CMOs Have it Tough. Steve Coll Will Help Their Brands Convert Longing into Belonging

Brands must create a sense of belonging, focus just as much on POV as TOV, and build connections with customers and communities to become culturally powerful, argues Steve Coll.

M+C Saatchi Group’s AUNZ chief creative officer is speaking to LBB about the agency’s updated positioning, Cultural Power. The group landed on that language and ambition, he says, because it’s what chief marketing officers need.

"Longing is great, but longing is maybe not enough. They needed something more than that. And that's what got us to Cultural Power. It is something that we felt was both universal in terms of a lens on customers, but then also in terms of what marketers were up against.

“Across the UK, the US, here, and in other markets, we talked to clients about what challenges they were facing, and it's very clear that this is a tough time to be a marketer. Advertising is important, but it's increasingly hard for advertising to cut through. That's not a secret.”

Cutting through is made easier if brands focus on creating a feeling of belonging, versus longing, because when the brand genuinely belongs in a person’s world, “you've got a much better chance of your message getting through and the connection with the brand becoming stronger, because you're talking about what matters.”

Rob Doubal and Laurence ‘Lolly’ Thomson, who are six months into their roles as global CCOs, recently visited the M+C Australia team.

“Their approach clearly fits with everything that sits behind this ambition,” Steve says of the global creative bosses. “My vision for every creative team that I work with is that I want to see them do the best work of their careers, and do the best work in the world. My ask of everybody is one great idea that moves the needle for our clients every year. And I expect 10 to get to that. I'm ambitious. I'm ambitious for our clients. I'm ambitious for our people.”

Those people include a string of recent hires revealed by LBB, including head of delivery Adrian Jung, and seven creative hires including five new creative directors. At the time of the creative appointments in January, Steve told LBB, “The talent that we needed to bring in needed to understand brand ads, but then needed to understand how to deliver that to culture. They need to understand PR thinking. They need to learn how to build utility and digital experience. They need to understand the power of activations.”

Now, he says delivering on Cultural Power’s potential means changing how people in the business work together. “How the creative department thinks, and how we interact with other specialists in our group, is something that we'll look at. How do we organise that to deliver on Cultural Power? I think in some of our work, we've done that very, very well. But clients today are looking for, 'Okay, how are you going to do it every time?'

“And so we're looking at how we think differently, how we keep what's working well, embellish where we think we need to introduce new things. Obviously, hiring new talent recently has been part of this, because change always comes from people, so it has to be meaningful.

“This is the wonderful thing about my position. I've got creative brains from lots of different disciplines that should play a role, and we'll organise ourselves so they can play a role in this.”

Promising to make brands cultural influencers guarantees effectiveness, because “culture is what makes us human” and therefore what creates an emotional connection, Steve says. And “if you can create and shape culture, you can change beliefs, and if you change beliefs, you can change behaviours, and if you can change behaviours, you can really make meaningful change.”

He references ideas with such power, including ‘Small Business Saturday’ for American Express, ‘Life is the Reason’ for Lifeblood’, ‘Awaken Your Super’ for Australian Retirement Trust (ART), Woolworths’ Olympics campaign, ‘Fresh Fuels the Best in All of Us’, and two campaigns for the Minderoo Foundation, an anti-vaping campaign called ‘We Are the Warning', and ‘The Plastic Forecast’, the latter of which was an Immortal Awards finalist.

On the superannuation campaign for ART, featuring a monster character and the tagline, “You could be sitting on a monster,” Steve says, “It's quite an unlikely brand. But we've looked at the results. It was a phenomenally successful campaign for them. We're starting to look at resonance and momentum as ways of judging Cultural Power. And that campaign has created both phenomenally well for ART.”

The reason why each piece of work was successful, he adds, is because it has a point of view (POV). While all brands would say they have a TOV – tone of voice – far fewer can claim to genuinely have a POV. “You're generally not sufficiently differentiated when you look at point of view.”

Part of assessing the strength of a brand’s point of view involves asking a “confronting question,” says Steve: “If your brand disappeared overnight, who would care?” The answer indicates whether a brand is one that makes ads, or a “brand that adds”.

M+C Saatchi is measuring this with its Cultural Power Index, an AI-powered tool that analyses billions of data signals to measure brand desire, influence, presence, and the moment. As a result, it can assess where its clients rank against category competitors, and adjust the creative approach accordingly. As Rob and Lolly told LBB in a recent interview, “Then we can go and say to the client, ‘Maybe we need a bit more presence, a bit more influence.’ And underneath that, there are loads of ways to achieve that – which are proprietary.”

Building and sustaining Cultural Power doesn’t necessarily mean creating work that doesn’t look like advertising. After all, Steve notes, “Advertising has always been part of culture. So it's not that we're saying that's not part of the future.”

Steve joined the agency at the end of 2023, marking his return to agencyland. He’d spent time at agencies like Droga5, With Collective, Havas, AMV BBDO, and Leo Burnett, but he joined M+C from Meta, where he was head of creative shop across AUNZ.

“The Meta experience was very influential on me, because coming from advertising into Meta, I suddenly saw very clearly that customers and consumers maybe aren't as interested in our ads as we are, and instead, they're building their own worlds of interest,” he says.

In other words, his time at Meta taught him what it takes to truly be culturally powerful. He was drawn to M+C because he knew he’d be around a group of “different creative thinkers”, both within the creative agency, but also branding arm Re, media unit Bohemia, and M+C Saatchi Sports and Entertainment.

“A lot of networks are amalgamating. The potential here is, because we're literally, geographically, more closely connected, we're starting to shape how we work together.”

The positioning has to work internally, within the network, just as it works as a promise to clients. Steve confirms the agency has an ambition to become a ‘cultural powerhouse’ and make work which adds value to fandoms, reinforces existing rituals, and is generous in its intention and impact.

“From the experience at Meta, if you're adding and connecting and looking at the things that matter to people, you've got a much better chance of being in feed, of being in that self selection of what the algorithm surfaces as clickbait for people. You've got a much better chance that your brand is going to be part of what they're interested in, and part of what their world represents.”