Saatchi. That name means something to us. It’s this agency, its the name on the front door, its every single person who decided to work here. We made a video love letter to Saatchi NY and our people on the 40th anniversary of a place that has always been driven by the power of unreasonable creativity.
The Saatchi Planning Non-Blog
A few months ago we were sitting in our planning group when someone said – “Hey, we should have a blog.”
Of course, a blog is a great idea. A place to share . . . a way to give the department a voice . . . etcetera, etcetera. But we wanted to do something different, the last of which was to publish another digital white paper on consumer trends or another study on how the recession has changed spending habits. We do all of that stuff and it is a really important part of our jobs . . . but we wanted a different take for our blog.
Most planners are particularly stricken/blessed by work/life integration. Their tireless curiosity & knack for seeing everything through a certain lens is part of what makes them good at their jobs. Going off that point, we decided that celebrating (and leveraging) the personal passions’ of the SaatchiNY planning team is one-and-the-same with celebrating SaatchiNY planning.
And so today we officially launch the Saatchi Kitchen. A non-blog. A simple aggregator of the personal blogs of some of our planners. There’s six collected there for the time being, but we plan to rotate in new participants as they pop up. We’ll also be using the sharing functionality to spread the word on what we like the best from each others’ passion projects with the rest of our networks.
From design fetishes and sociological theory to a backstage look at fashion week runway shows and musings on music videos, this is what SaatchiNY planners are interested in.
We hope you’ll think it’s interesting too.
Front Page image from Foodies at Home
Interview with Claudine Cheever by Tangerine NY
Where are you right now?
Sitting in an atrium soaking up the sun and trying to work.
What was your first job?
Working in a children’s book shop. I was in charge of doing the window displays and booking storytime readers. As a result I have a real way with tinfoil and an incredible collection of Caldecott-award-winning books signed by the authors and illustrators.
What do you worry about?
Competitors – to my agency and to my clients’ brands. You know, that “****, they did something cool” feeling. Or is that envy?
How do you handle stress or pressure?
Very very large bag of Twizzlers. Only the red ones. The fresher the better.
What motivates you the most?
The amazing people I get to work with every day. Particularly the planners in my department who are doing such amazing things at an age when I was still like waiting tables or whatever.
Which company do you most admire?
So hard to pick just one! I love Southwest Airlines—-their consistent and instinctive lens through which they view and do everything. They make it look easy and my personal experience flying with two young kids matches the expectation every time. I also really admire my client General Mills for the investment they make in their culture and people.
What blogs have you read today?
Facebook live feed (not a blog but I do read it pretty obsessively), hudsonhouston, designspongeonline, agencyspy (guilty pleasure), awfulplasticsurgery (double down guilty pleasure). I also watch Sesame Street with my kids every morning when they get up at an unearthly hour – lots of good ideas there like today Oscar the grouch repositioning a broken washing machine as a Grouch Messing Machine. As Gerry Graf would say, “smaht.”
What have you seen recently that you wish you’d been associated with (new product, service, advertising)?
Most of the iPhone apps that I use daily, from Smacktalk for the kids to the new New York Times real estate app. When they are good they are such perfection: beautiful functionality, great design, empowering, and you still get that little “wow” every time you use it.
If you weren’t in this business what would you be doing?
I’d probably be a literary agent. I had a brief episode as an assistant agent at the venerable Curtis Brown right out of grad school, working for the agent who represented Vikram Seth and the A. A. Milne estate. I unpacked the manuscript for A Suitable Boy direct from Bombay, 5000 loose pages arriving in a dusty suitcase smelling of spices, and got to dine at Aqua with Sonny Mehta.
Tell us something surprising about yourself.
My closet is much smaller than my husband’s.
Front page image source: Current.org
A recent New York Times article about four NYU students looking to build a new open source social network got us thinking.
The definition of privacy is changing in the age of social networking. It used to be about controlling who has access to information about you, and it still does in many ways, but more and more it seems to be about who is amassing huge amounts of information about lots of people, and how they are making money off of it.
We’re not asking “who is Facebook-stalking us” as much as we’re asking “what the hell are Facebook and Google doing with all that stuff they know about us.” Privacy is no longer about secrecy, it’s about ownership and profit.
I know intellectually that Google is not “free,” that everytime I conduct a search I am giving them an ounce of my mental flesh that they, in turn, monetize. But I guess it’s worth it to me—a fair exchange.
But not everyone agrees, apparently. Just as previous generations ranted about the evils of advertising yet were perfectly happy to consume the media it paid for, there is a new generation that seeks to find the next great free lunch.
Claudine Cheever is Chief Strategy Officer at Saatchi & Saatchi New York.
Image source: Copenhagen Campus Connection
I like to think that our best practices at Saatchi NY are in some ways like the iPod. The fundamental purpose of everything you love in your pocket never changes, but the form and functionality just keep getting better. Our purpose of creating loyalty beyond reason for our clients’ brands never waivers, but how we achieve this is always improving.
