Local Work Can Be Globally Acclaimed. Starting With That Ambition Jinxes It

Making Australian work with the intention of rolling it out in other markets is a recipe for failure, according to Special CCO and partner Tom Martin and Droga5 ANZ CSO Milla McPhee. Instead, work travels organically when it emerges from a local insight, free from burdensome ambitions.

When independent agency Special created the ‘Tonight I’ll Be Eating’ platform for Uber Eats, it didn’t set out to make work that could be replicated across a dozen countries. That was serendipitous.

“It had a repeatable structure – it had DBAs [distinctive brand assets], which was a bag drop, a doorbell, breaking the fourth wall, and a certain type of humour,” Tom said of the original platform.

“It ended up traveling to about 10 or 12 countries. Since then, we did 'Get Almost, Almost Anything'. That's traveled to a similar amount of countries.”

The agency didn’t start with a list of DBAs to incorporate, or a desire to launch a global platform. Such pressures would have stifled the work. Instead, a “really simple idea” which allowed the platform to "weirdly" feel both local and international meant it traveled well.

“I actually think if you start a job with the mindset of, 'I want this to go global', you're never going to do good work. You've got to actually turn that off and just go, 'What is the best job for Australia? What is the best job sitting in front of me?' And if it does well, it could travel,” he said, speaking on a live panel recording of the ‘On Strategy’ podcast in Sydney.

“If you go in and go, 'Okay, it's got to travel to 12 countries. They've all got cultural differences. Don't do a trippy tagline, because that tagline won't translate'. If you put all those restrictions on you at the start, or on a creative team, they're never going to come up with anything good. So we never even looked at it traveling.”

Droga5 ANZ’s chief strategy officer, Milla McPhee, agreed “global ideas are notoriously difficult to crack.”

“Because you are trying to please everybody, and in pleasing everybody, you inevitably end up pleasing nobody, or just not having a very punchy idea. Global insights are often quite weak. So this is why ideas that originate, particularly in a country like ours, and then are taken to travel, tend to be far more effective.”

Ogilvy’s AUNZ team works on global clients like Coke and Dove, but also has to make brands like KFC feel Australian. CSO Fran Clayton said Starbucks is an example that “not every global brand can make it here”. The ones that do “find a uniquely Australian role to play” and “have to absolutely have a real local strength to survive.” The same is true of global agency networks with local offices.

“There have been a couple of bigger network agencies that haven't had that and have just been satellite outposts, and it doesn't work.”

Special’s partners have each lived and worked in other markets, so they set up the agency knowing they could service clients all around the world from Sydney or Auckland. When Tom worked in New York, his clients were in Boston, Atlanta, and Germany, whereas, “in Australia, we have this mindset that, if we live in Sydney, our clients are in Sydney. If we live in Melbourne, our clients are in Melbourne.”

The pandemic solidified Special’s instinct, because “suddenly, the world had no boundaries. As long as I was on Zoom, when a client was on Zoom, I could do work in that country.” And as a result, Tom has worked on five Super Bowl ads from Sydney, “which I don’t think anyone’s done before.”

Rupert Price, DDB Group Sydney’s CSO, imagines “we’ll see more and more ideas coming from unpredictable places”, because the “arrogant belief that creative excellence used to sit in New York, or it used to sit in London, or it used to sit in Paris” has shifted.

“What's happening now, certainly in our network, in DDB, is that briefs are now global, and they go out to all the agencies, and there's a bit of an internal pitch process where we're all vying for the global idea.”

Replicating Global Ideas and Embracing Market Quirks: Macca’s vs ALDI

Humility is one of local agency BMF’s key values, but that doesn’t obstruct its goal of being “world-class from Australia,” said CCO Stephen de Wolf, who joined mid-last year. However, it does mean focusing on work for local brands like Westpac, Tourism Tasmania, Endeavour Group, and Tennis Australia, or localising global brands like ALDI, “versus having to expand into different markets and cities.”

