Caroline Catterall on Finding the Ideas People Choose

“Everything that we do needs to put the audience first,” says Caroline Catterall, CEO and founder of Keep Left. “In fact, when we talk about being ‘audience first’, perhaps a better way to talk about it would be ‘audience obsessed’.

She laughs jovially, but she’s not kidding. Keep Left has gone through multiple evolutions from when it was founded almost 20 years ago, but it has remained tightly focused on culture, people, and the beating pulse of both. 

“About seven years ago, the evolution of storytelling tools helped us develop some serious capability in content and in earned media and content marketing, which was awesome. We’ve spent the last several years really honing that idea; making sure we had the right strategy to make the most of the business and the agency we’d become… Our superpower at Keep Left has always been that we know how to earn attention. That's what we've done for 20 years. And there's a real currency in that today.”

Right now, Keep Left’s approach to earning attention is… if not changing exactly, certainly evolving. They’ve just launched a new agency positioning entitled ‘Ideas People Choose’, described by Caroline in her official statement as “an agency model that genuinely puts the audience first and breaks down silos. The world doesn’t exist in earned, owned and paid and neither do we.”

The positioning, then, marks the latest example of Keep Left harnessing their “superpower”, as Caroline puts it.

“We’ve got a whole host of internal processes that are intended to make sure we’re paying attention to an audience that’s different from ourselves. I think one of the things our industry gets criticised for (and this isn’t always true, but it can be) is that the majority of people live within six postcodes across Melbourne and Sydney. Even if that’s not always the case, it’s worth pushing against all the same. That’s why we do New Shoes Days. That’s why we do Whole Brain Thinking.”

New Shoes Days are an empathy-building initiative, and one Caroline is especially proud of. “The whole idea is that each Keep Left team member can take time out of the business and spend time walking in the shoes of somebody that they can't personally relate to, but that they need to understand.”

The experience is qualitative, intimate, and involved. “They’ve been hanging out with tradies; they’ve been spending time in residential aged-care homes. You can imagine how hard it might be for a bunch of 20 year olds to think 40, 50 years ahead and imagine the kinds of consumer decisions they might have to make at that age. How can you create a campaign an audience is going to relate to if you don’t understand that audience? At its heart, being ‘audience first’ means being empathetic. That’s what we’re doing here.”

Another thing we've done is to introduce a debate series called Good Chats. We gather together once a month and the team debates different topics. You get assigned a side, which you may or may not agree with, and then you have to make that case. There’s an obvious benefit here: we can't just be operating in our own heads and creating work that we like, it has to be in service of the client. So, I think back to last month's Good Chats. One of the topics was ‘Is Nick Kyrgios good for tennis?’ One of our art directors was on the ‘he's no good’ side, and he debated it with so much gusto  that at the end I almost couldn’t believe it when he told me that he actually loved the man. Which is the ideal, of course. We need a culture and a team that have really broad minds, that isn’t trapped in its own bubble. I think that matters especially in a post-COVID landscape. There’s every danger that our worlds, thanks to algorithms and whatnot, just end up becoming smaller. That’s not what we’re about at Keep Left. We’re about opening up.”

To that end, the agency has also launched a ‘democratised ideation process’. What this means, in brass tacks, is a middle ground between, as Caroline puts it, “the model of just giving it to an art director and a copywriter and letting them spend three days in a room, or what we tried five-plus years ago where brainstorms were kind of a big ‘all in’ affair. We've got 45 people in Keep Left across Melbourne and Sydney. Ideas should not just sit with two or three people.”

As she describes the process behind Whole Brain Thinking, Caroline grows particularly animated. It’s clear that this involved, empathetic approach is the epitome of Keep Left’s value set.

“You hire someone based on their skills, but their life experience is almost just as important. When a brief comes in, we’ll cast the team that works on that to not just be people with different specialisations, but also different life experiences. The ideas will sort of be raw and rough. And then our executive creative director Blair Kimber, will work with our creative trio to finesse whatever ideas that initial team develops.”

Caroline has worked tirelessly to create something new at Keep Left - an agency as focused on empathy within the company as without. With its new brand positioning, this model is ready to be implemented as fully as possible. Caroline looks to the future with optimism and excitement.

“It brings together everything we’ve been building. There’s always substance behind what we do, and we wanted to make sure this wasn’t just something management said - this was something the team could actually sink their teeth into. It’s a cultural shift we’ve pulled off here. I think that’s just incredible.”