Playing the long game
AMV BBDO, Cresta’s 2019 agency of the year, has been the UK’s largest agency and one of the world’s most awarded for decades. We met CCO Alex Grieve to discuss how he intends to maintain that position
Some weeks before we are due to meet, confirmation arrives of my allotted hour with Alex Grieve. As I scroll down through the email, my eye is drawn to the footer. It’s longer than the actual message. Far, far longer.
Below the usual corporate sign off, there is a list of recent awards so long you think it will never end. And these are no minor accolades, they are all Oscar level.
It makes Lewis Hamilton’s annual Grand Prix haul look small-time. AMV has been performing at this level since it was founded back in the late 1970s.
In those early days, its reputation was defined by the talent of copywriter David Abbott. His style had been heavily influenced by a stint in New York working under no less a figure than Bill Bernbach.
Returning to the UK, and eventually founding AMV, Abbott perfected an anglicised take on the Bernbach ethos. It resulted in long running campaigns for brands like Volvo, Sainsbury’s, The Economist, Yellow Pages and British Telecom that reflected a rapidly evolving society. Aspiration and upward mobility were breaking down the UK’s traditional class barriers, and AMV spoke to this desire for equality of opportunity, higher education and a better life.
As Alex explained during our conversation, Abbott was able to “touch the lives of ordinary people, the beauty of his writing creating a classical populism”. Brands (as well as awards) poured through the agency’s doors, propelling it to its current position as the UK’s largest agency.
Jump forward several decades and the now BBDO owned AMV is still consistently one of the world’s most awarded agencies, still creating campaigns in touch with the prevailing zeitgeist, still seemingly at the top of its game.
Given how much has changed in the world and the industry over those decades, and continues to change with sometimes dizzying speed, how has AMV BBDO achieved this near impossible feat ? And, perhaps more importantly, how does its latest creative head plan to maintain this trajectory?
As I arrived at the agency’s somewhat anonymous office block not far from the Tate Modern gallery, I reminded myself of Alex’s own upward mobility through the industry.
Starting out at Saatchi & Saatchi under maverick creative Paul Arden he went on to spend 14 award winning years at BBH working for John Hegarty on brands such as Audi, British Airways, Levi’s and Barnardo’s children’s charity. After a two year intermission at digital outfit Glue, he and partner Adrian Rossi moved into senior positions at AMV. That was almost ten years ago.
It’s hard to imagine a better training for his new role. Three of London’s great creative powerhouses acting like base camps for an ascent of Everest.
Alex is only the fourth creative to reach the summit at AMV. After Abbott himself there was Peter Souter and then Paul Brazier. People tend to arrive at the agency and stay. Brazier, for example, had completed 27 years when he made way for Alex in 2019. They find a place that, in the parlance of a realty agent, is their ‘forever home’.
I meet AMV’s new CCO in one of those ubiquitous glass boxes that line the sides of modern open plan offices. The design is comfortable rather than cutting edge, and some would say that this sums up the biggest challenge AMV faces.
When I rather provocatively suggest that the agency is sometimes seen as perhaps a little safe, a little middle-class, Alex doesn’t entirely refute this. “ Since I’ve taken over, this is something we need to correct. It gives a picture of us that simply isn’t reflected in the work we are doing.” Perceptions of course have a habit of lagging reality.
As if to prove this point, well before the phrase ‘brand purpose’ had swept the industry, AMV was working with Essity and its Libresse brand to develop a taboo-busting strategy that in many ways defines this new direction.
Their 2017 ‘Blood Normal’ campaign was a revelation. Here, at last, was a femcare brand discarding the usual euphemisms, the usual veils; addressing head-on a taboo so ingrained in society that the work shocked and delighted in equal measure.
This was followed by ‘Viva La Vulva’, a campaign that swept all before it in last year’s awards (including a competition-topping performance at Cresta).