“The humility keeps us in our borders, but on purpose,” he said. “Since Warren Brown started it, it's always been probably one of the more Australian-based creative shops. His ambition was to bring BBH back to Australia.

“There's a lot of pride in doing work that travels as far as talkability, but for Australian brands, or making a German brand like ALDI feel very Australian. That's the continued success that BMF aspires to.”

In Australia, ALDI’s brand platform is ‘Good Different’, which has led to BMF and ALDI becoming the reigning Australian Effective Agency of the Year and Effective Advertiser of the Year. The platform has worked so well, Stephen said, because it is built on an authentic truth: ALDI’s shopping experience in Australia is “weird”. When asked whether the platform should be used by ALDI in other markets, the CCO noted “it's a very different supermarket experience entirely” in the US or Germany, so “that ambition would be pretty hard.”

The ALDI experience varies more market-to-market than that of McDonald’s, for example, which globally works with agencies including Wieden+Kennedy, Leo Burnett, and DDB. Wieden+Kennedy’s approach of tapping into fan truths has been successful in the US and Canada, and will now be applied in Australia; in an exclusive interview with LBB at the start of the year, the agency confirmed it has opened a Sydney outpost after winning the local account.

Ogilvy’s Fran and BMF’s Stephen both worked on McDonald’s when they were CSO and CCO, respectively, at DDB. The brand has celebrated ‘fan truths’ locally for decades, they noted. For example, Australians call it ‘Macca’s’. Rupert worked on the business at DDB Group New Zealand, and now works on it at DDB Group Sydney.

“What they're looking for is innovation, and they're looking for fresh ways of marketing, and they are open to where that comes from,” he said of McDonald’s.

“They have a phrase now, which is 'share and scale', which is a sharing of ideas around the world, from all parts of the world, and whatever feels fresh and innovative and different and might be relevant in another market, take it and replicate it, rather than it be a command and control model from the top down.

“It's very much a network of collaboration now, where great ideas can come from Scandinavia or can come from China or can come from other places, and we'd be foolish to resist them just because they're from elsewhere ... that's the benefit of being a global client, you can quickly pick up on best practice from one market and place it in another.”

Creative Heroes Are Awkward, Avoid Getting Conditioned: Does Top Talent Need to Travel?

Tom used to put agencies like Wieden+Kennedy and Crispin Porter Bogusky on “this huge pedestal”. He thought they were “untouchable”. Then he went to New York to become ECD at Johannes Leonardo and realised those agencies were made up of people, and those people were “awkward [and] uncomfortable, just like you. They're just people trying to solve a problem in a room like you are.”

Stephen had the same experience. Growing up in Perth, he admitted he used to “run away” from his hometown, working across Melbourne, Sydney, and London. His time in the UK taught him “you can do it all from here … you can actually achieve all of the things that all of the people that we have learned about and read about and hear about in the press” have achieved.

Rupert offered a different perspective. The Brit, who spent 12 years in New Zealand before moving to Sydney last year, worried creatives or strategists who don’t do a stint overseas will become locked into their market, and locked out of others.

“When you go away, you have to let go of everything you know, because you're turning up in a new place, different culture, different signals, different ways of communicating, different messages, different history, different legacy,” he said.

“The more times you go through that process, the more you relearn, the more you grow, the more you open your mind.

“If you stay in one market your entire career, you'll be so conditioned by that market that that will probably be the only market you can ever work in.”

Australians and Kiwis are hard-wired to care about other cultures, proposed some panellists, because the countries’ geographical isolation creates a collective desire to understand the world and their place in it. “It’s inherent in our nature,” explained Stephen.

“Australians are the most loved people in offices all around the world. We're the only ones that turn up when it's snowing in London. I do think we bring that back,” he said.

“It doesn't matter if you bring it back through having worked overseas or traveled, but you do feel that in our interest in directors, and our interest in artists, and our interest in how we solve problems, which is very special.”