CMOs Scrutinising Budgets? Learn From Media Agencies and “Size Opportunity”: Davy Rennie

Agencies shouldn’t be scared of clients scrutinising their budgets, according to Digitas and Balance Australia CEO Davy Rennie, but embrace the opportunity to learn from media agencies.

“It's not so much that they're dialing back. They want to know that what they're spending has ROI,” the exec told LBB of marketers’ current approach.

“I'm okay with clients putting a lot of scrutiny on budgets, because what it makes us do is actually size the opportunity at the start of the conversation.

“Media have done it for decades, where you do buy your own growth, and I think they're really good at doing that. Very sophisticated creative agencies and digital agencies really need to learn from that as well.”

Since joining a year ago, the CEO has structured the business into five service lines – creative, intelligence, commerce, technology, and integrated media – to better meet clients’ needs. He united data and strategy to form an ‘intelligence’ unit because “I had a real bug bear about strategists going off and doing strategies and then retro-fitting data.”

Now, “Nothing goes out of digital strategically that doesn't have a data science lens over the top of it. It's critical for what we do. We're not in the guessing game, we're in the certainty game.”

That intelligence team is the reason the business can accurately predict ROI, and arm marketers for conversations with their boards and key stakeholders.

“What we've done with our intelligence team is we always look at the dollar value that a client's investment can generate if we follow our principles of creative intelligence and our brand position of connected experiences,” he said during the interview at Publicis Groupe’s Pyrmont offices in Sydney.

“So, 'When you invest in this and your activity looks like this, we can generate this size of opportunity'. That's so important. I don't think any agency who is wanting to compete in today's hyper-competitive world can go into opportunities without sizing the prize.”

Talking about likely return on investment upfront means chief marketers are “armed for the conversation, either with franchisees or with the board or with their CEOs to go, 'This is why we're doing something.'”

The most clever marketers are those that are truly customer focused, he said, those that are constantly asking, “How am I talking to my customer? How am I keeping them in my ecosystem? How am I making them continuously loyal, and how am I getting them to spend more over their customer lifetime?” Digitas and Balance are becoming “very, very sticky” with that kind of CMO, the ex-Tribal MD said.

“The idea of chief customer officer, you're seeing that sort of fade away a little bit now. You saw a real influx in it. A customer-centric marketer is really, really important.”

Davy's most “pivotal” achievement in the job to-date was Digitas’ retention of the McDonald’s CRM business late last year.

He complimented the “amazing partners” within the McDonald’s agency village, including “OMD and Wiedens and Akcelo” (in January, Wieden+Kennedy revealed to LBB it was setting up a Sydney outpost to service the account).

Now, the fast food brand is “asking us to step further forward in the creative process and come with intelligence. And that's something that we are well-equipped to do with a considerably bigger intelligence practice, and with some amazing tools.”

Accordingly, and connected to that win, he reshaped his team “for a future we had promised to McDonald’s.”

He hired national head of strategy and customer experience, Sarah Heitkamp and chief client partner Millie Menage, promoted key talent, and streamlined existing roles. Simon Brock, formerly GM and ECD, has been given space to focus purely on the creative product while Sebastian Klett has become GM of both businesses. Ex-audience and data strategy director Elise Morris has stepped up to head of intelligence, and he’s set to make further leadership hires in the coming months.

“We wanted a leadership team that was going to be obsessed with customer marketing,” he said.

He recalled he and Publicis Groupe CEO Michael Rebelo were impressed with Elise’s pitch presentation to the McDonald’s clients, while a recent presentation by Sarah led him to think, “There's some people that you watch present that just make you want to come back to work the next day. I talk about being the dumbest person in the room. I was just sitting there like, 'Jesus Christ.’”

Balance, meanwhile, is finding success by applying its tech and commerce capabilities to “really complex commerce challenges,” versus “just selling t-shirts.”

“That's fascinating, doing it on technologies that you wouldn't think are enterprise-level, or enterprise-ready, or even government-ready. We're starting to do that.”

Davy joined Publicis last year after six years at DDB, primarily leading its digital arm, and three years after Publicis acquired commerce unit Balance. Publicis’ ‘Power of One’ model has led to close collaboration with the holding company’s media and creative agencies, including Zenith, Leo, Spark Foundry, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Starcom, resulting in the connection of CRM, media, data, and creativity to “create richer customer experiences and media experiences.”

“Whenever we have what we call the multiplier effect, when we have two or more Publicis Groupe companies on a client, you start to see how effective that becomes. Not just efficient with spend, but effective,” Davy said.

“Over the next year, we're hoping to see a lot of partners say, 'Talk to us more about connecting CRM and media, and why it's so important.

“We're becoming more fluent in all of our body language as well. The CEO cohort here are very, very good at connecting and collaborating, and so are our teams, where there's no walls, there's no silos, there's no politics. It's just put the customer in the middle, put the brand right beside them, and access the talent that you need.”