Avish Gordhan and Mandie van der Merwe.
One of Mandie van der Merwe and Avish Gordhan’s biggest concerns before joining Saatchi & Saatchi as chief creative officers was the fact that they were joining an agency that had been without a chief creative officer for nearly a year following the departure of former CCO Mike Spirkovski at the end of 2022.
“We were hesitant about it and what it would mean. What were we inheriting? But we quickly realised that we had joined a creative department that has stood out. There is a real desire to grow there,” Gordhan said. Advertisement.
The duo left Dentsu Creative in November last year, having also worked in the creative departments of M&C Saatchi, Cummins&Partners and Whybin TBWA.
Since joining Saatchi & Saatchi in January, the pair have been at the helm working with the agency’s connected clients, including Toyota, Arnott’s, Visa and Ancestry, as well as other key clients including Vodafone, Nescafé, Heineken, NRMA, TPG Telecom and Dettol.
van der Merwe explains that the creative duo’s goal for the next 12 months is to get to know their clients and understand the team they work with.
“You have to understand the inner workings of the business. The next 12 months will be dedicated to strengthening our role within our clients’ businesses as a modern, forward-looking agency, capable of proposing innovative ideas and solutions,” she explains.
It’s about creating space, Gordhan says, but also about removing fear from the room.
“When you’re trying to do brave, bold, new, untested work, it’s a scary prospect not just for the agency, but for clients,” he says.
The other role the duo has had to play is to dispel that fear, internally and with the agency’s long-standing clients.
“We have built long-standing relationships with our clients and with the company over time, and that is how we are going to bring modern creative thinking to their business, not just from a communications or marketing perspective, but also to solve other business problems that they have,” Gordhan says.
“Part of our job is to make sure people understand the comfort level needed to do the job well.”
“We’re all going through tough economic times right now,” says van der Merwe. The agency’s clients are sensitive to this, as are the creative duo.
“I see clients being reactive and focused on real, short-term results, and I get that. We need to make sure the engine keeps running. And it’s not just Saatchi and Saatchi clients, I see it’s a trend that everyone in our industry is feeling,” she says.
Brands have an opportunity to resist the urge to respond only to what’s in front of them, Gordhan says.
“Brands and companies that are looking up and taking a longer-term view and looking over the horizon to see what’s coming are likely to move faster. Mandie and I often say that thinking like a ‘big brand’ doesn’t mean being inflexible,” he says.
“There’s a perception that big brands tend to behave slowly. I don’t buy that argument. Big brands actually hang on to platforms, to brand behaviors, for longer in order to give people, audiences, and your brands an emotional edge.”
Saatchi & Saatchi has been fortunate to participate and be invited to several pitches recently, says Gordhan, building on some momentum on that front earlier this year.
“It doesn’t seem like it’s going to slow down. I look ahead and I see meetings scheduled for the next three months that will be related to the pitch,” he says.
The agency’s pitch plan is to keep getting invited and just be in the running.
“The challenge with a presentation plan is that it’s kind of like not being invited. If you’re not invited to the party, you don’t get to wear your best dress. Our plan is basically to get invited as much as possible and then present from there,” Gordhan says.
Regarding the growth opportunities the duo see for the agency, van der Merwe says building tailored agency teams helps unlock that growth.
“We create these bespoke teams that surround a client, enabled by our connected platform of capabilities in a really practical sense,” she says.
“When we think we have a great idea, we have the ability to bring these different skill sets together in a room so that you get the media intelligence, the data intelligence, the technology intelligence, the digital intelligence, the social intelligence… whatever is specifically needed.”
“We then build on that creativity and that idea, and I see it having a positive impact on the solutions we provide to our customers. By coming together, we create that growth, while creating ideas for living in new and exciting ways.”
For Gordhan, he and van der Merwe had conversations around “what are we going to do in the future?”
What the duo focuses on is that this industry defines itself as a creative industry.
“We need to focus on creativity and communications solutions. This is a historic phenomenon. We are now faced with tighter budgets, a fragmented media landscape, the impact of AI on our industry and the increasing number of in-house agencies,” Gordhan says.
In this context, Gordhan argues that the industry must systematically try to expand the way in which creativity can be applied.
“We need to take a broader view than the creative industry as a communications industry. We need to go further in that direction,” he says.
The industry also needs to make companies understand that creativity goes far beyond simple communication, says van der Merwe.
“As creatives in creative agencies, we look at everything from every angle. Tell us more than just your communication problems. Tell us something bigger, and we can really accelerate your business.”
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