Neil Christie writes:

On Friday I was in Madrid to speak at a conference organised by C4E consulting services at the IESE Business School.
The trip to Madrid afforded an opportunity to visit the Prado to see Goya’s strange and disturbing Black Paintings.

And in the bathroom of my hotel room I encountered the strange and disturbing Black Bog-roll.

(Amazing hotel, the Puerta America. Each floor is styled by a different architect – those architects including Zaha Hadid, John  Pawson and Norman Foster – and is totally different from all the others. Brilliant idea for a hotel that enables you to come back and have a different experience each time you visit.)

The theme of the conference was El Futuro de la Agencia de Publicitad (future of the advertising agency) and the other speakers were Nigel Long of Naked, Guy Hayward of 180,

Al Young of St Luke’s and Lee Maicon of Strawberry Frog.

None of us was rash enough to do much prediction of the future but luckily for us people seemed to be more interested to hear what we were doing in the present. We had each been asked to talk about what made our agencies different and successful so that’s what we did.

For those who couldn’t attend the conference, here’s my condensed (and possibly unreliable) account of each agency’s worldview.

180
Big international ideas are best developed by multinational teams. This reflects the multicultural world we live in and the international scope of most brands and businesses. Guy’s ambition is for 180 to continue to create big global ideas (they’ve just won the Sony account, which should help) and to earn big global fees doing so. He put his multicultural thesis into practice by making his presentation and fielding questions in fluent Spanish.

Naked
The agency of the future needs to be not just different but distinctive, that is, to have a difference that makes a difference. (I suspect the simultaneous translator may have struggled with the nuances of this.)
Nigel explained the four ‘Naked truths’ –Everything communicates, There is a better way, People are your partners and See the full picture. He argued that in a world of vested interest, independence is a virtue and illustrated this with a nice analogy for the way that clients seek advice from specialist agencies: “If you want impartial advice on what to eat for dinner you don’t ask the fishmonger.”
Nigel also teased the audience with talk of the Naked Big Tool (but he didn’t get his Big Tool out) which is apparently used with Naked’s ‘lubricant’ on a client’s various agencies.

St Luke’s
Al talked about the story of St Luke’s birth and unique ownership structure. (All employees own a stake.) He also talked about their environment, where no-one has their own desk but each client has their own room. Interestingly, he also talked about the difficulties their culture and structure present. Although the agency is co-owned, it can’t be co-run and every family needs a mum and/or dad to establish boundaries.

Strawberry Frog
Unfortunately I missed a chunk of Lee’s talk (also impressively bilingual) but the gist of what I heard was that strawberry frog aims to create cultural movements for its clients. They have a philosophy that they call ‘frogism’. This means thinking like a frog, not a dinosaur – being small, intelligent, agile and flexible. Interested to hear that they have no in-house production people and entirely outsource that function.

Wieden + Kennedy
Well, I talked about the usual W+K stuff:

–    we’re here to do the best work of our lives
–    people and principles are more important than process
–    chaos is your friend
–    embrace failure
–    try to create strong. provocative relationships between good companies and their customers
–    the importance of the voice of the brand and how we work to express that
–    the best way to feel optimistic about the future is to focus on doing great, innovative work now

Interestingly there were a lot of similarities in what each speaker said. It might have spiced up the debate a bit if we had had an alternative perspective from a representative of the likes of WPP. I’m sure they have a very different idea from us of what the future might look like.

Anyway, it was an interesting day and we were very well looked after by our hosts at C4E. Many thanks for inviting me. If anyone reading was present I’d be interested to know what you made of the presentations. Or, indeed, if you weren’t present but are inspired or outraged by anything in this post, I’d be interested to hear about that too.