How Blending Cultures Can Sharpen Creative Strategy
When WPP announced the mega-merger that would create VML in late 2023, the holding company asserted that it would be the “world’s largest creative company”. And it is, indeed, massive. So it should be capitalising on that international scale, right? VML’s chief strategy officer for the EMEA region Anna Vogt would say so. “Big global holding companies’ USP isn't just having 40 or 50 offices in EMEA,” she says. “Their USP should also be how they bring them all together, how you cross fertilise or how you take learnings from one market and put them into another. And if there isn't someone whose job it is to look after that, to foster those communities, or spot differences and similarities, it feels like you're not really capitalising on your big point of difference.”
Since stepping up from a UK to an EMEA role at the start of this year, Anna’s made that her job - at least across the strategic side of things. She’s spent a lot of her career working on big global accounts. While she was at BBH she looked after Persil, spinning out the ‘Dirt Is Good’ platform around the world. That was about understanding people around the world and finding the universal truth that can become a global idea. “You look for these big global insights that are relevant enough that every market in the world can connect to them, but then also give your local flex – take that insight and do it this way in India versus Brazil versus Morocco.”
The thing is, agencies don’t always apply that multicultural approach until they have a brief that specifically demands it. “We're doing it on brands, but we're not doing it on ourselves as agencies as much,” says Anna. “It's always like the cobbler's kids have the worst shoes. You're good at doing it for others but when it comes to leveraging that scale for yourself, you're maybe not as deliberate. How do you express your purpose, your point of difference? I mean, if you can't do that yourself, you haven't got hope in hell doing it for clients.”
To do that for VML, Anna has gathered a group of EMEA strategists – the CSOs from the markets that have one and a senior representative from the planning department from the other markets. “It's really important to have a rep from every office, because otherwise you're kind of being biassed towards the markets that have very built-out strategy capabilities,” she says. “Whereas markets that haven't have still got a lot to contribute and do things differently, which is also interesting, right?” So she’s been trying to find the right people to represent the dozens of nationalities represented across the region.
Beyond gathering that group, Anna’s tried not to over-operationalise it. “It's just a community to tap into. So I'm a really strong believer that no amount of process, no flowchart, no official structure is going to ever replace a really solid culture that you build as an agency or as a team. So it's about building a sense of culture and belonging, as obvious as that sounds. Having a community that comes together once a month, you've got stuff to talk about and everyone's got something to share or to feed back on. That's important.”
And then if a big pitch comes up, that can be raised in that group. People can help from different places with their specific life experiences. If it's a multi-regional pitch, and therefore you need an insight from Poland, France and Portugal.
Anna’s also keen to build a better picture of offices that might have different kinds of specialists. “I'm making this up, but Portugal might be really good at brand design, for example. Having that from a strategic perspective is useful,” she says. “Poland might be really great at UX, so they can bring that in. I don't think it's just having nationalities represented but it's also the skills and the skill sets that are developed in those individual markets that you can start to harness, you can call on and help each other out.”
When she stepped up to the EMEA role, Anna was particularly excited for the cultural blending because, as a self-described ‘third-culture kid’, she’s always benefitted from having a multinational background. With one German and one American parent she grew up between Germany, America and Switzerland. When she was 12 her parents sent her across the border from Geneva to a French school. “I didn't speak a single word of French. And I got stuck into a totally native educational system. That's quite tough,” she says. “But once you get through the hard bit, you learn an awful lot. And in hindsight, it really does shape how you fit in or decide not to fit in, how you own your difference and actually be proud of your difference. But it made sure I can contextualise it in a way which is relevant for the situation that I’m in. And I've always thought that was really relevant to strategy.” Later, Anna lived in the UAE for a while too, has spent most of her career in the UK and married a Swedish man, so “it's a total mix,” she says.
There’s a good reframing of your perspective that comes from being immersed in many cultures, Anna feels, and it changes the way you do business. “It's not about being right or wrong. It's about understanding the context that you're operating in and understanding the rules of the game. I think oftentimes, if you're biassed with one particular culture, one way of operating, you come in and just want to assert the status quo. You know it's worked here, so why wouldn't it work here? You can sometimes see that in meetings with people who maybe haven't had that sort of multicultural exposure, where it becomes a ping pong match (‘No, it's this way.’ ‘No, it can't work.’ ‘But it should work.’) And actually, I think you just have to understand what's driving the market. What's driving decision making, what's driving behaviour, what's driving the cultural tensions or norms? Then you try and make that work. I think that's where strategy's really brilliant, as a skill set or craft where you can then create that narrative that still has a connection to the original thought, but you absolutely adapt it and translate it in a way which is relevant and feels native for the market that you're in.”