By now, we are all familiar with, perhaps even a little blasé, about this breakthrough work. But its bravery is unquestionable. It’s certainly not ‘comfortable’. And it’s entirely contemporary in both execution and its spread across platforms.
“Both BBDO at network level and parts of AMV itself were unsure this was the way forward,” Alex says diplomatically, “and media owners including Facebook rejected it…until the momentum behind the work brought acceptance.”
The fact that it went ahead at all, he explained, is down to an incredibly brave client. “ I am staggered there aren’t more CMOs who look at Essity and brands like Burger King and the old W+K Honda campaign and realise that being brave can be a sure-fire way to success,” Alex says, before carefully adding, “mind you, it’s easy for me to say that from where I sit, I’m not on the client side.”
I ask if he feels it’s possible to squeeze ‘purpose’ into any brand - as seems to be the current vogue - and Alex relaxes into the conversation with a come back I hadn’t really expected, “I think this is both a very exciting and at the same time worrying development. There is a genuine need from many consumers to buy brands that stand for something. Brands like Essity have an absolute right to do this, but there are some brands or products which are just there really to give us a moment of pleasure or entertainment.”
In the UK one of these products might be Walker’s Crisps (potato chips). This market-leading PepsiCo brand has been fronted by one of Britain’s most famous ex-soccer stars turned TV presenter and national ‘treasure’ for as long as most consumers can remember. It’s not award-winning in the way that Libresse is, but AMV’s work has become part of the culture.
Warm, consistently funny, sharply written; unthreatening but hugely effective, the Walker’s work reflects perfectly Alex’s point. Here is a product (and campaign) aiming not to change the world but to give us a moment of pleasure in the ad breaks as much as on the tastebuds.
This partnership between Walkers, AMV and presenter Gary Lineker has lasted for over 20 years. Dotted throughout the agency’s large roster of big brands you will find similar long-term relationships that have resulted in equally long-term strategic and creative solutions.
These days, of course, solutions may involve a raft of skills and media choices that AMV’s original founders would have found more science fiction than essential agency creative disciplines.
How does an old-school advertising supertanker become a fleet of agile, fast reacting, ever-changing bright, new creative speedboats? Today’s obsession with short-term activation-focussed creativity would seem at odds with AMV’s classic ad-format legacy.
Alex takes these questions in his thoughtful stride and gives a simple answer that belies the complexity of the question, “there’s a real danger that you get overwhelmed by how things are changing, and over-correct” he says.
“Ed McCabe’s famous quote ‘creativity is one of the last remaining ways to gain an unfair advantage over the competition’ is a principle we still have a steadfast belief in” he goes on to explain.
Today’s “bigger toolbox”, as Alex puts it, simply “changes the practises of how you apply creativity” and calls for a wider set of people around a problem. “It’s now four or five people rather than just the old AD/writer combo, and it's about being less precious about the names that go on an award.”
It seems AMV BBDO feels it can take all these developments in its stride, that whatever new technology or data-based techniques come to the fore, they will have the right people working in a spirit of effective collaboration.
That idea of collaboration clearly extends beyond the day-to-day working creative teams.
Where once the agency’s creative direction seemed focussed on just one figurehead, today Alex believes it doesn’t make sense “to have queues outside my office waiting for me to sign off on everything, so we are trying to remove hierarchy, be more fluid and remove bottlenecks.”
He returns several times to collaboration and team strengths as key to running a modern 80 strong creative department with its wide range of skills, “I am the necessary figurehead, but it’s a team of five of us that really runs things.”
The other four are ECDs Nadja Lossgott and Nicholas Hulley and new Deputy ECDs Toby Allen and Jim Hillson.
With this enviably talented creative team and CEO Sarah Douglas around him, Alex seems to wear his responsibilities fairly lightly. He’s relaxed, unhurried and, unlike some in his position, happy to cover pretty much any topic. Even more surprisingly perhaps, our meeting isn’t once disturbed by phone calls or urgent interruptions.
