5 Minutes with… Sarah Jenkins

Sarah> I was sorting out loads of stuff at home recently and I was pulling out school reports. And yeah, there was definitely an inkling, even as an eight-year-old. There was a lot of creativity, a lot of writing, a lot of energy. I think that's definitely translated. 

I grew up in Dorset which is a beautiful county on the south coast of England. It’s an idyllic place to go back to, but a little bit boring when you're 15. I had a love of creativity and writing - I always thought perhaps it's journalism, perhaps it's to write films? I used to write loads of plays when I was little. 

That was the golden age of advertising. The ads were as good as the TV - think Levi ads, or the Gold Blend couple. They actually got even more special, when some of the really clever, surreal ads started to come into play in the early '90s. I thought, 'This is pretty cool. I want some of that.' It was way cooler than being a journalist. 

Sarah> I didn't have a job. I wasn't successful in the graduate rounds. I thought if I want to work in advertising, I have to be in London. So I moved to London without a job, and did two jobs to make it work. I decided to double down and just get in front of as many agencies as possible. I was working so I couldn't doorstep, so I wrote 100 letters and because I'm so old, it couldn't be 100 emails.

I remember working really hard at that. I handmade these A4 collages to attach to all my cover letters. And I got a job within a week - it just shows that with enough audacity and imagination and determination, even back in the '90s, when arguably we were more closed, it was possible to smash your way into our industry.

Sarah> It's hard to pinpoint key moments where things shifted and accelerated, but I definitely know there are key people who elevated me, accelerated me and taught me how to be a leader. I think when you’re taught to be a leader, you rise, and it means that you rise in your future as well. 

Sara Bennison was my head of account management at Grey, the first time round. She ultimately pivoted client-side and was CMO, then interim CEO of Nationwide until about a year ago. One day, she called me in to talk to me about a pay rise. And I think a rise of around 10k was on the table, which was obviously a big chunk of cash. She said, 'But I wonder if you think that's the right amount. I want you to really think about everything you've done this year and how big the contribution you've made is.' She sat with me and we wrote down everything that I'd done. And at the end, I was like, 'Well I have done a lot.' She said, 'Well, do you think we should be asking for a bit more money then?' She came back a week later and I'd got a bigger increase. She taught me to value myself, to talk openly about money, to be really comfortable talking to anyone in my team about money, and making it as human as possible in a world where we often shy away from talking about value and compensation. It was an amazing lesson in really valuing myself and my contribution. 

Nils Leonard, when I’d just arrived at Grey the second time in 2010. He's obviously amazing now. And he was amazing then. He would be in these big reviews, everyone piling in with an opinion. I'd been there about two weeks and he said, 'Sarah, you always say good things. What do you think?' I don't think I'd ever even said anything in his presence at that point, but he said it in such a nice, gentle, confidence-boosting way. I remember saying something, him saying it's brilliant, and then they changed things around based on my feedback. The generosity he showed in the room was epic - to not just make sure I had a voice, but do it in such a kind way. He'd do that to everyone and anyone, and really understood the importance of looking after the youngest or the quietest is an awesome skill in leaders. Talent is everywhere, and sometimes you have to look a bit harder for it.

Karen Blackett was amazing because she made me think about being a leader beyond my job title – how I could be a leader within the industry, and represent and create change at scale. To really weaponise my influence for good.

Working with Chris Kay - I can say this because he's left Saatchis so it's less embarrassing – gave me one of my most awesome times of learning. He taught me a lot about the importance of bringing clarity as well as leaning into the fire and partnering strategists and creatives; a proper partnership, not just being supportive, but hard wiring how to bring value creatively and changing the destiny of the work. 

These people have been what's supercharged me, rather than specific moments or when we cracked the brief or solved a problem. I’ve been surrounded by giants.

Sarah> Zero chance of me saying one thing I’m afraid. 

We did some incredible work on Lucozade in the early age of proper social media and connected platforms. We relaunched Lucozade when I was at Grey, and that was phenomenal - a proper dent on culture, proper ambition. 

We made the swear jar for Comic Relief, which was amazing. It was a way of raising money for charity and we realised that phones could be the best swear jar in the world. I got to work with amazing people at Google, Apple, Paypal and Amazon. Basically all the  mobile tech giants worked together to help us build an app which listened to you and every time you swore, Stephen Fry would tell you and it would donate to Comic Relief. 

Upriser is something I'm disproportionately proud of. It has the same audacity and chutzpah as some of my favourite work but less barriers actually, because people care and want to make Upriser happen. There is a generosity and spirit that is driving that forward, and we’re excited to keep evolving it as we take it nationwide with incredible partners like ITV, Leith, Cowshed and IMA-HOME, and now with some really exciting data points that support how hard working it is.

Sarah> It's so awesome. An open-sourced platform designed to ensure an entire generation of school students are inspired by creativity and the creative industry. The architecture is perfect. It's hardwired for the rhythm of teachers and schools. We think we're busy; teachers and kids at schools are busier so it has to work to their cadence, not ours.

It's curriculum-based learning, so we go to where the curriculum is, rather than turning up to an assembly. 

