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Jhonnie Blampied joins Matterhorn as strategic planning director

Jhonnie Blampied has been appointed as the strategic planning director at Matterhorn, Mumbrella can reveal.

Blampied was the chairman and CEO of DDB Australia for 14 years before moving to head of strategy at The One Centre in 2007.

Matterhorn team: Jhonnie Blampied, strategic planning director; Matt Kemsley, founder at Matterhorn; Garry Horner, founder and CD; and Garth Agius, agency partner

Blampied was also the regional new business director at Saatchi & Saatchi, before moving to director of brand planning at Ogilvy nearly two years later. Most recently Blampied has been consulting for just over six years.

Blampied told Mumbrella: “They [Matterhorn] have got that creativity that really engages and it’s not about doing big TV ads, it’s about really getting involved whatever the medium, whether it is Facebook, online and actually turning things around and using your creative skills to actually change someones mind.

“Underlying truth is what we used to talk about when I started advertising, you go mining for the facts and that’s what these guys are trained in and really good at doing and they mine for human truth and insight and that is what is a marriage between what i’m passionate about which is customers, the way think, and why I started playing with behavioural economics.

“We are moving forward, it is not just about ads,” he said.

Matt Kemsley, founder at Matterhorn, said: “Good creative will always want to have ideas in new areas using a new medium or new touch points but what Jhonnie will bring is a discipline to that.”

Garth Aigus, agency partner, added: “With Jhonnie and that strategic path with behavioural economics [it will] help guide the process”.

Despite Blampied’s focus and expertise in behavioural economics, he said Matterhorn would not become a behavioural economics agency.

“We are going to be an agency that uses or applies the insights from behavioural economics to actually make creative work, work even harder.

“What we are getting to is less to do with the things that have all changed, because you can trip over yourself trying to chase those little wagons, but trying to identify the human insights and truths that actually don’t change is a real skill and one we intend to mine for.

“This isn’t about doing different creative work, it is just about making creative work more effective”.

While Kemsley said the agency had evolved to scale, where it needed a dedicated director of strategy, he said a key to the future success of the agency was to remain nimble.

“I don’t think in this market you need to be that much bigger to take on a lot more capacity of work.

“What we have is people who can get to solutions, can get to ideas and can get to results quicker because they are good people. It’s not about being big, I thinks size is not something that drives us,” Kemsley said.

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