The first line of Simon Vicars’ LinkedIn profile simply reads: “One of the most prolifically awarded Creatives in the world”.
That line might make you think that the Kiwi creative, who has spent the last three years as the chief creative officer of Colenso BBDO, has quite a high opinion of himself. But when we dial in for a video call with Vicars, he’s currently wrangling with a fork shortage in the agency’s Auckland office.
It’s a far cry, perhaps, from the red carpet at Cannes. But, when you’ve won as many gongs as Vicars, scrabbling around to find a fork is probably quite refreshing.
“Colenso always aims to have creative excellence with consistency. That’s our ambition. It’s quite easy to win, actually, but it’s really hard to win consistently,” he said.
“To win back-to-back Grands Prix is a surreal moment. It feels so impossible that when you win, it’s kind of a surreal experience. What I love about winning big at Cannes is that it never satisfies us. Whereas I’ve seen agencies come from nowhere to great heights and disappear again.”
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Enduring Excellence
Colenso’s continued success is worthy of note. At this year’s show in the south of France, its “Adoptable by Pedigree” campaign picked up a silver in Creative Business Transformation and a bronze and a gold in the Direct category. It also picked up the Grand Prix in Outdoor. Colenso also won a bronze in the Direct category for “Meowzer” for Whiskas. It was later ranked as the top Pacific agency by Lions for the second year running.
“I’ve learned to handle those moments better. The more moments [winning] that I’ve experienced, the more I’ve figured out how to operate within them and celebrating and enjoying that moment is such an important part of it,” he explained.
“For a very long time, I would get that trophy and say ‘How are we going to do this again?’ That would be my first reaction and I couldn’t really enjoy the win.”
“The big wins we’ve had over the last couple of years have been big celebration moments because of the wonderful ripple that success has right through our clients’ businesses, their marketing departments and then right through Colenso,” Vicars added.
“The work fixes everything, as the saying goes. You can do all the team building away days in the world but nothing galvanises a team like winning.”
Vicars’ assertion stands at odds with what seems to be the prevailing view of the industry: clients don’t care about awards.
“They love it,” he conjectures.
“They love it because the work is moving their category forward, so if they can be attached to work that is moving the category forward, that is brilliant for their brand but also brilliant for them and their marketing team.
“There’s an element of vindication, there’s an element of relief. There’s the vindication of doing something outside category convention and there’s an element of relief in that celebration because they’ve done something that is different to what everyone else is doing.”
Money Makes The World Go Round
Vicars does concede, however, that there is an “awkwardness” around celebrating creativity that does not deliver commercial results. But he added that the Colenso team are “just as uncomfortable” about that as the agency’s clients are. He also says that there is an “awareness” within Colenso about when ideas are going to be released – anything after late March, he believes, is too late for recognition in Cannes.
At Colenso, the ability to win awards and generate a return on award-winning work for clients is enabled through the “curation” of its client list. Vicars said that the agency works hard to ensure that its clients – which include Medibank, the Bank of New Zealand, Delivereasy, and telco Spark as well as the aforementioned Pedigree – have the same ambition as Colenso and don’t have to be sold on the value of creativity. Just yesterday, Colenso scooped a bunch of gongs at the Aotearoa Effies.
“All our clients understand that mediocre work takes an extraordinary amount of funding to get into people’s lives. Whereas, creativity can supercharge a message. That conversation happens right at the start of a new relationship. We turn down a bunch of pitches and we are very careful about the clients that we let in the building,” he said.
“We have this wonderful chemistry process that Rob Campbell [chief strategy officer] and Ange [Watson, managing director] are always in. We talk [to prospective clients] about truth over harmony. The thing I first noticed when I came to Colenso [following four years at DDB] was that everyone spoke so simply. The strategy department spoke so simply and, all of a sudden, client-side, everyone spoke so simply.”
“Rather than having a harmonious relationship that has a whole bunch of damaged stuff beneath, we just try to say how we feel and always speak the truth. Our clients know that it’s coming from the best place, not a place that is excited about conflict, but a place that is in their best interest.”
Small Market Advantage?
Unkind readers might say that Colenso is in a gilded position. The New Zealand market is small – at the last count, its population was roughly the same as Greater Perth and Brisbane combined, or around the same size as Greater Melbourne. With that lack of size, it is sometimes felt that the risk is lower for clients, especially global ones.
Colenso serves as Pedigree’s global innovation hub and it “beta test[s] innovation” for the pet food brand before it is rolled out around the world. But that innovation doesn’t necessarily take the form of a big, flashy campaign. Vicars said that the digital shelter management tool it built as part of ‘Adoptable’ was perhaps its “most unsexy” work for Pedigree.
Other unkind readers may say that with Colenso as part of the Clemenger Group, which in turn is owned by Omnicom, the agency is ensured a level of financial security that allows it to create its risk-taking work and even turn clients away. Perhaps they are right.
But then independent agencies such as Howatson+Company and Thinkerbell – to say nothing of New Zealand-born Special – have been performing admirably in terms of client and award wins over the past 12 months. Thinkerbell is B&T’s reigning Advertising Agency of the Year, for instance, and Special took home the Grand Prix at last year’s B&T Awards.
Without global overlords in Paris, London or New York, does Vicars think that Colenso stands alone when arguably the world’s best ad agencies are ultimately run out of smaller, more unassuming offices in Surry Hills, Richmond, Auckland, Shoreditch and Brooklyn rather than Madison Avenue, the City of London or one of Paris’ arrondissement?
“Empires are built and crumble and built and crumble,” said Vicars.
“Over 17 years, I’ve seen that trend go this way and that. It’s just the natural life cycle of the industry and we are in a different cycle. That’s how I interpret it. The pendulum will swing again at some point. It might even swing to in-house creative with the likes of Telstra almost building an in-house capability with +61. I see it as an era and the pendulum will swing again.
“I think it is exciting for anyone in a network when the entire industry is starting to hum. Whether the energy is slightly outside a network for me, doesn’t really matter. Colenso is at its best when DDB Auckland is at its best, Special Auckland is at its best, Ogilvy and such. I think it’s great when the industry is rising.”
We’ll drink to that. We may even try a spoonful (given Colenso’s fork shortage) of Pedigree.