Working on the Persil ‘Dirt Is Good’ platform was Anna’s chance to put that into action. That insight was realised by interviewing people across many different markets. “You look for the commonality, then you ladder it up and then you sort of bring it back down again,” she says.
Because the universal truth can’t be told the same way in every country. “'Dirt is Good', was a central realisation and celebration that dirt is a good development tool for kids. That's great. It's like a philosophy,” she says. But it’s not without its problems as an idea. If you go to some parts of the world with less sanitation or access to clean water, dirt can be lethal. Which meant that rolling that idea out globally was complicated. “How do you take that thought and then execute it in a way which still pays homage to the original thought, but is locally adaptable? So that you're being sensitive to the differences and also maximising the insight that you can bring from a particular culture.”
VML has applied this same thinking to the Postcode Lottery. “How people play the lottery, their relationship to winning, their relationship to prizes, their relationship to communities is very, very different market to market,” says Anna. When you play with your postcode, you always play with your neighbours, as a street or community. Then you share the prize if your postcode gets drawn. “Now, that sense of community and wanting to win with your neighbours is quite strong in the UK,” says Anna. “When you go to Germany, you don't want anything to do with your neighbours. Thank you very much. I'll keep the money for myself,” she laughs. “It's not quite that bad. But it is different how they view these things. Then you have to find a way of expressing the brand in a way which plays to the community spirit element of one market, and then another market that might be more solo oriented.
“How do you bridge that? Actually, the thing that overrides all of that is using your postcode to unlock something. It might be unlocking different things by market, depending on what you believe in, or whatever drives your purchase decision. But that's another interesting way of people looking at things quite differently, depending on local culture.”
Anyone who’s been in a global advertising award jury has seen the importance of local insights play out. Anna was judging at Cannes Lions a couple of years ago and remembers a French ad that heavily relied on some sonic branding. Nobody understood how well-known that small tune was until someone pointed out its importance. If that knowledge of French culture hadn’t been in the room, the work wouldn’t have earned the consideration it deserved.
Third culture kids like Anna have even more breadth to draw on for this kind of thinking, and thankfully they’re getting more common in the workplace. Anna considers London, where she’s worked for 25 years, which is increasingly made up of international cultures. In 2022, two-thirds of live births in London occurred to parents where either one or both parents were born outside of the UK. “The implication is a lot of people are being born to people from different cultures living in the UK,” says Anna. And so all it then takes to become a third culture kid is for them to then go and live in another country from either their parents or the place that they grew up in.
“I think the question is, what do you do with people like that? Because maybe not so much anymore, but certainly when I started off in advertising, you’d bring someone in from another market, it was like 'They don't get the UK,' 'They don't know the Tesco ad from 1965.' Can we really use them in the right way?” That’s not how Anna sees it. “I think being able to use outsiders on the inside of an organisation is really useful, as long as they're flanked by people who do get the context locally. Having that outside perspective is invaluable. And that's where big networks stand to win.”
It’s convenient for Anna that VML’s positioning is about 'Connected Brands'. “That sense of connection is what we do for brands[...] But I think the whole philosophy of connection, if you take it up a level, is one that we should all be living by, even when we deal with each other. Look, we're not actually doing anything differently from what you might do if you work on Ford globally, or any of the other big brands globally, where you will have regular check-ins with your counterparts in other markets. It's kind of that. You just do it for yourself, and figure out how you can then harness that and make it more relevant to bigger clients.”
With a past as a competitive swimmer on the German national team, Anna laughs about how she peppers all of her conversations with sports analogies. She pulls one out to illustrate the value of bringing VML’s offices in different geographies closer together: “This study showed how often when people swim in relays, they always perform faster than in individual races, even beyond a margin you would say is normal. And I think the reason is when you're in a team, you perform for each other. So there's a sense of responsibility for one another. It's not just about me; it's about these other people.
“I think you do get a much higher performance culture than if you just operate individually. And that takes time and investment because if you only show up to every fifth meeting, you're never going to get to know people and you're not going to understand your place and their place. But if you're willing to invest in that then I think there's loads of benefits. And that's the journey that we're on at the moment.”
