Scottish agencies must strive for better: Scottish IPA Chair

According to Dixon, one of the biggest factors holding Scotland back from winning more UK-wide accounts, is not a lack of talent or ideas, but a reluctance to strive for better.

“In this free-market hour of need, the twin notions that “Good enough is not enough” and “Great ideas can come from anywhere” appear incredibly relevant… We should all be delivering a bit more ambition, energy, rigour and creativity,” said Dixon.

Also, despite their smaller size, if Scottish agencies have big enough ideas and ambition, Dixon believes that they should not lose business to the south.

“What if we all focused more of our attention on the market that isn’t here, beyond the border, even beyond the UK, because that’s where the majority of the opportunities lie…" said Dixon. "I think it’s time we exploited our relative lack of scale, our flexibility and capability and turned our underdog status to our collective advantage.”

Moreover, echoing IPA President Rory Sutherland, Dixon believes that the current silosisation of the industry could lead to its demise and that it must work collectively, and with different sector organisations, to stimulate new ideas.

“I really believe that we all need to get out of our self-imposed ‘creative agency silos’ and start tapping into more of the creativity and business acumen that surrounds us; whether that’s in the business schools, the art colleges, the science labs or the dynamic start-ups that are filling the void left by the demise of redundant heavy industries… As an industry body, our challenge going forward is to help make brands or organisations more relevant, robust, and sustainable, (in every sense of the word).”

Finally, Dixon believes that preserving the status quo is not an option. He said that the industry must move forward or risk sliding backwards: “I do know that that if we work collectively to push the boundaries then we’ll all have a better chance of winning new business and protecting what we already have.”

Ken Dixon succeeds Guy Robertson, managing partner, GRP as chairman of the Scottish IPA and will be expected to serve a two-year term.

READ THE FULL SPEECH BELOW:

Inaugural address of the new IPA Scottish Chairman, Ken Dixon

I’m going to spend the next 15 minutes outlining my thoughts on the specific challenges that we face right now in Scotland. How the IPA can help us all to re-energise our collective reputation and our bottom line. If nothing else I hope that the next two years leads to more frequent, feisty and expansive debates than perhaps we’ve been used to.

So, what’s the plan?

We need to be more outward looking and a bit more self-critical, to open our doors to a wider group of ‘creative’ minds, to crank up the energy levels and stop moaning about work heading South.

Be more outward looking and a little more self-critical

It wouldn’t be right to kick off an ‘ad’ industry talk without some marketing jargon. I’ve certainly heard more ‘Apprentice-esque’ soundbites than I care to remember, from brand onions and genesis sessions, to shuffle decks and ZBB planning. I’ve also learned the hard way that self-critical doesn’t quite extend to asking the Chairman in a pre pitch meeting, “Who on earth put that idea back on the table?” When that person was in fact… the Chairman.

But of all the agency jargon I’ve heard there are two phrases that I believe are more relevant today than ever. They’re short, simple and to the point:

The first – “Good enough is not enough” was the mantra of Jay Chiat, and was so good that agency staffers wore the logo with pride on their t-shirts.

The second – “Great ideas can come from anywhere”, no doubt came from an all too often overlooked account exec, who by now earns more then the lot of us combined.

In this free-market hour of need, the twin notions that “Good enough is not enough” and “Great ideas can come from anywhere”, appear incredibly relevant.

It is a tough business climate right now, but are we sometimes guilty of holding ourselves back?

Having lived and worked in cities in the South East and the Far East, I’ve found that one of the biggest factors that holds us back from winning more UK-wide accounts, is not a dearth of talent or ideas, but a reluctance to push for something better, even when we know things could be better.

Some people here might think that this hugely sweeping statement is a little harsh. It might be a little, but in a creative industry, especially now, the day that you don’t believe things can be improved, is surely the day that you should collect your coat and pass the baton to someone who does.

It’s great to see so many younger people in the audience here tonight. What excites me about the people coming into our business right now is not only that when they say, “That’s a great campaign.” you know that they’re actually thinking… “However ‘I’ could have done it so much better.” But that they think that because they’re far less hung up on the traditional silos of agency life than many of us, they don’t see the big divide between paid-for and unpaid-for media (and neither incidentally do most consumers), nor do they see the point at which above-the-line becomes word of mouth. In fact, they’re probably not even hung up on the idea of an ‘agency’ full stop.

Right now, inspirational ‘Scottish’ creativity for them is more likely comes from companies like Rockstar, or individuals like the stunt cyclist and internet phenomena Danny McCaskill, than any ‘agency’.

Danny is the guy who with one YouTube film has probably done more to dispel the reputation of Edinburgh as a City where the buildings and cityscape are there to be listed rather than experienced, than any traditional through-the-line campaign ever could.

Danny and his friends pulled together an ‘awe-inspiring’ movie, on a laptop, in his bedroom. In doing so they proved that you don’t always need to be a big machine with vast production budgets to succeed. Rather, you need passion, talent (fuelled in this instance by lots of Nurofen), vision, teamwork and a most of all, a refusal to accept ‘can’t do’ as an answer.

