M&C Saatchi Named AFR's Most Innovative Media and Marketing Company in Australia and NZ

M&C Saatchi has been recognised as the Most Innovative Media and Marketing Company in Australia and New Zealand by The Australian Financial Review’s Most Innovative Companies list.

This is the fifth year in a row that M&C Saatchi has appeared on the coveted list. In 2017, the agency was ranked the Most Innovative Company in Australia and awarded Best Product Innovation and Best Overall Innovation for the NRMA FireBlanket, a fire detection system created by the agency for the insurance brand. In 2018, the business was recognised for Best Innovation Culture.

The AFR BOSS Most Innovative Companies list (previously the BRW Most Innovative Companies list) is now in its eighth year. The list ranks the most innovative organisations in Australia and New Zealand, and is the only national list of its kind. For the first time in 2019, the list was broken down into 10 industry categories, effectively ranking organisations against their peers. The list is judged and compiled by Inventium – Australia’s leading innovation consultancy. Inventium uses a unique, scientifically proven approach to help organisations grow through innovation. In 2019, the list comprised of ten industry lists of ten, compiled from over 800 nominations, and 400 shortlisted organisations.

This year, M&C Saatchi was celebrated as the most innovative in the media and marketing industry, having exceeded in a range of criteria including its approach to innovation both for clients and its own business.

The innovation highlighted was the creation of Minerva, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) robot designed by M&C Saatchi’s CX and data specialists, Lida.

Minerva, or Minnie for short, was built using best-in-class and custom-made machine learning tools to provide a complete overview of the components of advertising. These components involve object identification, optical character recognition (image to text), sentiment analysis, gender/age/emotion classification, colour coding and more. This data is then stored in a database with the ability for AI to extract and visualise trends and enable analysis.

On International Women’s Day 2019, Minnie’s analysis of 80 years of advertising to women in The Australian Women’s Weekly was released. The analysis highlighted the change required by advertisers in regards to the depiction of women in advertising.

The initial findings included insights such as the fact that the skin colour of models has not changed. From the 1930s to today, the women in magazine advertisements are still overwhelmingly white-skinned and blonde.

Additionally, until the 1980s, the language in advertising in The Australian Women’s Weekly was overwhelmingly patriarchal with the word ‘man’ more prevalent than ‘woman’ despite the advertising being directed at women. Based on these findings, M&C Saatchi has since engaged with several brands to help decode their advertising and provide an objective view of how they portray diversity.

Says Jaimes Leggett, CEO, M&C Saatchi: “At M&C Saatchi, we pride ourselves on using creativity to find innovative approaches that solve far-reaching problems. Minnie is a brilliant example of that, as is the work she has done so far in changing advertising for the better. Being recognised by the AFR’s Most Innovative Companies list is a great honour for our teams and the efforts they put into bringing this to life as well as our overall commitment to innovation.”

The AFR Top 10 Most Innovative media and marketing companies:

1. M&C Saatchi
Most innovative media and marketing company in Australia and NZ
Innovation: Minerva (or Minnie for short), an Artificial Intelligence (AI) robot

2. PHD Media
Innovation: First-time mum algorithm
Winner of Best Media & Marketing Innovation Program

3. CHE Proximity
Innovation: NRMA Safety Hub
Winner of Best Media & Marketing Innovation

4. Leo Burnett Australia
Innovation: Canon Kyoyu

5. AKQA
Innovation: Predictive search and rescue operations for New Zealand Coastguard

6. VERSA
Innovation: Flexible working week policy

7. Dentsu Aegis Network
Innovation: Innovation Champions design thinking program

8. Shootsta
Innovation: Traffic management and globalisation

9. King Kong
Innovation: King Kong Academy

10. Sparro
Innovation: Sydney Swans AI audience estimation