Leo ECDs’ Hiring Spree Includes Stand-Up Comedian, Satirist: “It’s A Strategy, and It’s a Smart One”

Leo Australia’s executive creative directors credit a “safe to fail” culture and alignment of ambition with client partners for the agency’s rapid growth period.

Leo has hired 11 new creatives in the past six months, including former Ogilvy ECD Hilary Badger to head up the Melbourne department. In Sydney, Tim Woolford and Tommy Cehak were promoted to their joint ECD roles. In what the trio describe as a deliberate move to bolster creativity, Leo is fishing from a diverse creative pool, including a stand-up comedian and a satirist, following a strategic refresh of the creative department.

Tim tells LBB he feels a “genuine sense of excitement and energy” across the company.

“It’s a testament to what the market is seeing, and there's a sense that Leo is a place to go to get some of the best work of your career out the door and made,” he says.

“We’re not a creative department, we’re a creative agency. We’re balancing ambition with the culture of a creative agency.

“We protect the creative process and encourage experimentation. Wherever ideas come from in the agency, trying things and experimenting are essential to the creative process. Protecting that allows people to feel like they can be braver, take bigger swings, and do better work.”

Tim also praises the agency’s “highly creative, ambitious clients” like Suncorp, and ANZ -- Leo won the hotly-contested account last October.

“We treat creative freedom and effectiveness as a partnership, not a trade-off,” he says.

“There is a real culture of alignment here about what makes great creativity, and also extremely effective work.”

Hilary and Tommy agree the client roster shares the creatives’ vision. Tommy says the creatives they’re hiring “view Leo and our clients as the place where they can step up and do the best work of their career”, while Hilary adds, “Our client list is full of ambitious marketers who see creativity as a force multiplier and a key differentiator for their own brands.”

“It's at a point where clients demand creativity, but clients have met the demand for creative excellence and are pushing that way,” she says.

“So at this moment in time, our agency and client ambitions are really aligned, because clients understand that creativity is the differentiator to business growth.”

Hilary adds, “Creatives are very good barometers of where momentum is.

“Creatives want to go to play where there’s an opportunity to create good work, and where clients are really invested in creativity. They’re in tune with which agencies are rising and where the energy and excitement are.”

Fellow ECD Tommy references work for Suncorp as examples of long-term brand building ideas that express the creative leaders’ ambition. “If you look back on projects like ‘One House’, ‘Resilience Road, and ‘Haven’… we’ve been doing excellent work that builds on itself year on year.

“It's about providing the sort of environment that allows people to do their best work without fear of failure, and being able to try things and push things in new directions to get to the best result.

“When you feel free and motivated, it inspires and leads to the best kind of work.”

Hilary notes the scale of a network agency like Publicis’ Leo is attractive to creative talent, and stresses the importance of entertaining consumers.

“It’s no longer a situation where people are sitting passively in their living rooms waiting for our ads to land there. We have to invite them in.

“Creativity is our product -- it’s what the whole agency is framed around.”

Tommy adds a key strength of Leo’s creative team are its creatives’ diverse backgrounds.

“Diverse perspectives, background[s], and interests load up what we have to offer,” he says. “Creatively, more perspectives, skill-sets, and insights make us stronger.”

Tim agrees, revealing one member of the team “moonlights for the Betoota Advocate” in their spare time, while another is a stand-up comedian.

“A stand-up comedian knows how to read a room, time a punch line, and land an insight in a space of 10 seconds, and in a creative environment that's invaluable,” he says. “So yes, we have diverse skill sets coming in and they elevate the work dramatically.

“These are people with a cultural pulse -- they know what's going on out in the world, and you know they are, they are responding and reacting to that in ways that are entertaining people.

“We’re confident because we’ve seen what happens when great ideas are given the right backing and support, when the right creative resource, the right creative people and teams are put behind work, great work. It's not a risk -- it's a strategy, and it's a smart one.

“Our team having diverse backgrounds is par for the course now, and will only elevate our work.”

Hilary says her main experience with the agency so far is “just how central creativity is” to the overall project.

“Our philosophy is about how, as an agency, we can reinvent brands, businesses, and behaviour,” she explains.

“Those are the ‘big picture’ creative problems to solve. It’s an ambition that needs to be filled with the right people who are thinking from a business problem-solving approach.

“Creativity is the business across the whole agency, and that's super exciting. It’s the recipe for success.”

Tim calls Hilary’s summation “spot on”.

“To build on that, I've always really firmly believed that talented people want to do work where they feel their best ideas will be seen and made,” Tim says.

“I've never felt like we’re hiring to patch anything -- we’re hiring to swing bigger and make more creatively ambitious projects.

“At the end of the day, if people feel proud of what they're making and who they're making it with, they're going to stick around.”