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 By any rights, an agency that’s won 17 out of 18 pitches in a year should have a right to be a little bit smug, especially when that year was 2009 – not one of the best, by the standards of the region’s advertising industry.
And yet, Leo Burnett’s managing director for the UAE, Kuwait and lower Gulf, Kamal Dimachkie, is rather more interested in what happens next, than what came before. Yes, he’s pleased about those 17 wins, but other things loom larger – things like, what do you do when the world of traditional advertising seems to be crumbling before your eyes?
In fairness, that’s probably a fairly significant issue.
“When you look at the traditional agency, we’ve always done the sort of activities that are being labelled as below-the-line, or retail, or activation. At a time when most of the revenue an agency used to generate came from TV, these other disciplines felt like the poor cousins,” says Dimachkie.
“But as revenue sources and revenue profiles started changing, and as there became more consumer pressure and brands started being attacked by one another, there was more on everyone all the way around to diversify and differentiate and attract attention. Just as there was more pressure in traditional media, there was more pressure at the retail end.”
And then there’s that pesky internet thing: “You barely hear any more about above-the-line versus below-the-line – you hear more about new versus traditional media. What this tells you is that the divide between above and below has disappeared, and there’ s a more conscious awareness that you need to communicate through the line,” says Dimachkie.
While “through the line” might well be something that turns up on Buzzword Bingo one of these days, the lesson Leo Burnett is taking away from the shifting landscape is simple: “digital” and its other, older, unfashionable cousins are not things that can sit outside an agency any more.
“Put all of that together, you realise that, like it or not, if you want to do right by a brand, you need to be holistic in your thinking, you need to have the talent that can generate ideas, the talent that can interpret and execute these ideas. And whether you like it or not, you need to be able to have a good conversation, a conversation of equals, with the client in order to guide them,” suggests Dimachkie.
“These sorts of pressures are forcing people to reassess the model, and to make sure they bring in these resources in-house. What I think is that, what perhaps we need to do, instead of keeping retail and digital at arm’s length, is bring them back into the agency, in terms of creativity, but perhaps keep production separate, in the same way you handle print and TV production,” he adds.
Dimachkie is very clear that this isn’t something that any agency – including Leo Burnett – has got right so far. Indeed, he says digital agencies are “not wrong” when they accuse traditional ad shops of trying and failing to “get” digital. So, things have to change.
“If we’re going to genuinely be able to provide holistic solutions... in fact, forget the word ‘holistic’ – if we’re going to be able to partner with clients and provide them with solutions that their brands require, and the users of their brands demand, then we’d better get with the programme, and acquire this skill,” says Dimachkie, with refreshing frankness.
“The reality is, there’s a new skill-set to be acquired, and now it’s become a question of how you acquire it. Do you draft the competency into the agency and say right, that section, that corner of the agency does it, or do you say, this is the way of the future, I’d better integrate with that competence?”
In this case, Leo Burnett has gone for Option B: moving the agency as a whole towards digital, instead of hiving off a separate division to deal with all the ones and zeros – currently the favoured approach for many big-name agencies. Something of a big ask, no?
“It takes time, it takes money, it takes bringing in expertise, it takes training people, familiarising these people on programs, pairing them up with people who know what the deal is – so that, with a bit of concentrated effort and time, they’ll start speaking the language which has so far been alien to them,” says Dimachkie.
“This is what we’ve been doing, we’ve been making a lot of progress – yet we’re very conscious that we’re not where we want to be. We will continue to invest in this capability and discipline until we can speak this language very, very fluently, in the same way that print or TV is spoken,” he adds.
One example of Leo Burnett’s recent “through-the-line” efforts is the impressive and entertaining Hiroshi and Osamu campaign for GM/Chevrolet – of which we’ve waxed lyrical
before. Currently Hiroshi and Osamu can be found on TV ads, in print, on Twitter, and in a massively-popular – 26,000 fans and counting – Facebook page, along with special promos on MBC.net, and, and, and...
If Leo Burnett doesn’t nominate its Japanese pals for the Lynx, we might just have to have a quiet word with someone, possibly involving some kind of weapon. And if it doesn’t win, we might need to have a little chat with the jurors...
Dimachkie seems to be keen, though: “[Hiroshi and Osamu] is a beautiful example of what happens with the collaboration between traditionally digital-thinking people and traditionally traditional people; the vocabulary is shared – and therefore the hang-ups are left at the door, and everyone focuses on the idea. This is one of the things I particularly like about this campaign.”
But this has involved creatives from Leo Burnett working with media buyers at Starcom, working with creatives from branded-content division Core, working with external talent, and keeping everything in step. Which – and, we’ll admit, we’re guessing here – doesn’t look very easy.
And while Hiroshi and Osamu is, in our view, an excellent piece of work, and a standard-bearer for how to do a local, innovative traditional-and-social media campaign, it remains only that – one campaign.
Dimachkie says that, “like it or not you will have to start speaking a new language”. This campaign suggests Leo Burnett is capable of picking it up; Dimachkie is clear that he wants his agency to take lessons en masse – so now all that’s left is the execution. Also known as “the tricky bit”.
We’ll be very interested to see how Leo Burnett gets on in 2010.
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