The well-oiled AMV BBDO management systems preclude, it would seem, minor crises or urgent decision-making coming between its CCO and whatever he needs to focus on.
With awards stacking up like cans of beans on a supermarket shelf and enough business to keep it on top of Nielsen’s UK league table, it could appear that Alex has taken over at a fairly comfortable time for the agency.
On closer inspection, however, any clear water between itself and the likes of Adam & Eve/DDB, McCann London and VCCP is narrow and aggressively fought over territory.
Somewhere within the new job title must lurk the word ‘pressure’, but I don’t get any hint of it from my interviewee’s calm manner.
Holding company target-based financial priorities must surely, I suggest, pile additional non-creative responsibilities onto his already full load. Especially at a time when the older ‘ad’ networks themselves are under pressure to remain relevant and profitable.
Alex responds: “For some, just standing still is not bad these days, and it is a definitely a tricky time…but I am still optimistic because as tech has grown and become more familiar there seems to be a new realisation that creativity is needed more and more. Tech has led to a kind of digital sameness in user experience and to break through requires more disruptive and interesting creative work - which is where we come in.”
His relationship with CEO Sarah Douglas is clearly a close one and is based on both having spent years shadowing the previous generation of AMV BBDO leaders. They understand deeply the culture that has served the agency well for decades and now expects them to be its effective guardians.
Prior to the arrival of BBDO, that culture included an ethical approach to business many years ahead of its time.
The original founders ran the first major agency to refuse work on tobacco business, eschewing the chance to make many millions of what must have been tempting income. They also had a policy of never making redundancies however bad the economy (and it got pretty bad at times, during their early days).
I probe how these ethics must have changed since becoming part of Omnicom.
“Redundancy is still something we try our very hardest to avoid,” Alex tells me. “It’s the very last option.” And it becomes clear that as much as possible the agency continues to uphold the original agency’s principles even as part of a much larger global network.
In fact, the relationship with BBDO and Omnicom seems a pretty happy one and, unlike many mergers, it seems to have been one of very much like-minded parties. Of all the networks, Alex claims “BBDO is a truly creative network.”
It also can’t hurt that the network’s current worldwide CEO, Andrew Robertson, moved direct from the top role at AMV.
This apparent ‘love-in’ doesn’t stop Alex getting a bit of a grilling from Worldwide CCO David Lubars if London fails in a new business pitch. But again, the relationship seems close and one of mutual respect, with Alex claiming to speak to Lubars regularly and labels him a “a good man who wants to do good work, a fellow spirit”.
Looking through the London agency’s long list of clients, there’s nothing that obviously courts ethical question marks even in today’s much more rigorously policed business environment. Unlike, for example, the Saatchi brothers, AMV has always resisted the temptation to get involved in politics.
To be honest, at this point I’m struggling to find some edge, some controversy for my interview. It seems founder Peter Mead’s famous motto ‘If in doubt, be nice’ still rules at this thoroughly modern iteration of AMV. Almost annoying, but also somehow very reassuring.
With the hour rushing by, I bring up awards and their role today. We are, after all, partly meeting up so that I can present Alex with Cresta’s Agency of the Year 2019 trophy.
As you’d expect, AMV’s new CCO has a personal awards tally that most of us would kill for. Multiple trophies at the world’s top festivals mark Alex out as someone his department can’t help but respect. But now that he decides which work gets entered and who gets the credit for it, how important does he feel they are for today’s young creatives?
“The trick I learn’t when I was younger is to see awards as a bonus. You can’t get too wrapped up in the pursuit of them.”
And he adds: “The joy of this job, if you’re to be in it for any length of time, is just to enjoy doing it.”
Fortunately, one thing Alex seemed to enjoy was the design of the new Cresta trophy that I presented to him. “Unusually elegant compared to some”, was his verdict. This was a bit like winning a trophy myself.
Alan Page is President of Cresta