There's a huge amount of work we do around Careers, and working out a structure to allow kids to come into Saatchi, and when we can go to them, to share our worlds. 

The third pillar is Character. That's really about doubling down on how lacking in confidence so many kids are. The impact of lockdown, limited curriculums and the horror show that is state school funding is squeezing confidence out of kids – particularly those from a working class, less privileged background. 

The architecture is immensely important. Everyone involved is busy, so we designed a playbook that is ‘off the shelf’, and says to schools and businesses: ‘Here's how you do it, here’s 70 pages of knowledge and wisdom and proof.’ Knowing so much of it is validated by Ofsted.

Then there’s the partnerships. Because it's not about just downloading the playbook and cracking on. We curate and we connect amazing creative companies with really progressive schools with brilliant assistant principals. That is alchemy. I'm so jealous of what ITV is doing with its school in Grenfell, for example. So it's competitive as well! That's good, because when we're competitive, we’re better as an industry.

We've squeezed creativity out of kids from a really young age, and it’s a privilege to spend time with them, to stop that erosion and the corrosive nature of our curriculum, to keep creativity there and keep their confidence up. 

We talk about creativity with the students at its broadest. If it means you go and be the best engineer in the world, that's amazing. If it means you become a doctor and you're more human about it because you spent more time thinking about what makes people tick, that’s incredible. It's definitely creativity at its widest as well as its most glorious. But of course, as an amazing by-product, we have more kids going, 'I want to come and work where you work.' And that is awesome.

Sarah> We've always been in commerce. That's what makes advertising, from its very inception. It's this beautiful marriage between creativity and business. I am definitely on an excited mission to get our value exchange right. Because what we bring to businesses is disproportionate. The leaps, the accelerators, the fixes, the energy, the belief. That's what we do for business all day long. The smarter we can be on that value exchange – not a race to the bottom line of an Excel spreadsheet, but really understanding the impact we have on our clients' business and on culture and beyond – the better we will be as a whole. 

Procurement are doing their job when they talk to us about the value exchange. So we need to have more honest conversations with our clients. We need to have more honest conversations as an industry. I think we’re still a little bit apologetic when it comes to talking about money. And we should have the chutzpah and the swagger of the management consultants. What we do is as powerful, we’re just weirdly lacking in confidence when it comes to making sure that as an industry, we're getting the value exchange right. It's not arrogance, it's just confidence in what we do. And I think more confidence can only be a good thing.

Sarah> It's an extraordinary campaign, the crew behind it are all so talented. It feels simple but it does take magic. You have to have the right talent, which sounds obvious but it's the attitude, the ambition, audacity and intent that’s transformative. You've got to start with people who've got that hardwired into them. And then it's the systems in place to make this happen. 

Production has to be upstream. You cannot come up with Hope United and then phone a producer to say, 'How do you make it happen?' You need production at the top table at the beginning of a project like that. To make work like this, you have to be multifaceted, multi-output, creative with budget, smart on licensing. There's a lot going on and a huge shout out to our Ruth Bates who heads up our data arts discipline, and chief production officer Jess Ringshall who’s been immense in building out our approach to production craft and delivery.

We have worked with amazing client partners who bring their own bravery and boldness, which is also game changing. The clients are a massive part of what's made Hope United so big and so important, because they recognise that we all need to double down.

All those things coming together: the amazing attitude of our crew, amazing systems in place, and amazing clients that want to make brilliant stuff happen.

Sarah> The work we've done in 2023 has been brilliant. The scale and speed of everything we do on EE is impressive and important. It helps the whole agency be more agile. It helps set the tempo. 

With EE 'Stay Connected', we had to be really intelligent about how we used our reach to make sure everyone got home safely. And we've got all these amazing media channels in which to do that; real time data solutions driven by EE.

With the British Heart Foundation, we had to navigate a lack of national interest in heart disease, one of the nation's biggest killers, and there’s lots of reasons why we have to lean in. Having a problem that is that gnarly at a societal level, and addressing [it] with real humanity, is such an important brief, and we’ve worked with amazing partners like Spotify to change the narrative.

Then it's the genuine side hustles and smarts that are going through the agency. Like getting an ad van to Westminster within 24 hours of Rishi Sunak's comments around mandatory maths for under 18s. A fast start back in the first days of January for all of us. 

With Solgar, we owned Blue Monday with just three billboards. We showed that when you take out of home and PR and properly bring them together, there's amazing alchemy.  

And with ‘Pregnant Then Screwed’, we helped bring about real government reform, an important move towards a more sustainable childcare funding system.

We’ve got some epic work for EE landing soon and there’s the not-so-small matter of the John Lewis Christmas campaign of course which is shaping up deliciously.

It's awe inspiring how proud I am of the agency and the crew, the quality of the work and the scale being navigated. I don't know how we're fitting it all in, but somehow we are. Momentum is king in this game. Because it brings confidence. It's got its own perpetual energy. So you've just got to lean into your own momentum and not let up once you're in that awesome groove. 2023 has been immense for our agency, I think 2024 is going to be even bigger.