A positive start to 2006 as Martin Sorrell of WPP predicts a gloomy year for the UK ad industry.

‘His prediction will cast a pall over the British advertising industry’, says the Times. The article goes on to say that, ‘since Easter spending on advertising has fallen, reflecting weakness in the wider economy. Some media company executives say that the downturn is the most severe since the recession of the early 1990s’.

Here at Welcome to Optimism we will be attempting to shrug off that pall as we contemplate the year that’s just passed, the year ahead and what it might hold for Wieden + Kennedy London.

2005 was a great year for us. We couldn’t have achieved that success without the efforts of every single person here. They gave us hard work, patience, commitment, talent, blood, sweat, tears and, possibly, other bodily fluids may have contributed. Thanks, everyone.

The UK advertising market had a poor year in 2005, with no real growth. But we grew significantly, winning new business from Pizza Hut, Sky One, EA Games and Yakult. This meant that we also grew in numbers, taking on 18 new people.

We moved into a new home in Hanbury Street and turned it into a great place to work. This has made a huge difference after the years of struggling with a crap environment at Elsley Court. It really feels like the new building has given us a new spirit and energy.

We had our best year ever for awards in 2005, with a few of the highlights being: Grand Prix at Cannes, Grand Clio, Grand Prix at the Andys, two black pencils at D&AD, Grand Prix at the APG Planning Awards, Best ad of the year at British Television and IPA ‘Best of the Best’ (small) Agency of the Year. Our reputation for creative and strategic excellence is now amongst the best around. It’s no coincidence that a survey in Campaign in 2005 named us as 2^nd most desirable agency in town to work at. It’s also significant that for the first time we joined the COI roster, described as one of the best measures of agencies’ status and ‘a thermometer that indicates who’s hot and who’s not’.

We launched two important new initiatives last year: WK Side and WK Fat. WK Side is an experiment designed to bring in people from outside the advertising industry and see what we can learn from each other. WK Fat will be the agency’s innovation engine; exploring new channels for our ideas, quantifying the value of those ideas to clients and finding ways in which they can be implemented.

We parted company with two clients in 2005: Revlon and Sky One. Creative and strategic differences in both cases. Disappointing, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Other than these two, we did some good work across all our clients this year: new TV and press on Wales Tourist Board, a multi-media relaunch for Yakult, the biggest yet Nike Run London, international campaigns for Nike ReUse a Shoe and Free, some very funny new Pizza Hut commercials, some nice idents for EA Games and, on Honda, some dealer campaigns that prove that dealer campaigns can be as fresh as brand campaigns, an array of radically different new work including the Yume no Chikara and Crazy Sensible campaigns, and we topped off the year with the epic Impossible Dream.

Not bad. But we can still do better.

For 2006 we’ve set ourselves some objectives. These are still provisional and we may add to them or amend them as we go. (Especially if it looks as if we’re not going to achieve them.) At the risk of embarrassment and humiliation if we fail miserably against these targets, I thought I’d post them on here.

1. Achieve the standard of our best work across all our clients.

Most agencies have one or two ‘shop window’ accounts on which they do great work and then a bunch of ‘bread and butter’ clients that help pay the bills but don’t produce work anyone can be proud of. We don’t want to be in that game. We’re here to try to do the best work of our lives across all of our clients. It’s not easy. (And maybe it’s impossible by definition for all our work to be our best.) But it’s what we have to aim for.

2. Make 2006 our healthiest year ever in terms of revenue and profit

Though money isn’t the reason we exist, we need it to pay people’s salaries. And, remarkably enough, they expect pay rises every year, so we have to keep making more of it.

3. Win 2 like-minded profitable UKClients

Winning new biz is a key driver of growth. But we don’t want to put on extra revenue just for the sake of it. We want to grow on our own terms by taking on clients with whom we can develop the kind strong relationships that lead to great, effective work. And we don’t want to grow so fast that quality control suffers. So two significant new clients seems like a reasonable target to set for the year.

4. Successfully run a large global project

W+K’s business worldwide is increasingly coming from international assignments. But most of W+K London’s recent work has been UK-based. (The global Aiwa campaign on which we collaborated with W+K Tokyo was a notable exception.) There’s an opportunity for us to broaden our contribution to the agency’s global clients and we’ll be looking to do this in 2006.

5. Learn and profit from new communication channels

Digital and other new channels are the fastest growing sector in the industry, while the rest of the industry is in downturn. (See Sir Martin’s comments above.) We need to keep ahead of the pace of change, developing our experience and expertise in these areas, developing breakthrough strategies and creative ideas for these media

6. Continue to build our reputation beyond conventional ads

Though we’ve done this to a certain extent, with some innovative work on Nike and Honda in particular, we’re still best known for our TV work. We want to become more than just an ‘advertising agency’. In 2005 we set up WK Fat to help us do this. In 2006 we need to put it into practice.

7. Enhance and develop our working space

We’re planning to continue to extend and improve our Hanbury Street home. Watch this space for more details, depending on how the planning permission application goes.

8. Become the most enjoyable place in the industry to work

In a survey in Campaign in 2005 we were rated 2^nd most desirable place to work (after BBH). We want to improve on that, and to ensure that we’re not just highly rated by those people who aspire to work here but, more importantly, have the people who are already here rate W+K as the best.

So, where to next? In the words of our founder Dan Wieden:

‘Where to from here? Just about anywhere our heart desires. I mean it. Look at us now. We are new again. New people. We got a new home. A list of new clients. A healthy balance sheet. Offices all over the globe. A creative reputation second to none. We are independently owned. And fuckin’ crazy as hell. It is interesting to hear talk about the good old days, but that agency no longer exists. All we need is that weird thing that seems to hang around in the ether here. That whacked-out affection for letting go of the handrails. For throwing yourself off a cliff.’

2006, here we come.