Dentsu’s Ben Coulson Has a Creative Climb Ahead, But He’s “Out of Base Camp”

Ben Coulson is going to build Dentsu Creative’s creative reputation incrementally. As he puts it, the agency is “on our journey” in Australia and New Zealand, and “if there's a hill that we're climbing, I think we've got ourselves out of base camp.”

“That is the path from the middle of the pack in agency-land to Agency of the Year,” the AUNZ chief creative officer tells LBB in what he promises will be his only major interview for the year.

“It's incremental success. It's working across your client base. It's working across all your disciplines, and it's lifting the whole body of work. For a while, it was almost possible and fashionable to kind of fluke it out of an award ripper that was maybe a bit of a charity idea or something. 

“I think that's well and truly gone now … You've got to lift each brief.”

In January, Ben’s fellow Dentsu leadership told LBB this is the year the agency will “arrive a little bit to the Australian market.” CEO Kirsty Muddle, chief client officer Cate Stuart-Robertson, and chief growth and strategy officer David Halter said 2024 was about refining the product in big pitches and asking, “What does good look like?” Ben agrees the “proposition is enticing”, and it’s now his job to prove it out in the body of work.

Competing in some of the biggest pitches of last year, like ANZ and Defence Force Recruiting, “made it real for us,” he says, “because we took it live and took it to potential clients we hadn't met before.” Dentsu Creative was working fast to flex its thinking on prickly, long-term brand questions.

“We stood in front of them and said, 'This is what we believe for you. This is how our belief and our philosophy would work for you and your business.’”

When he pitches this year, he’ll have a bigger local body of work behind him, he says, instead of illustrating the business’ capabilities and commitment to innovation by pointing to case studies from the likes of Japan or Canada.

“I think that might be the missing bit. If I was on the other side of those tables, I'd be probably saying, 'I like you guys, I like your style, the senior people in the room are impressive. What you're saying about the kind of work that cuts through, that can change our business for the better, that can have an impact on our business - this all makes sense. Show me your work.’ That's the bit we've got to live up to.”

Ben shows off the work so far in a ‘yearbook’ he made for his creative department. Across Australia and New Zealand, it includes Hammerbarn for Bunnings (the PR-led idea that started as a conversation between the BBC and Bunnings, and was “probably was going to end up being a stuffed toy” but ended up “a total reinvention of all Bunnings stores”); Aid Aisle, the supermarket set up in the middle of a marathon; a supermarket for bees; a documentary on organ donors, ‘Second Chance Champions’; and the use of ‘ancient influencers’ to promote mental health for Movember.

Opportunities like Hammerbarn build creative agility and confidence, he says, because he can say to his department, “Okay, guys, you've got that other brief that's gonna take three weeks, six reviews. Bounce over here. We're working on this project for PR. We need some ideas by two o'clock. We need three ideas. Chuck them into the washing machine. If something comes back, we will be making it in two weeks.”

Then there’s a brand platform for NIB, and its new work diverting billboards’ processing power into medical research progress. “Turns out that only about 6% of the computing power of the billboard goes to putting the artwork on the screen. So to use the rest of its computing power, we've got them to work on crunching data for cures for cancer.”

Last month, Dentsu Creative launched the latest iteration of The ICONIC’s ‘Got You Looking’ campaign, featuring men with floral beards and women chopping wood in gowns. Ben notes “you don’t want to be too heavy handed with the ideas,” for clients in the category, because “the clumsiest fashion ideas are the ones done by ad agencies … they overcook how much they force the idea into the work.” In its first 12 months, the brand platform has driven a 34% increase in unprompted brand awareness, 5% rise in consideration, and 9% boost in purchase intent for the business.

“By zigging whenever everyone else zags, you can come up with something that gets a disproportionate result,” Ben says. “It's got to be innovative. People can't see it coming.

“There is a really specific way that we've been able to achieve that work, and we'll keep doing it in the next year or so. It's not, 'Hey guys, let's just do some cool ideas'. There's a certain kind of idea we're looking for, and there's a certain way that we're going to extract those kinds of ideas on our tier 1 clients. Tier 1 ideas are what we call them. [It] means a really innovative, new, breakthrough kind of idea that can win at D&AD. It's got to be for our biggest clients.”

Cate referenced the same ambition earlier this year. “Our tier 1 clients are the clients that we currently have and love and want to grow,” she noted. “We've probably been a bit apologetic about ourselves. We have 20 insanely good clients that we don't shout about enough.”

Ben has established ‘hunting parties’ to find tier 1 ideas, a program of work which sees a strategist, suit, and creative join forces to dig for opportunities. Ideas are presented to senior leadership every fortnight, who then vote on which to pursue. Teams hunt “primarily around our own clients and the opportunities that exist there, but occasionally and inevitably, some really cool ideas come back for other people's clients too.” 

The best ideas “won’t come from the brief,” Ben says, and it’s his responsibility to teach clients to “not just expect your agency to do what they're told, but to do something much better than that.”

“It'll [a good idea] come from getting to know your client, doing a really good job of all the day to day work, getting their confidence and trust,” he continues, “then finding something that exists in culture, something that's going on in the world, and going, 'here's a way you can have something to say about this.’”

Ben joined Dentsu in September 2023 after stints at McCann, Clemenger, and Y&R, and a long-held admiration for the Japanese agency. He recalls a 2014 piece of work, ‘Sound of Honda / Ayrton Senna 1989’, which recreated the F1 legend’s fastest-ever lap and forced Ben to change the way he thought about creativity.

He loved the D&AD Black Pencil, Cannes Grand Prix-winning ‘My Japan Railway’, which created a stamp for every Japanese railway station. Another: ‘Inflation Cookbook’ out of Canada, which used data to solve a cost of living challenge by predicting supermarket discounts and generating recipes based on those ingredients.

Dentsu was also a partner in the Academy Award-winning Studio Ghibli film, ‘Spirited Away’, has announced an animated feature film about golf, and boasts a reality TV division making shows like ‘Monkey Prison’, which Ben describes as a cross between ‘Geordie Shore’ and ‘Survivor’.

“Each of these are really good examples of a hot network that goes about its business quietly, but produces absolute A-grade progressive, modern work.”

If the first year and a half has involved getting Dentsu AUNZ out of ‘base camp’, Ben’s next challenge is to get higher up the mountain. Part of his job is ensuring the team he’s leading isn’t scared of the ascent. After all, when you’re working with the biggest brands in the country, “these are big numbers, right? And these ideas can change the fortunes of companies.”

“You have to acknowledge that this particular type of creativity, called commercial creativity, it's trench warfare,” he says. 

“We really are on the frontline for where commerce and creativity collide. There's going to be heaps of pressure, and you've got to be accepting of that. You're going to get heaps of rejection. 

“I reckon my job, a lot of time, is to absorb that pressure for others. A CCO, or anyone in leadership, should be absorbing a lot of that pressure and not passing it on, because creativity needs a certain amount of free time to think about the possibilities, not worry about the problems.”

The creative product, ultimately, is the “first and last priority.” Speaking of which, he’s got to get back to work.

“This will be the only chat I'll have about our intentions and our work this year. I'm going to get on with making the work from here on in. You won't hear me crowing about it,” he says. 

“We love the quiet achiever thing. It's working for us, and we want to continue it … this will be the last time you hear from me this year. I've got plenty of work to do.”