Here are a few aphorisms written on the whiteboards around our office on Hudson street. Well, OK, written on the whiteboard in my office.
This is a fundamental belief for us. What I love about this one is that talk about making an emotional connection with people blah, blah, blah, can easily start to sound like we want to send the world a greeting card. But the reality is that rational information, while comforting to those dispensing it, leads people to make decisions. Emotion leads to action. This is not soft stuff – it drives business growth.
See comments above about dispensing information: no one is waiting around to be told messages. Brands today need to help people do the things they want to do if they are to connect.
The accepted wisdom used to be that you had to show a woman in an ad to sell her on the product. Anything for young people had to feature a skateboard and someone who sounded like Pauly Shore circa 1995. I remember a car insurance company out of the UK that targeted women – with an entirely pink website. But the best way to attract a certain target (be it a demographic or a mindset) is to do just that: attract them. Don’t depict them.
“Media neutral” feels weird to us. How do you stay neutral? By not having an opinion. By not caring. Good ideas are not media neutral, they’re media hungry and they know where they need to go to be interesting and useful to people.
Powerful human insights are the holy grail in this business. Really good ones feel like a revelation. But in order to connect with what people care about AND with what they want to do, we need to understand their motivations too. Only then does the idea have a chance of participation, and earning its own way in the world.
We live in a fast-paced world where nothing stays the same for long. As an agency we have classic, iconic brands that are in every American kitchen cupboard and closet, but the clients we work for are also incredibly fast moving. To keep up with it all we have to have a dynamic culture made up of quick thinking people with the flexibility and agility to stay ahead of the curve.
So how do you create an atmosphere that attracts, nurtures and excites people like that? What gives Saatchi & Saatchi a winning culture?
To start with we have a foundational set of beliefs that doesn’t change: Lovemarks. A belief that every brand we work with can inspire loyalty beyond reason through a passionate, enduring emotional connection. That kind of relentless aspiration for every client and piece of work you produce gives a creative culture oxygen.
While that belief won’t change, how we find the pulse of an emotional connection changes constantly. The number of ways we can use to find out about what people really care about has exploded. In a digital age we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to gaining insights into what the consumer thinks. So another key part of our culture is about keeping our tools up to date, and adding our innovations to those of partners and boutique agencies, so that we create newness and keep things fresh. So you add innovation to the foundation.
And of course we have to make sure we recognize and respond to the unique needs of our people. We’re in a talent business, and people with talent are higher maintenance than others. That’s a good thing. They need to be challenged and stimulated, and feel like they’re learning and growing all the time. You achieve that by investing in them, constantly adding to their skill set and knowledge base. So to top it off you add relentless education.
A great foundation, a passion for innovation, and relentless education. That’s a winning culture.
Claudine Cheever is Chief Strategy Officer of Saatchi & Saatchi New York
Great ideas begin with great insights – an open understanding of how someone experiences the world. It’s this kind of basic understanding about a person, product, brand or category that produces a great strategy and a creative spark, the genesis of an idea that will help to generate real business results for our clients.
For some time now we’ve been gathering those insights by Xploring. Xploring in the real world means going to the jungle – putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes. It’s about asking relevant questions, having authentic conversations, listening deeply, participating, and sharing experiences.
Now more than ever the conversations we want to be a part of, and the experiences we want to share to really understand people, are online.
To get in on the digital conversations we’ve been Xploring the Internet – analysing and synthesizing the content people are leaving on websites, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, forums and so on. What’s exciting about this is that it’s so deeply visceral – we can ‘listen’ to the consumer in a way that’s never been possible before. You know social networking. This is social listening.
We’re always in the process of investigating new tools to measure, monitor and mine content – right now our thinking is that both analyst services and specialist software have their place. There are also plenty of free tools that can be used – we particularly like spezify.com, all theTwitter aggregates, the Google tools, and, of course, the greatest search engine yet: youtube.
Other sites, like Polyvore – a site that lets users compile collages of their favourite fashions and style landscapes – take you deep into the mind of individual consumers. For example, when we plugged Bono’s eco-concious brand EDUN into Polyvore and looked at the results we found that EDUN clothes were almost always the first item picked for a collage. They’re a base layer for fashion and the groundwork for inspiration. The young women who wear EDUN tend to like muted colours, organic shapes, and moodscapes that were always inspired by the key EDUN item. Sometimes they’ll make a socially responsible comment, but fashion definitely comes first. What an exciting discovery for a brand that wants to transition from social cause to fashion—they’re already there in the minds and hearts of their most passionate consumers.
This is just scratching the surface. And while we know that we are not unique in our growing adeptness at using these tools and techniques, we do think our foundational strength in identifying revelatory insights sets us apart.