Similarly Rockstar started from very humble beginnings but is now a multi-city organisation employing hundreds of people.

The thing that sets Rockstar apart from the competition for me is not the fact that the shear addictiveness of their game - the world’s biggest selling console game, Grand Theft Auto, has destroyed more relationships than any other. But that they really understand that “good enough is not enough”. So much so that they delayed the launch of Grand Theft Auto 3 because when they asked themselves the big questions, they knew that it ‘wasn’t quite there yet’. That is to say, not up to the exceptional standards that they had set themselves and that their audience would demand.

Now it really does take balls of steel and a supreme understanding of your target audience to delay a launch, when delaying means missing the crucial Christmas trading period. (Especially when the high temple, and bellwether of Christmas trading consumer confidence – aka John Lewis, is in the direct sightline of your FD).

I’m not suggesting that we all risk an invasive bodily experience on a mountain bike or embark on potentially suicidal marketing strategies. But, I do think that we should all be delivering a bit more of the ambition, energy, rigour and creativity that we sometimes criticise our clients of lacking.

Moving on to my point that we need to open our doors to a wider group of ‘creative’ minds.

We’re here tonight in Edinburgh, a world class city that hosts the world’s biggest arts festival. It may well once have been the city that’s all ‘fur coat and nae knickers’, but hen parties aside, it has a lot of brains too, as indeed does Scotland as a whole.

I really believe that we all need to get out of our self-imposed ‘creative agency silos’ and start tapping into more of the creativity and business acumen that surrounds us; whether that’s in the business schools, the art colleges, the science labs or the dynamic start-ups that are filling the void left by the demise of redundant heavy industries.

There’s never been a more opportune moment to embrace the fact that “a great idea can come from anywhere”, because right now, in the current economic malaise I’d say that all great ideas are extremely welcome.

As an industry body, our challenge going forward is to help make brands or organisations more relevant, robust, and sustainable, (in every sense of the word). To turn them into brands that consumers really value, and would fight to keep (unlike most of the institutions that have gone to the wall over the past 12 months). But to do that we need to grow our understanding of what really matters to people, and you only do that by engaging more deeply with them, and more often.

This next bit might sound like heresy, but maybe we need to get more of a dialogue going with the people (often very, very smart people) who have issues with brands as we know them.

On a UK level the IPA has done a huge amount to engage with other sectors, and here in Scotland the IPA’s Sara and Sonja have helped to organise a string of successful events, most recently with Mark Cridge from Glue London. One of my key aims over the next two years is for the IPA in Scotland to work with other organisations and groups to co-host talks, and crucially debates that can stimulate new ideas. Ideas that can re-energise our membership and encourage a greater number of ‘non-traditional’ and digital agencies to join the IPA family.

The ultimate dangers of not looking outwards and living within your silo are (to me) personified by the demise of the US car industry. It is surely the epitome of a group of like-minded companies that comforted themselves in the fact that so long as they were all producing roughly the ‘same kind of product as their neighbour’ then they’d be OK. They seemed to forget that even in America, an 18 year-old female might finally succumb to the charms of a small but well proportioned Italian – that’s Fiat by the way, not Silvio Berlusconi!

If you’d been manufacturing or marketing cars in America surely you would have started to question just how many gas guzzling cars a single American can actually afford or want to own?

Ok, our business here is a long way off being the US car industry (thankfully), but there are parallels.

My own agency recently took a hit with the news that the BOS account was to be consolidated into the lead agency for Lloyds’ in London. I’m not sure that we could have done an awful lot about the events last October that precipitated a major recalibration of banks around the world. But who knows, perhaps if alongside creating press, TV and poster campaigns we’d developed the most useful and fastest selling financial application for the iPhone, then we might not only still have the Bank of Scotland account, but have also snatched the Lloyds’ account in the process.

What is for sure is that to get to new business we’ll all need to be thinking in new ways and putting more energy into the process. If that all sounds like a lot of hassle and hard work, it is. The truth is that for too long many people in our business have wanted to live in their comfort zone, which is hugely ironic for a profession that’s made its fortune out of promoting change.

But is today’s tough climate the time to be pushing the boundaries, shouldn’t we focus on protecting what we have?

Tempting, as it might be to try to sit tight and preserve the status quo, right now, I don’t think that’s an option. It’s a case of either moving forwards or sliding backwards. I do know that if we work collectively to push the boundaries then we’ll all have a better chance of winning new business and protecting what we already have. We’ll also start to get on the radar of more opinion leaders, journalists and clients, both here and south of the border.

I might sound like an idealist but I’m also a realist. The pool of work here in Scotland is limited and it’s getting smaller by the year.

Luckily for us imagination and creativity is our currency and it’s one that’s highly transferable. We haven’t committed our entire lives to working in a factory that’s gone bust overnight, or invested millions in a now redundant technology. We’ve all chosen to work in world that lives by the sword and dies by the sword. To appropriate an Obama-ism “we need to pick ourselves and dust ourselves down”.

