Loyalty beyond reason

by Diane Milne

Saatchi & Saatchi has consistently dominated the world advertising scene and has the power to transform ordinary brands into global success stories. Diana Milne catches up with its CEO for EMEA, Simon Francis, and asks how to get ahead in advertising.

“We're incredibly proud of all our campaigns and hate them all in equal measure”
-Simon Francis

He may not be a household name but Simon Francis is the brain behind some of Europe's best-known advertising campaigns - from Pampers and Toyota to Guinness and T-Mobile. As Saatchi & Saatchi's CEO for EMEA he has the power to make or break a brand and to create what he describes as "lovemarks" - products which attract "loyalty beyond reason" from their customers.

 His firm has dominated the global advertising industry since the 1970s and currently employs 6000 people across the world, with 150 offices in 86 countries worldwide.  In the past five years alone it has won 3500 awards for creative work, most recently scooping six Lions at the Cannes International Advertising Festival 2009 for its  T-Mobile 'Dance' advertisement.

The T-Mobile campaign featured real life footage of 350 people breaking into a spontaneous dance routine at London's Liverpool Street station among the rush hour crowds.  The footage was later shown across online, direct and retail channels, as well as through a specially created YouTube channel. It encompasses, says Francis, what advertising in 2009 is all about and reflects the dramatic technological changes that are shaping the industry. It is no longer enough to target a captive audience on prime time television. The fragmentation of the media landscape and the vast array of media choices available mean advertisers must try harder than ever to engage with consumers on all fronts; through digital, television and print but, most importantly, through word of mouth. "Technology has completely transformed the industry," says Francis. "It's very challenging to go to market with push messaging right now because the audiences' choices of media are so fragmented. Maybe 15 to 20 years ago, 34 percent of the UK population would be watching Coronation Street. You could reach 34 percent of the population in a 30 second advertising slot and talk to people of all social typologies. Now the average rating is much lower for all TV programmes because there are so many different channels and shows."

Falling revenue

The decline in print and television advertising in the past decade has been well documented. According to the latest figures by the Advertising Association, newspaper advertising fell by 12 percent last year in the UK alone and TV advertising dropped by five percent. Meanwhile, internet advertising rose by 17.3 percent. Given these figures does Francis believe there is still a future for traditional media in Europe? "We would say our primary media now is people. They do the marketing work for us. The traditional media are still amazingly good conversation starters. And if you look at our case histories they make full use of traditional media to start a socal networking conversation. But that is now carried on through social media, such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. If you have an idea that is so compelling, arresting and enjoyable then people will come to your idea and propagate it."

The pressure for Francis and his team to come up with these compelling ideas is growing in the face of harsh economic conditions and their clients' ever shrinking advertising budgets. "We've seen, on average, advertising budgets shift 10 to 20 percent south depending on which market you are in and how the client is placed," says Francis. "Clearly some market leaders are more resilient and have carried on and maintained their expenditure. Some of the middle ranked and smaller players have found it more challenging and they are the ones that have been the most impacted." He goes on to say that advertising markets that have suffered the biggest impacts are in the UK, Spain, Italy and parts of Russia.

While he maintains that shrinking budgets have not stifled creativity, he says that economic conditions are setting the tone of today's advertising campaigns, with a move away from extolling the virtues of excessive spending and an emphasis on what consumers are really looking for: "Hope, joy and optimism." Francis adds: "Creativity isn't something that is budget related. But there's a different style emerging and clearly wanton expenditure is not in. It's not appropriate and many people won't be advertising in that way. But many people are looking for optimism, for hope and for humanity, and these seem to be becoming recurrent themes". He goes on to say that with recessionary conditions, it is the products that can offer that "emotional connection" with the consumer, which will beat the competition, even products that are offered at a lower price with the same functionality. "In an age where there's not much money around and times are tough, people will, of course, look to compare and contrast brands and services. Those brands and services that can offer an emotional reward, beyond just the functionality of the products, are the ones that get loyalty beyond reason. The brands that can offer hope, joy and an emotional connection to the consumer are the ones that will prosper when all the other brands will suffer."

Creating lovemarks

Saatchi & Saatchi's belief that customers' buying choices are made on the basis of emotion, not rational thought, drives its creative processes.  It aims to make every brand in its portfolio a 'lovemark' and, when creating a new campaign, it embarks on a complex process of analysis to establish the emotional connection the product has with consumers. "We do extensive research on our client's business where we look at how respected they are and how loved they are. We plot them on a map versus the competition and then we work out a plan to either increase the level of respect towards the brand or increase the amount of love it engenders among consumers. Then we put together a plan accordingly. For many brands it's about the emotional side of things rather than the functional side of things. It's a very scientific plan constructed to build 'lovemarks' over a period of time."

Increasingly, says Francis, companies must prove their moral credentials in order establish an emotional connection with an increasingly socially conscious consumer - with sustainability and corporate social responsibility becoming key differentiators between brands. With this in mind, last year the company acquired the environmental sustainability agency Act Now run by Adam Werbach, one of the founder members of Greenpeace and the youngest ever member of the US-based environmental organisation, the Sierra Club.

"'Lovemarks' are all about standing for something," says Francis. "And increasingly many consumers will make choices and decisions based on how well a product or service performs for them but also for the world at large. The advice we'd offer our clients is to align their internal impact on the world to what the consumer wants and to build that into our 'lovemarks' thinking."

He cites the example how this strategy was used to create a campaign for Pampers, which he regards as one of Europe's most successful 'lovemarks'. "At pampers we put in place a programme where every time somebody bought a pack of Pampers one euro went towards a vaccine that would save a child's life. It was an extraordinary programme we put in place with UNICEF and it's a great example of how a brand can change the world and offer mothers an emotional reward whilst at the same time driving the business forward."

Great minds

It is the job of Saatchi & Saatchi's 2500 strong European creative team to come up with the ideas that will build emotional connections between brands and consumers - a process which Francis says relies for its success on the team being "incredibly brutal creatively", an approach characterised by the company's catchphrase for the process; 'let's kill some puppies'. "It's a crude phrase but it's true. You fall in love with your ideas and you don't want any harm to come to them but to get ideas such as the T-Mobile campaigns, you have to be utterly brutal and use consumer testing and gut instinct to make your choices," he explains. Describing the process he says: "We have these huge tribes where we have creatives from all over the world to work for two intense days where we fill rooms and rooms with ideas which we will whittle down to 10 or 15. Then through consumer research we whittle them down to one or two. We do some development work before one comes out at the end of the process. But first we have to kill some puppies."

Despite having won countless awards for his teams' creative work, Francis says he is by nature, never fully satisfied by the outcome of a campaign. "We're incredibly proud of all our campaigns and hate them all in equal measure. This uncompromising, perfectionist approach extends to Saatchi & Saatchi's working culture which Francis admits, is not for the faint hearted, with anybody not deemed to embody the agency's values, quickly weeded out. "It's a tough place to be if you want to cruise. It's a very tough place if you are not creative or you won't put yourself at the service of an idea. For every single individual we have a peak performance appraisal system. We are quite brutal with people that don't match our spirit." That spirit is built on Saatchi & Saatchi's twin pillars of philosophy: 'Nothing is impossible' and 'One Team, One Dream'. Francis says the strong emphasis on good teamwork is the real key to Saatchi & Saatchi's success in the cut throat competitive advertising world: "In many agencies people don't work together and egos get in the way," he says. "Profit and loss accounts get in the way, and reporting lines get in the way. Saatchi is unlike anywhere else I've worked before, where we have one team, one dream."