Leggett: Clemenger ready to lead the market

Three months on from its merger Clemenger BBDO has a new leadership team and is ready for its new era.

BBDO Worldwide global president Nancy Reyes with Clemenger BBDO CEO Lee Leggett and BBDO Worldwide chief creative officer Chris Beresford-Hill.

Clemenger BBDO has signalled its intent to “lead the market creatively and commercially”, as it readies for its new era as a fully owned Omnicom agency three months on from its merger.

Chief executive Lee Leggett said the agency was now fully ­focused on the future with its completed leadership team, following last week’s appointment of new chief creative officer Stephen de Wolf.

Mr De Wolf is returning to the agency where he worked on some of the agency’s most well-known campaigns, including the globally recognised “Meet Graham” campaign for the Transport Accident Commission.

Mr De Wolf will work closely with Ms Leggett and chief strategic officer Simon Wassef to propel the repositioned agency, which has undergone a major transformation this year with its merger with the CHEP Network and Traffik agencies to create one fully integrated agency.

While the merger triggered a raft of changes with leadership departures from across the three agencies as well as client departures due to clashes, three months on the new Clemenger BBDO is ready to emerge as a new entity, fully owned by BBDO Worldwide and Omnicom following the holding company’s buyout, which is scheduled for approval on June 30.

“We’re clear on what we stand for: big ideas, bold impact and creativity that moves culture,” Ms Leggett said.

“Wolfie [Mr De Wolf] shares that ambition. His appointment is a signal to the market that Clemenger BBDO is here to lead, not just creatively but commercially.

“This isn’t about going back. It’s about building forward. Wolfie helped define Clemenger’s creative legacy. Now he’s here to help the team rewrite it.

“With the breadth of capability we’ve now brought under one roof, we’re ready to do work that defines the future, not just celebrates the past. Creativity is ­having a comeback and we needed a leader who could meet that moment. Wolfie brings the kind of ambition, originality and cultural relevance that’s required to lead a modern creative company.

“He knows how to build teams that push boundaries and ideas that punch above their weight. His leadership will help us set the bar for the next era of creativity in this country.” 

The agency reinvigoration is part of BBDO Worldwide’s global repositioning and first rebrand in 30 years in which the advertising network abandoned its longstanding “The Work. The Work. The Work.” line in exchange for “Do Big Things”.

The rollout, led by BBDO Worldwide global president and chief executive Nancy Reyes and chief creative officer Chris Beresford-Hill, aims to encourage its agencies to start to swing for the fences again when it comes to solving client problems with big ideas.

Ms Reyes told The Australian her ambition was to help BBDO agencies reclaim their creative power, which she said she believed was too often underplayed and undersold by the industry. “Our creative perspective is a killer business proposition,” she said

“This is a dramatic, insecure industry that declares its death at least once a year. So, in doing so, you get scared and worried and you end up becoming more and more transactional, and because you don’t want to lose a client, you play it safe. So all of the big, amazing, juicy brains that we once put more upstream on a client’s problem get pushed more and more downstream.

“But, I think we’ve all realised that [all the work] looks exactly the same. We’re basically feeding the algorithm to make things as standardised and as common as possible. We’ve lost uniqueness and identity and creativity in that standardisation.

“Maybe we had to go through that, to give ourselves the extra bit of confidence that we needed, but I do think people are opening up and realising it’s not great and we need to do more.

“In the past, BBDO operated a bunch of separate offices and it was actually super good for business because it bred this healthy competitive spirit between the different offices. Fast forward to today’s world where it’s quite difficult to stand up every single capability from the ground up in every single market.

“The push here is to put our arms around each other and be connected more than we’ve ever been before and see if we can’t help each other through the good times and the bad times. The community thing is a pretty big business initiative for us.”