Restoring one of Australia’s iconic creative agencies to its former glory was never going to be easy task, particularly when many of those who hold senior creative and management positions at leading agencies today have at one time been through its doors and still hold a fondness for the place that shaped their careers.
Starting life in South Melbourne in 1972, The Campaign Palace rose to become one of the most awarded and internationally recognised Australian hot shops, but in recent times has lost the creative crown that once made it great.
Jacques Burger, the South African former managing director of Ogilvy Cape Town who has been tasked with rejuvenating The Palace’s reputation, knows all too well the significance of his role and how its efforts to bring back the heyday will be scrutinised not only by his WPP masters, but by the wider creative community.
“I don’t feel it, but I know that there is,” Burger says of the pressure that goes with the territory as Sydney managing director and national CEO at The Palace. “There is still a lot of goodwill towards The Palace in this marketplace. Secretly I think people hope that it does really well. Someone said to me if things are good at The Palace then things are good with advertising in this country. I thought that was an interesting statement.”
Just over 10 months into the job – which he took at the last minute after already accepting a position with an agency in Britain before he got the call from Australia – Burger puts The Palace slump down to complacency. “I honestly believe there was a fierce belief in the kind of work that The Palace was doing back in its heyday. There was a real confidence, a position of ‘this is right’ and a fearless culture, almost a spirit you find in pirates and mavericks where people go out and explore the outer edges of the universe,” he says. “But in time I think that was lost a little bit. People started resting on their laurels of what was built up. Bad habits set in. It became this famous brand and people got caught up in the fame and forgot the challenger attitude that got it there in the first place.”
Turning to his own early aspirations, Burger says he wanted to be a plastic surgeon, but the thought of studying for years on end was a turn off. Instead he pursued a degree in law because it offered him the combination of “business and the logic of argument”. A gap year saw him start a postgraduate course in advertising which ignited his interest leading him to give up law and start work with Ogilvy as a junior account executive. He remained there for 11 years until his move to The Palace.
Tipped by some within WPP as one of its rising stars, the 35-year-old is unafraid to speak his mind. Just weeks after arriving in Australia he took on media agencies claiming they were “running scared” because traditional agencies were “falling in love” with the media again and that channel planning was more effective when sat with creative.
Then just last month following The Palace’s decision to pull out of the pitch for 3 Mobile, an account it held for almost four years, Burger told B&T there was a “disconnect between us and what they were looking for”. And in the same week following news that national planning director Hristos Varouhas was quitting after just five months, Burger said: “I don’t feel he’s made the difference or change that him leaving is going to affect us in any way
Burger also holds strong views on the quality of work being produced in Australia, branding both agencies and clients as “too safe” and the work as average. “If you had to take the average work out of South Africa and the average work out of Australia it would be on par… however, what I find from a South African perspective is highs and lows. Many more highs and lows than what you get in this market,” he says. “In Australia everything seems to be thinned out to this middle band of average. Not real shockers, but not really amazing work either. Australia is too safe, its way too safe. Clients are too safe. I think it has become fixated on research in a bad way. I think research is fantastic when it helps you to understand where the consumer’s head space is at, how they think and behave, but when it’s being used to work out what ideas should be and whether consumers will like something or not, then I think it becomes exceptionally problematic. I sometimes get the sense that in Australia we are stuck somewhere in the middle where we are not as maverick as South Africa and we are not as evolved in terms of understanding about how and when research can play a role.”
According to Mike Abel, Burger’s friend, former boss at Ogilvy South Africa and now rival CEO at M&C Saatchi Australia, his forthright views are typical. “Jacques is very much of an action man. He makes brave calls and I applaud what he did with 3. He is a very ambitious person, and although he is a very loyal person he is a very pragmatic person. He is very rational.”
And Burger’s ambition for The Palace? “To make it creatively famous again,” he says matter of factly.