So as creative and inventive professionals we shouldn’t respond to the ‘credit quake’ as CNN momentarily rebranded it, by holding out the begging bowl, and definitely not by playing a protectionist card. Because although this downturn is going to be here for a while, if we get embroiled in a “Why do Scottish businesses keep move their accounts to London?” rant we’ll gain nothing, especially new business from down south!

Which brings me on to where we sit on the radar of prospective clients outwith Scotland and within the IPA family.

Well, no Scottish agency has ever grown to the sheer scale of a London shop, and for good reason, the market here just couldn’t take it. But what if we all focused more of our attention on the market that isn’t here, beyond the border, even beyond the UK, because that’s where the majority of the opportunities lie. And if our ideas and ambition is big enough there’s no reason why we can’t have a piece of those opportunities.

There’s no denying that as part of the IPA family and in the eyes of many prospective clients, agencies in Scotland are seen as the underdogs. But underdogs can win; they generally have a lot more fun along the way, (creative people like to work for underdogs). And that when victory comes, it always tastes that bit sweeter.

I think it’s time we exploited our relative lack of scale, our flexibility and capability and turned our underdog status to our collective advantage. And let’s not forget, even if you’re in an agency of less than 20 people here in Scotland, through the IPA we all have access to a huge resource both here and in London, one that offers you as many benefits as the biggest agency grouping anywhere.

I know that to be thought of as an underdog can be a bad thing and rightly so if it’s the type that wallows in self-pity. Nobody wants to keep the company of the underdog who’s a moaner, no matter how valid his or her cause. Which is why we should all stop complaining about business moving South.

Having grown up in Liverpool in the 80’s I know all about moaning underdogs, in fact I became an expert. Because in 80’s Liverpool the world was against you and boy did you keep telling people. Then one day you woke up and realised that the world might just have a point, (which was possibly the reason why Manchester was economically wiping the floor with Liverpool).

If however the underdog applies their talent, demonstrates their hunger and goes beyond what’s expected then people take notice.

When I go back to Liverpool now, the place is almost unrecognisable. It’s still a tough city with huge social problems. But, despite its structural problems, it is inventing its way to a better future. The city is alive with creativity, big ideas, entrepreneurial spirit, start-ups and innovative social ventures and networks. Crucially it’s not lost the ability to tell it how it is, or be prepared to laugh at itself. Something that we in Scotland can do as well, if not better than anyone.

And to appreciate just exactly what an underdog can do, you can’t do much better than look at and learn from Obama’s dramatic victory in November.

Young, ambitious, precociously bright, but also an outsider, Obama wasn’t part of the old school or from a Democrat dynasty. He was also a guy with some radical views, had very little experience; he wasn’t married to a hockey mom or … ‘from these parts’.

But Obama ultimately exploited the best aspects of his underdog status to such an extent that the weaknesses most likely to derail him, namely his lack of political experience on a national level (and for some the colour of his skin) mattered less and less as time went on.

It’s precisely because he wasn’t part of the system, the old boy network and fixture in the clubhouse that he succeeded. He told it as it was, and in tough times that’s what people wanted to hear. He outmanoeuvred one of the most politically adept families of our time - the Clintons, to gain the Democratic Party nomination, and then went on to soundly beat the Republican establishment.

Obama did things that you just don’t do; he collected more donations than anyone had ever collected before, and he did it by harnessing the power of the internet and its social networks. The Clintons and the Republicans got caught dozing. They both failed to grasp the power of the digital age and the fact that people are not just your target audience, but that they are fast becoming one of your most effective media channels.

So to sum up, from stunt cycling on Youtube to the demise of the US car industry…what’s the message going forward?

What any good client anywhere wants right now is an agency that gets them as a person, understands their business needs, what makes their target audience tick and understands how to deliver a product or service that will deepen or create a relationship. They’ll use the best, most inspiring, cost-effective people for the job. It’s our job to prove that we in Scotland can mix it with the best of them.

So rather than see clients’ desire to shop outside their patch as a threat, we need to start seeing it as an opportunity. We need to capitalise on the wholesale reappraisal of client/agency relationships happening right now, as procurement departments encourage their marketing teams to readjust to a new market reality.

If you’re the incumbent this might strike fear into your heart, but it’s also a chance to reinvigorate an existing relationship and maybe, just maybe address the elephant in the room. Because you can bet that if you don’t, the agency that’s knocking on your client’s door will.

Just like the Clintons and the Republicans a lot of the really big established agencies are struggling to adapt to changing times, their overheads are high and their own brands are so well defined that change is proving to be a slow and painful process. I’d say that without exception none of the IPA agencies here in Scotland are faced with that level of problem. We can use our scale and our agility to collaborate, to move faster, tell it like it is and bring new business to Scotland.

It’s an honour to be asked to take on the role of the Chair of the IPA in Scotland. I hope that over the next two years I can help to open up our world to a broader and more inspirational level of debate. It won’t be easy and I’ll need to tap into more of the young minds in this room in addition to the wise heads on the Chairman’s group, because with the best will in the world many of these people are already working at 110%.

I know that not everyone here will agree with my analysis. But if that helps us to create more debate, raise the bar, and harness the ideas of a far broader group of creative minds, then I believe that we’ll all be in a much better place.