It’s The Moment For “Big, Mighty Brand Ideas”: Saatchi & Saatchi NZ CEO and CCO

New Zealand brands have upped their ambitions, and are favouring brand-building over performance marketing as they look “for an edge again”, according to Saatchi & Saatchi’s leadership.

CEO Mark Cochrane and CCO Steve Cochran believe while the past few years were characterised by “a focus on digital transformation, CX” and performance marketing, the pendulum has swung back towards “big, mighty brand ideas, well-orchestrated.”

“Clients are leaning into a brand and creative edge, again,” Mark told LBB during an interview in Saatchi & Saatchi’s Auckland offices. He referenced client Westpac, and the bank’s relatively new CMO Sarah Williams, who joined in November.

“We have been on their journey as a brand. They had a quite a migrationary period of getting their brand right internally,” he said, “but the ambition of brands like Westpac now, it's quite front-foot[ed], and they're really open for a new way.

“That comes back to the ambition of the business industry. It's time for the private sector to really grow again, and people are leaning into great brand work.

“The brand impact, brand ideas, and good storytelling, it's certainly coming to the fore, and that's probably why it's less performance, and more brand impact again in the market.”

Steve wondered whether clients have been playing it safe – not specifically in New Zealand, but across geographies and categories. While New Zealand’s shrunken scale in terms of population and economy means it can act as a test market, it has not been immune to a reduced appetite for risk-taking.

“Now there is slightly more desire to bring that energy, to cut through again and have more impact,” Steve said. “I think the challenge for the industry, though, is trying to do that and do more with less.

“We now have budgets split across a lot of activity or a lot of channels, [which] makes it more challenging to coordinate something or to use that smaller money to have as much impact.”

Agencies must be able to measure the impact of their brand-building efforts, to prove clients’ marketing dollars are delivering maximum return. Mark said Publicis’ connected platform includes a focus on connected measurement, which “we’re quite proud of.”

“We're engaged with the C-suites and across the board, so they know that they are signing on to major investments,” Mark said. “That's the joy of New Zealand sometimes, isn't it, that you get to have those true conversations, and they'll call and go, 'What do you think, is this worth it?' Absolutely it's worth it.”

The size of the New Zealand advertising market means there are very few layers of hierarchy sitting between an agency and a client’s C-suite and board.

“Our partnerships are pretty tight, the way we work with all of our clients is deep, right across our organisations,” Mark said.

“But some of the difference between sometimes Australia or globally, versus New Zealand, is we are really close and partner genuinely with the C-suite of each organisation. We connect lots. They're engaged in ideas, they're engaged in corporate reputation, they're engaged in brand impact. It's a lot of the reason why New Zealand's always such a great market. Because you've got both the brands and business[es] of New Zealand [that] do believe in brand, and they do believe in marketing, and they do lean in.”

Saatchis’ brand platform for Toyota, ‘Let’s Go Places’, for example, boosted the auto brand’s reputation to “number one in New Zealand last year,” Steve said, “which was something that was more of a midterm goal.”

But he acknowledged “there is a sense that bigger, orchestrated platform work, there's fewer of those projects now than there might have been once,” and “not the big budgets” for as many film campaigns.

“You're working with medium budgets or smaller budgets, maybe off your platform, maybe as a one off project, but trying to have an impact with it.”

Part of the challenge is justifying the expense of a production targeted at New Zealand’s population, versus the potential reach of production in Australia, let alone the UK or US.

“Maybe this is just a self conscious thing,” Steve said, but a “beautiful 60 second commercial” costs roughly the same from market to market, so “when you're spending X amount to talk to 100 million people, versus X amount talk to 5 million people, that equation and that return on investment doesn't stack up.”

Mark stressed budgetary constraints emphasise the importance of developing a “really good brand ecosystem and then making it famous.” That requires activating a “brand world” across channels, and “power[ing] it up in lots of different, interesting ways.” And despite the limited number of big film productions, the CEO is most excited by “what you can do with film and moving content right now.”

“I like to say [there is] a bit of a renaissance of it right now, and we're enjoying that. Just making sure that great storytelling through films and content is really starting to come to the fore … I'm just really excited to see how film keeps shaping.”

Gen AI has already resulted in a proliferation of content that “look[s] like it’s got production value”, but Steve is adamant a big idea rooted in a human truth and executed as a “good story” will continue to be agencies’ greatest differentiator.

While the market is tough, and “the economy is not jumping forward like you’d want”, the greatest opportunity lies in brands genuinely “leaning back into great ideas,” Mark argued, and asking, ‘how does the brand connect to people?’

“That's a good thing for our industry as well, because, as a group, we've all evolved as an industry. We've all evolved into end-to-end platforms and all those types of things. But it is coming back to the moment of brands. It's really exciting.

“For Saatchi, our client list, we're very good and connect well to mainstream and across New Zealand brands. So your Toyota, Z Energy, Westpacs. We're finding that it's those brands that are continually willing to invest in brands and connect to consumers.

“It's probably more like your FMCGs where things have turned off a little bit. We would probably say we're a little bit more resilient.”