Nancy Reyes Has Big Hopes For Clemenger, Knows “Market is Rooting For It”

Staff processing the news of Clemenger, CHEP, and Traffik’s merger should feel buoyed that the market is “rooting for it”, according to BBDO global CEO Nancy Reyes.

“It means something to the people here, to the advertising industry as a whole, not just Australia, to get this thing going in the way that it's meant to get going,” she told LBB.

“To have a fan base, even in your toughest times, I want our people to know that the market is rooting for it. I think that that's incredibly inspiring.

“They need to be comforted by the fact that, if they feel equal parts excited, nervous, anxious, scared, inspired— Okay, this is exactly what you're supposed to be feeling, all those mixed emotions. We've got to be transparent with people.”

Yesterday, BBDO revealed the merger to staff and the market. Clemenger will be led by CHEP CEO Lee Leggett, while further senior appointments including a CCO and CSO will be made in due course. Nancy told LBB in an exclusive interview the restructure was motivated by a need to unify disparate capabilities, “put our arms around this business”, and restore pride and greatness in the agency both globally and locally. However, she admitted she hoped the local outfit had been more urgent to date in its rebuilding.

“The agency is really storied, and a lot of incredible leaders left the company and started their own things, and they've done quite well for themselves, which is fantastic,” she said, referencing CHEP CEOs like Justin Hind and Chris Howatson who left to start their own agencies. 

“I think that's a positive. I wish more change had happened more quickly.”

Operationalising the restructure will take the balance of the year, but she expects to see greenshoots emerging within 12 months, including quality work, and an agency that ‘feels’ big when you step out of the elevator. “Some of it is maybe a little bit more sensorial, which sounds a little soft, but I don't mind.”

“Some of those things [markers of progress] will show up in the way we treat our clients. Are we actually looking at upstream big business problems? Are we solving them in creative ways? How are we doing on new business and momentum?”

She wants BBDO offices around the world to feel like a community, not a network, which is why global leadership is determined to incentivise collaboration and connection.

“The network was beneficial for many years, BBDO operated as separate entities all around the world, it bred healthy competition between the markets, and it was awesome for a while,” Nancy said. 

“I just don't think that's very modern. I don’t think it's very sustainable … I don't think we've been structured or incentivised to operate like a community.”

She’s starting by encouraging her executives around the world to use global leadership calls to be “vulnerable”, and setting up global councils to innovate across strategy and creative, pricing and new business and marketing. 

“One of the things I'm really focused on is making sure that the leaders in all of our different countries all around the world share these stories with one another, because honestly, one day, one market will go through exactly what Australia, New Zealand is going through. And we need to learn from one another more, to carry each other through a tough time.”

Last week, LBB revealed BBDO is updating its positioning for the first time in 30 years, retiring ‘The Work. The Work. The Work’ for ‘Do Big Things.’ And to do big things for clients, the agency needs to innovate on how it prices that work.

“We've got to be smarter about how we price our services. If we're talking about big impact, if we're talking about big upstream stuff, we can't keep pricing our things by people and by [time]. We are minimising the impact of what we do.”

She is confident BBDO can have those pricing conversations because it has longstanding, blue-chip clients to whom it has proven the power of creativity as a growth engine.

“The average tenure of a relationship that we have with our clients is 13 years. These are global, massive, awesome clients,” she explained.

“So over those years, we've certainly seen them through transformations, changes. We have been there. If you ask any of those clients 'Why BBDO?', none of them would say, 'Because they made me a good spot' ...They would say, 'Because they helped me solve this business problem.

“I didn't get into this business to make content. I got into this business to create future runways for clients to rethink their business problems, to reframe them, to apply a perspective that they wouldn't have thought of on their own.”

The criticism, or misconception, is, “big is bad. Big is old. Big is expensive” but “it's our job, as we've always done, to reframe that perspective” and ensure BBDO squashes out any of its own slowness. “We'll work on that. But I don't want to run away from it. I'd rather face it head on.”

“It's super small minded, super small minded, to think that big is bad,” Nancy said. 

“I don't understand what client wouldn't want a big idea; what client, what individual, what employee wouldn't have a big ambition to do big things in the world. I think we've done 'big' a disservice. And so we've got to recalibrate it, we've got to reframe it. We've got to build this rallying cry around the fact that we're BBDO. We're proud. We're built to do big things.

“Doesn't this mean that we're just reinforcing that we're big? Yes. I honestly want us to go right at it. That's the main concern that people voice. But that's exactly why we're doing it. I say this a lot: any strategist, any creative, would kill for that kind of juicy tension, that's when you know you have something.”

It’s also an effectiveness and measurement promise. “We have to hold ourselves far more accountable for the impact that our big thinking has.” 

The new Clemenger entity is legally effective from 31 March. New Zealand’s Clemenger Wellington and Colenso BBDO are unaffected by the Australian restructure.

Colenso is currently regarded as the strongest Clemenger shop in the region; it won just one of four global Immortal Awards this year for ‘Adoptable’, a piece of work for Pedigree that used AI to find homes for shelter dogs.

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