AKQA Australia A “Work-in-Progress” But Capable of “Ideas That Haven’t Even Been Possible”

​AKQA Australia has ambitions to produce “ideas that haven’t even been possible and work that hasn’t even been thought of” as it beds in top creative hires and its merger with whiteGREY.

“I want us to be recognised in this market as a world-class, leading creative agency,” managing director Jeremy Smart told LBB in an interview at WPP’s Sydney campus.

“We're not there yet. We need to continue to be open to things that we aren't doing today ... whether that's rituals, whether that's ways of working, whether that's fusing teams together or people together. And that's going to come not just through us as leaders making decisions. It's going to come through our ability to listen to our people and observe what's needed.”

A year since whiteGREY was officially merged into AKQA in the local market (globally, Grey’s reporting line recently switched from AKQA to Ogilvy), Jeremy and general manager Justine Leong are realistic about how much is still left to do. As Justine put it, “The reality is, there is no such thing as a perfect merge.”

“We're probably where we expected to be. We were decisive early on, on a lot of the changes and decisions that we needed to make,” Jeremy said.

“So where are we today? Like a lot of M&As, we remain a work-in-progress, and it will continue to be that way for a period of time. There's no doubt.

“There's still work to be done … and we would be kidding ourselves if we were sitting here saying to you, 'No, no, everything's great, we're rock solid, and we've landed.' There's so much you don't know through the process that you can only learn through the process.”

“It's Okay To Step On Each Other's Toes”

Jeremy joined AKQA in October 2023, just five months before the merger was announced. He relied a lot on 14-year Grey veteran Justine, who had weathered the merger of The White Agency with Grey Group in 2017 and knew what the newly-shaped business “wanted to achieve coming together” this time around.

The leadership team drafted a set of principles to “hold ourselves accountable to”, which included an acknowledgement that the early days would be messy. They made an agreement: “It's okay to step on each other's toes. We knew there were going to be moments where things overlapped, or there was tension, or things might not fit perfectly,” Justine said.

“Finding and working through those moments together and it being okay to say to someone, 'Yes, it's not right, but we'll get through it, and we will find ways through it, I think was really important'.”

The first merger taught her, “Transparency is everything. When you are bringing people together that don't know each other, when you are learning new ways of working and operations, when you're combining personalities and cultures, the only way that you really can open up and understand each other is through that transparency.

“It's sort of been okay to not be okay.”

As a result, leadership preserved the individual agencies’ important rituals – like Grey’s Monday morning all-staff meeting called 9:39, because “it never really started at 9:30” – and committed to “learn from some of the perhaps missteps of other M&As in the past,” as Jeremy explained.

“We used a third party to help us, and that's really important from an objectivity perspective, because it removes any of that awkwardness.”

One of their leadership principles was generosity: of time, information, and space. It meant Justine could observe “where there are beautiful sweet spots” and which of the 200 people across the business’ Sydney and Melbourne offices to connect.

“Mergers can be a distraction to what we're doing in our everyday jobs and the work we're doing for clients,” she said.

“But extending ourselves to people across the agency, being open, being accessible, being giving of information and not withholding anything was really important.”

But good things take time. And as Jeremy noted, while “so much in our world and our lives” is instantaneous, “sometimes we just need to slow down and say, 'Hang on, this is going to take some time. It's okay. We're going to get there.'”

AKQA’s client roster includes Bunnings, HESTA, KFC, Adore Beauty, Country Road, Officeworks, Visit Victoria, and Volvo. Jeremy said there are further new business wins to be announced, and clients have been understanding as the agency has adjusted. One MD gave the feedback, “You haven’t missed a beat”, which Jeremy called “nice validation.”

“We're hardest on ourselves, too, and we have high expectations,” he said, but clients’ trust and patience has been “built on credibility, it's built on reliability, and it's built around intimacy, or the space that you create.”

“We're Investing in the Best People”

AKQA’s renewed ambitions became clear to the market with former AUNZ ECD Tim Devine’s promotion to global chief invention officer and the appointment of Tara McKenty as ECD, as revealed by LBB in December. The highly-regarded ex-BMF and Google creative supercharged the creative department and laid the groundwork for the addition of Sarah McGregor last month.

Jeremy said both hires are a statement of intent, “a demonstration internally to our people, externally to the market, and also to our clients, that whilst we remain a work in progress, we're evolving in the right way.”

Tara has “elevated the craft, there’s no doubt about that,” Jeremy said. “We've seen that evident in the work that we're now producing, and she's also attracting the right kind of talent we want.”

Justine added, “It shows our people we're investing in the best people at their craft and the type of work that we want to do.”

The type of work AKQA does when it is at its best, Justine argued, includes the project to promote the Netflix thriller, ‘It’s What’s Inside’, which saw the agency create a digital body-swapping experience powered by machine learning.

Then there’s ‘Action Audio’, which gives visually impaired people the ability to follow sports in real-time.

“AKQA is exceptional,” Justine said. “It works for some of the best clients and brands that any agency would want to work with across the world. The type of work that it's famous for and being acknowledged for is world-first and world-changing, and seeing what AKQA does on a global scale and level in other markets, that is what I want to see come to fruition here in Australia.”

Local Grey projects like Hope Narratives and Volvo’s Living Seawall also act as inspiration for what the AKQA of the future can create. The former is a modular language system developed to help people grieving a missing person express themselves and find hope.

The ‘Living Seawall’, meanwhile, used concrete reinforced with recycled plastic to create seawall tiles in Sydney Harbour that resemble mangroves, improving water quality and biodiversity.

While “it does feel like we have been under the radar,” Justine is confident AKQA won’t be underestimated for long, thanks to hires like Tara and Sarah, and upcoming work and wins that “I think will be surprising to the industry”.

“Every agency is going through change, going through merge, going through adding on services and different models to the mix, and we are operating in a really complex world,” she said.

“We have this incredible depth of experience and deep technology skills in making and crafting work that exists, and then you add on what we bring from the traditional whiteGREY type of creativity.

“There is no formula out there in any other agency [that mimics] what we have created here, and what can exist then is ideas that haven't even been possible and work that hasn't even been thought of, and creativity that, in its truest form, is solving clients' problems in incredibly wonderful, innovative, beautiful ways that aren't structured by a format or a platform or need to fit into a box.”