leap of faith, but from the get-go, she knew it was the right decision.
Ashleigh Bruton
“From my first meeting with Hoggy and Simon [Joyce], it just felt right. These guys are so passionate in these areas. We’re so passionate about the work we do, the people here, the culture we have, how we live up to our values… stepping in, it felt like 100% the right move,” she explains.
“It’s been fantastic.”
Hogg says without her, too many creative ideas would still be left on the table. The agency’s lack of capability to execute an idea in “full colour” was becoming a huge creative frustration.
“I think that’s the best articulation of why [a head of fame was needed], because it’s a creative catharsis thing, but it is also about making good business sense, making good sense of clients, from an effectiveness point of view,” he says.
“The creative catharsis of being able to come up with an idea and execute it to its full potential, you can’t do that without these disciplines and we really couldn’t do it without Ash.”
With the remit requiring a breadth of experience, expertise, and skills, Hogg described the job as a “recruiter’s nightmare” but Emotive found a “unicorn” in Bruton.
“I’ve had a really non-traditional career journey,” Bruton says. “I’ve done so many different things and have really honed in on those specialisms along the journey – and I never thought I would find a job that connected them all. So as much as it was truly a recruiter’s nightmare, for me, it was a dream.”
At Emotive, ‘fame’ is integrated right from the very start – which in itself is a completely non-traditional view on advertising.
“Traditionally, an idea is already fully developed and then you chuck it on social or make a brand experience,” Bruton explains. “But here, we’re having that thinking at the start of every brief that we take, it’s not an afterthought anymore. It’s baked into the actual heart of the campaign.”
From the get-go, Bruton and her team are ingrained in conversations, pushing the creative, strategic teams to make campaigns more fame-centric.
“The team isn’t there just to review the work, they’re part of creating it. It means that when the brief does hit those social or brand experience channels, it’s so much stronger, it makes more sense.”
The offering has certainly been welcomed by Emotive’s clients – with many finishing the year with highly successful fame-centric campaigns.
While good clients have always looked for good creative that solves whatever problem they’ve got, and Emotive says it does just that, what’s also important is that aspect of getting noticed. According to Hogg, the clients that understand that importance, are also willing to take on different forms and shapes.
“There’s a healthy appetite for it and a healthy education point from us,” he says. “The ambition alignment is there.”
As mentioned, this year there have been a number of successful campaigns with the new approach, including for Luna Park, TRESemme, Ovolo, and Altos Tequila, but the pair says there are two in particular that really stand out.
In July, a Dan Murphy’s liquor store in Alexandria was taken over by Formula 1 star Daniel Ricciardo, to promote his new wine range in partnership with Pernod Ricard. Looking through the five-prong lens, Emotive leant into every pillar to nail the campaign, particularly brand experience and social.
“That started as a content brief with Daniel, and we thought, ‘hey he’s got great social, we’ll get good amplification’, so it started to grow, then we decided to make this as big as possible – so we did the store takeover,” Hogg says. “Those disciplines began to bleed together, because the ambition wasn’t making good social content, it was generating talkability and getting noticed.”
Bruton adds: “After the fact, the actual brand experience, the activation, was what people were talking about. Even on socials from the campaign, it was all about the Alexandria takeover – that’s the crux of this offering.”
The campaign was so successful, it’s led to another brief.
The other – a now infamous campaign featuring Aussie legend, Sharon Strzelecki.
For Google Ads’ new AI-powered tools for small and medium businesses, Emotive took a wildly creative approach to raising awareness – again, through the fame-centric lens.
Magda Szubanksi, the actor behind the iconic Kath and Kim character, was on board from the start – fully embracing the talent pillar – and helped make the campaign bigger and better.
She did a promo video, a 4-minute long ‘how to’ tutorial, she appeared on David Koch’s Channel Seven program ‘Kochie’s Business Builders’, she was built into every aspect of the idea.
“Sharon was baked into it across the board – and yeah, everyone knows this isn’t real because she’s a character, but it made it playful and added an element of talkability, which again, is central to this offering,” Hogg says.
Further, the offering has piqued interest across the wider industry as more marketers are looking at non-traditional advertising as a way to do more for less.
With its flexibility, the offering allows them – even those with tiny budgets – to divulge, and generate talkability without the giant cost.
“Not having big budgets its a reality for loads of marketers, so for us, we want to work with them to figure out the problem and how we can creatively solve it using the five disciplines,” Hogg explains.
“Even if its $40,000, it’s a great conversation. There are clients looking for the right thing, and they are looking for cost effective ways of doing the right thing, which is reality and all good.”
He says the offering has afforded Emotive new business opportunities, and hopes this continues into the new year.
Bruton adds: “Yeah, sometimes its completely valid. Sometimes it comes from a place of wanting to do good, but the downside is they are often taking advantage of it and wanting more for less.”
More for less – it’s a challenge everyone is facing, undoubtedly. And the pair say, despite the aforementioned pros, often, it is more so a con. Describing it as “cheeky briefing”, Hogg says some marketers are looking to the offering not with the ambition of creating great work or getting noticed, but because it naturally offers more for less.
“For some, this is an excuse of getting something on the cheap, but more often than not it tends to get flushed out at the briefing stage.”
This is not the only challenge that has been throw at the agency since doubling down on ‘fame’ in February. A big one comes in educating marketers why taking a fame-centric approach is so valuable.
Bruton conceded that the industry is incredibly tough right now, but the deeper problem for marketers and their agencies lies in the shifted engagement consumers have with advertising.
“Consumers are getting so much smarter, the way they’re engaging with media is completely different,” she says. “They don’t want to be spoken to the way we’ve been speaking to them for the last 30, 40, 50 years, so marketers are having to get smarter and that’s where the fame-centric lens is really effective.
“Unless you’re showing up in a way that looks and feels like it belongs on whatever platform, people are just going to have a really negative reaction to it. And that’s the challenge so many clients, and agencies too, are facing.”
The aforementioned talent movements when restructuring, internally understanding what ‘fame’ looks like, and nailing how that manifests in the work have all proved a challenge in 2024 too.
However, Hogg and Bruton are looking up to 2025 and feel Emotive is in a good place to hit the ground running in the new year.
Bruton and Hogg
While they don’t have a “master plan” in place – as they need to remain nimble – the agency is recruiting to continuing building expertise in the five pillars.
The beauty of these roles, according to the pair, is they continue to blur these lines and make sure everyone is marching to the same beat.
“Ash is coming in from the top, and she’s sharpening us even more,” Hogg says. “And that’ll make us stronger in the new year.”
Being independent and having those opportunities to remain agile is also an advantage for the new year, especially with recruitment.
“If we go ‘oh, we should create this role because we need more firepower in this area’, we can action that and it’s easy to do,” Bruton continues. “That’s one of the nice things at the moment, there’s still so much potential.”
Having recently signed off on some new scopes recently, and even a few retainers, there is natural organic growth across the business – which remains the focus for 2025.
“As Ash said, we haven’t realised the full potential of what we’ve got going. But there’s credibility behind it with these new briefs and work coming next year, and we’re building relationships, and from a business point of view, we’re in a really good spot,” Hogg concludes.
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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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