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Demand marketers disclose their intended tenures during a pitch: that’s Sir John Hegarty’s advice for creative agencies battling a demise in the quality, scale, and longevity of ideas.

In an interview with ��������, the knighted founder of BBH and Saatchi & Saatchi observed that chief marketing officers are usually in a role for three years, which has led to a dearth of long-term ideas that endure and transform.

“Their tenure in a company is reduced and reduced and reduced,” he said, speaking to �������� this week during a visit to Australia.

“When I came into the business and I was pitching way back, one of the comments in a new business pitch would always be from the client, 'Well, you lot, you're very good, and I like you, but how long will you be here?' Well, the boot's on the other foot now. 

“When you're pitching for a piece of business, the agency should be saying to the client, 'Well, how long are you going to be here? Because we put a lot of effort into creating a thought, an idea, for you, and are you just going to bugger off in the next five years and we won't see you again? Or the next three years, or next two years, or during a pitch?'”

The advertising legend argued the industry is at a crossroads, and said he feels upset by the degradation of the craft and power of advertising. Yet he does not lay blame at the foot of agencies.

“I would argue it started with the marketeers, and we've acquiesced,” he said. 

“We haven't fought, we haven't made the argument, we haven't said to people, 'This is not going to work'. We've just taken the money and run. And because it's such a hideously competitive business, which in many ways is one of its advantages, we haven't stood up to it, and we haven't said 'This is wrong. We are creating work that is being rejected by our audience, is annoying them, is forcing them to turn off'.”

The solution, he proposed, is a creative revolution starting at the edges before working its way into the middle. Does that create an opportunity or duty for independent agencies, often led by ex-holding company executives who have struck out on their own? He believes that might just be the case, because true resistance starts with big acts for small clients.

“If you look at the ‘60s in the revolution, most of those agencies, the great agencies, Doyle Dane Bernbach, PKL, all of the great ones, Mary Wells, they had very small clients. Volkswagen was a funny little German import.”

True independence comes from an appetite for freedom and experimentation, though, he said, not an ambition to scale and sell. In 1997, 15 years after it was founded, Leo Burnett bought a 49% share in BBH, and in 2012, Publicis bought out Sir John and his co-founders, taking full control. But he contended they didn’t start with an ambition to sell.

“I really love what Uncommon have done in the UK, but they've sold. I mean, we started BBH in 1982 and we never talked about selling. We talked about great work, that's what drove us. None of us came into it saying, 'I want to be rich'. I mean, yes, it's nice to be rich, don't get me wrong, but that wasn't our driving force. And today it's like, set a company up, within five years you've sold. It's gonna take five years just to begin to establish your point of view.

“I always say, 'Money has a voice, but it doesn't have a soul'. When you're doing what we do, you've got to have a soul. You've got to have a point of view, a difference, a passion, and that's what makes change.”

A decline in passion and distinctiveness is partly driven by a downward pricing spiral, he argued, which has impacted the value clients place in the work, and agencies’ ability to invest in, and attract, talent.

“Because we've devalued the product we're making, clients then don't pay for it, because they think 'Anybody could do that. It's not very good'. And we're in this profit crisis.”

The industry has stopped “creating work that has a constancy to it, that has a relevance to it, that has a power to transform.” Instead, “everything we do now is just [a] transaction. This one off in the short term, and there's no belief in it. At a time when brands should be becoming more and more important.”

Last week, she was merging Australian agencies Clemenger, CHEP, and Traffik to combat the transactional approach to creativity that has bled into BBDO’s culture. However, consolidation can destabilise creative cultures, which could take a toll this year with Omnicom pursuing its acquisition of IPG and rolling out Omnicom Advertising Group, Publicis merging Publicis Worldwide and Leo Burnett to create Leo, and WPP continuing to embed Grey into AKQA.

Advertising leaders across the globe should fight to keep creative leaders in positions of power to weather those shifts, and take cues from other creative industries by making stars out of the best creative leaders, Sir John advised.

“If you look at the music industry, who are the most influential people in it? They are Elton John or Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan, whoever you want to name. We hardly know the names of the executives. Look at architecture. We talk about Frank Gehry. We talk about the people doing. 

“Fashion, yes, you've got LVMH, but we talk about Tom Ford ... the fashion industry understands this, that without creativity, they're nothing. They need the Gallianos. They need people like that, because they are the lifeblood of what the industry is going to do. And we've got to get advertising to that, even if it's a large organisation that goes, 'If we don't have those [creative people], if they aren't at the top, if we are not listening to what they're doing, if they're not delivering a kind of product that is profound and different, then we will fail.’”

Creative people (not “account men, or business people”) must lead the way, and protest against the influence and actions of “tech guys” who don’t value creativity. He imagines such resistors will think, “I don't want to run a company that's driving people apart, that's stalking, that's paying money into the coffers of these people who are trying to destroy fucking humanity.”

“There's just no empathy, there's no sensitivity, there's no creativity, there's no celebration of the human spirit,” he said of high profile technology leaders. 

“It's just reducing you down to something that can consume and be stored and followed and checked.”

He was outspoken about the advancement of ‘stalking’ people via data and personalisation efforts, going so far as to say, “As I constantly say, in the real world, you go to prison for it. Maybe we should hold up some clients and say, 'These people should go to prison for stalking.'” Once again, he blames brands, not agencies.

“I get very angry when it's always the advertising. Advertising gets blamed. The client goes scot free. 'Would I do something terrible? No, I'm a good man and I think about our audience and our consumers are very important to us'. Bullshit. You're extracting every ounce of profit out of them you possibly can. 

“You're not taking the blame for your bad actions, not doing something about it, not putting your hand up and say[ing], 'Well, actually, we asked the agency to do that, and if they don't do it, we don't pay them.'”

The best business people are artists, he continued, because they understand how to create true value over time, but often, that success comes posthumously. How can commercial creatives make something that outlasts them when shortened CMO tenures result in an uptick in pitching, and a limit the lifespan of big brand ideas? 

“It's short thinking for short term profits, for short term benefits, isn't it? It's just fascinating to me that the new Bridget Jones film is out, and it's called 'Mad About the Boy', and in it is a spoof of a commercial for Levi's that we made in 1992,” he said. 

BBH created iconic Levi’s campaigns throughout the 1980s, including ‘Swimmer’ a spot set to the track ‘Mad About The Boy’ which, 32 years later, has now been recreated in the new movie.

“Now, will Levi's do anything about that? I don't know. [It] should do, should capitalise on it.”

Making great work is imperative to the industry’s survival. If the market keeps heading in the direction it is, it will lose relevance and influence, the creator of Levi's 'When the world zigs, zag' tagline, and Johnnie Walker’s 'Keep Walking' argued. But that doesn’t mean selling big work is straightforward.

“People at BBH said once it had got one of the three of us [co-founders] to sign off on it, it was going to get sold. But that wasn't quite it. It was always a battle. It's always going to be a battle selling great work. You've got to be a great salesperson, you've got to be passionate, you've got to take people with you. It's not gonna be easy.”

One thing, however, that makes conceiving of great work easier is understanding and knowing what ‘great’ looks like. Many creatives disregard, or don’t have enough respect for, the past, he said, which is accelerating a decline into mediocrity.

“How do you think you're going to create great work? How do you think you're going to extend the value of advertising? Because you don't know what it achieved in the past and the people who achieved it.

“One of the great advantages of understanding how powerful an idea is, is if you've had one, done one, and witnessed it and watched it. There is nothing better than that than saying, 'We had that idea. It went out there. It transformed that market'. It's a sort of revelatory experience.”

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