Don’t Talk to Justin Ricketts about Ads

Justin has a degree in fine art. Creativity runs through his veins. It is what he loves, and it is his uniquely creative brain that has provided him with opportunity after opportunity.  

Initially, the plan was to become an artist but, in practice, the unsteady income wasn’t going to pay the bills. He found Ogilvy in '97, 'a sophisticated place at a time when advertising was booming’, as he describes it. Fast forward to the year 2017, and Justin found himself CEO of Hogarth Australia. With a myriad of positions in between, including the founder of Ensemble Australia and general manager of Octagon Australia.  

During his time as CEO, he has transformed the business model into something completely new. According to Justin, the future of Hogarth Australia relied on taking control of their own destiny. It was about rearranging the traditional model of an advertising agency and focusing on growing local clients. This ever-growing model has seen Hogarth Australia create a company that is transcending past the traditional advertising box.

Justin touched on the rise of inflation and how this is affecting the budgets of clients. With these two factors, he believes that ‘fundamental transformation’ is needed not only for brands to survive but also for all advertising agencies as well. With the rise of social media, streaming services and even online shopping, clients have less money to spend but are in need of more content than ever before. While he believes that traditional campaigns are still relevant to the industry, they aren’t the only way to go about getting a brands message across

“We’re certainly seeing brands move away from linear campaigns and move towards building platforms where brand messages can last longer and expand as time goes on, rather than a one-off TVC that airs for a few months. We are trying to build a platform where that is accessible for the clients that want to move in that direction”, he said.

The best and most current examples of this new wave of thinking can be seen in the partnership between Hogarth Australia and Woolworths. All non-advertising content, for example, recipes, catalogues, the signs above the freezer section, and the free lifestyle and food magazines at the checkouts, are all being made by Hogarth Australia. A team of about 25 people in a 3000 square metre production studio are dedicated to providing consumers with all of Woolworths’ content. 

It’s an incredible feat for an advertising agency and a model that is growing as Hogarth Australia continues to learn. “We are the magic in the middle, focused on omni channel personalisation, digital addressable channels,” he said as he described the work produced for Woolworths. 

Coupling this content creation with a direct-to-client model, Justin used the analogy of an architect and an engineer. He explained it as follows: if you want a stunning house, you involve an architect. The architect, however, doesn’t then oversee the engineer, they let them do their job. Justin's vision for a future where the client and advertising agency work in tandem from start to finish with no middleman is one that is dripping in poetic artistic flair. 

Some may see the world of content creation - with all its many different avenues and forms it can take - as messy and chaotic. Something to be left to someone else to deal with. It takes a problem solver to see through the chaos and the mess and find the potential. But it takes an artist to see the chaos and mess as potential. 

Lucky for Hogarth Australia, Justin has a degree in fine art.