Why You Should Bring DEPT Problems, Not Briefs
“The big picture is there are a lot of different things that we do.” Jeff Bowerman knows that defining the Dutch-born global agency DEPT can be approached from quite a few angles. It also depends on who you ask because the agency’s fabric is made up of different material than most. One of the team recently asked Jeff, the UK executive creative director, what Cannes is, he laughs. “This isn't a thing in their area of work, because it's more engineering, not comms, not marketing.”
Many in the team aren’t from a creative agency background. Because of DEPT’s heritage in design and technology, lots of them are more about building digital products than writing TVC scripts. The leaders embrace that power.
In the last few years, the Netherlands was the biggest market, followed by the US then the UK. Now the US business has overtaken the Dutch side. “And I hope soon it will be US, UK, Netherlands, which is the right way around,” says EVP of the EMEA region Joanna Trippett. “The UK is our fastest growing market around the globe, other than India. And within that the creative services are the fastest growing segments. Which, when the UK economy has been so terrible and creative industries are having such a tough time, is actually quite surprising.
“I think what we've created in the UK is a very special blend of creativity at the intersection of service lines where perhaps there have been more traditional setups,” she continues. “You need more innovative, progressive thinking to be able to break down their silos. So in the UK, we've had quite a lot of acceleration in leadership teams' careers within DEPT[...] We've got some catching up to do due to the origin of the business, but it's absolutely the creative part of the business that's fuelling that growth in a more exponential way than the other sides.”
Joanna’s seen DEPT UK benefit from the tech and design guts of the business underpinning the creativity it delivers for clients. “From a creative perspective, the technology part of the business is absolutely an accelerator for everything we do,” she says.
Jeff’s own career demonstrates this ethos. He started off coding emails and websites himself. In fact, he once wrote on LBB that writing a script in an early job saved him six weeks’ work and laid the foundations of his outlook on his career. “I love art. I also love problem solving and I'm inherently slightly lazy,” he says. “If I could find tech to help make creativity easier and help with the boring bits, I really enjoy that. More luck than judgement, that's where the industry has gone. When I started 20-something years ago that was a new thing. No one creative wanted to do web design, banners or microsites. So it’s a bit of an opportunity that's come round. At DEPT, the best work we do is where the tech and creative comes together.”
That’s not to say all of the agency’s work is complex and tech-led. DEPT’s recent ads for eBay are about as above-the-line as it comes – TV commercials and out of home. But Jeff is keen to highlight the ecosystem around that – the creative for social, the cutdowns and the less traditional, innovation-led projects that support that ATL work. “We're thinking about how it works from social up. There is a value add to that,” says Jeff. “Rather than a stuffy old agency making the TV [ad], we're actually doing much more, which makes us stickier.”
It all starts with the way the agency sets out its stall. Rather than asking for a creative brief on a pitch, DEPT would rather write a broader growth plan for a client’s business. That might result in a completely different brief, which is where the agency can flourish, says Joanna. “Then we're designing creative solutions around what the growth strategy is for the business, which means that our creativity can be far more impactful.”
This is what she thinks clients really need at this moment. “Where the world is at right now, businesses are having a rough time and they need a partner that can help them navigate through whatever they need to get through,” she says. “A brief that's not a strategic partnership is very hand to mouth. It's not going to [in the] long term drive the business forward in a way that's challenging. I think a good agency-client relationship is challenging. So we like to push ourselves and our clients.”
DEPT doesn’t ever pretend to be a regular creative agency, which helps them approach clients like this. “We do come across a little differently. So clients are never surprised when we get them a provocation,” says Joanna. “They kind of expect it from us. But we often will start somewhere, do a great job with that and then expand[...] We have to think quite smartly about how we pitch and which clients, taking care with what their background is to make sure that we're going to resonate.”
As a creative leader, Jeff is surprisingly comfortable with taking the creative big idea off a pedestal and allowing it to be part of a more refreshing and diverse offering of solutions. “We consider what the thing is that's gonna surprise them or set us apart from a traditional agency,” he says. “To win out on pure creativity is a tough fight. Whatever agency you are, it comes down to 'I like that idea.' I've never been comfortable with the roll of the dice in a pitch, that one idea you've had is the thing that resonates with that client at that moment or it just happens to appeal to their senses on what they like. How do you strategize around that? How do you productise that way of pitching? It's too much. So I quite like the idea of having something in there that gives us an edge, makes it memorable, that all the pressure's not on 'You had better come up with a 30-second script that is killer.' In the pitch you haven't had that conversation, the collaboration to get there. And I think sometimes that's too much pressure on creativity. I'd rather surprise them with other things, like a new use of a channel or technology.”
When DEPT won its pitch for The Gym Group’s business in August 2023, the team was pitching against what Joanna ventures was “a classic agency mix.” DEPT stood out by presenting the new brand line in a search ad. The client appreciated how, in reality, that’s how so many people will discover The Gym Group, so why not prioritise that moment? “They spend a lot on search, arguably, more on search than a bunch of brand channels,” says Joanna, but she recognises that it’s slightly odd. “I bet we were the only agency in Cannes talking about the copy on a search ad.”
Jeff admits it’s not considered ‘sexy’, but he leads a creative team who gets excited about things like creative use of SEO.
And Joanna loves campaigns with their creative core outside of traditional media. “Arguably you can be so much more creative in all of those formats that you can break and hack and platforms change their rules as you go. They tell you off because you broke their format,” she says.
She’s alluding to a couple of campaigns that DEPT put out on TikTok that resulted in the platform having to change its guidelines for brands. One was for Amazon Prime show ‘Panic’, which induced real panic in its young target audience by convincing them that TikTok was down with a fake error screen, before showing the trailer for the programme. “I'm really proud of that,” laughs Jeff. “I know every agency talks about rebellion, but I think there is a spirit of that in that sort of space. I'm proud of making TikTok change its rules twice.” The other time was when the agency broke the platform’s UI, introducing buttons that weren’t actually part of the app but part of the video that's behind. TikTok has since ruled that’s not allowed. “That sort of stuff fuels us a bit more than making an ad. Not to say that [making an ad] doesn't as well, but it's definitely more challenging and distinctive as an offering.”
To do that kind of work, DEPT has been staffing up a bit differently too. “Our creatives, the thinkers, makers, doers that we have in the business have got quite unique backgrounds,” says Joanna. “Some of our best creatives are comedians, our VP of emerging technology is a trained architect. We've actually had three architects in our creative team. I think it's that ability to have logical thinking and creativity, that's like the magic wrapper that sits around it. I do think we're quite a unique workforce, which is special.”
Jeff loves to maintain a balance when hiring. “You want a bit of a mix of people who've got the experience, know how it works. But you also want someone to come and go 'Why are you doing this? That's weird.' Sometimes you deconstruct what we do, like a pitching process. (Yes, it is mental. I know. But as an industry, it's very hard to avoid unless we collectively unionise and go we're not doing it anymore. There will be someone that will always do it.) But sometimes having fresh people from outside the industry coming in has helped us see different ways to do things.
“Equally, borrowing from other agencies what works, what doesn't work, has been useful.” His creative team mixes people who've worked in agencies before with those who haven't. “I like a blend because I think you need a bit of both. Sometimes a joyful naivety of 'Oh, we could do this!'” He laughs at this kind of conversation playing out. “‘Well, let's try. Expect some pushback!’ It looks easier than it is, some of this stuff. This Cannes-winning thing over here isn't just a great idea. Let's talk about how we get there.”
That blend makes it easy for DEPT UK to pivot on the scale or the type of work that's needed for each client’s problem, argues Jeff. “We're not a traditional agency that has a team of highly seasoned above-the-line creatives that only make TV ads and can't pivot. We can pivot in any direction. Some people may be out of their comfort zone, but we're not beholden to any one output.”
And that’s why Joanna encourages clients to come to the agency with a particular approach. “Don't bring us briefs, bring us problems,” she says. “Then we can bring together different service lines that could give you a different answer. And that can answer your business problems, not just your marketing or comms challenge.”
