5 Minutes With… John Zeigler

DDB Asia Pacific CEO and Chairman, John Zeigler, has a lot on his mind. In his recent TEDx talk he called for a class action lawsuit against CEOs, he’s determined to reduce the amount of money the network spends entering awards and he’s convinced that woolly briefs are putting far too much pressure on creatives. Over the past ten years he’s brought local agencies out of their shells and developed consistency across the region – and he’s got a very clear idea of where he wants to take the network next. LBB’s Editor, Gabrielle Lott joined John for an opinion-filled ‘5 Minutes With’ and finds out why the man in charge of DDB’s Asia Pac region doesn’t even see himself as an ad guy. 

LBB> What it is about DDB, as a global network, that makes it such a unique and successful network? 

JZ> I think the thing that really makes DDB different is that we have a purpose that is much greater than ourselves. Bernbach was the founder of the creative revolution and I believe that he gives us a sense of great purpose and creativity in what we do. 

LBB> So there’s a real heritage? 

JZ> Yes, but it’s not just a heritage. Ogilvy have a heritage, they had David Ogilvy. But I think Bernbach wasn’t just an ad guy. He was also a person who felt that you could change the way that you communicated. He invented a different way of connecting with people. I think that’s what drives our unique creative spirit. A lot of people talk about that. It can be hard when people ask you to define it, but DDB is uniquely creative and has a spirit that no one else has. 

LBB> As CEO and Chairman of DDB Asia Pacific, can you tell us about DDB in the region and what makes it so strong and noteworthy? 

JZ> Well, I think there are two things. One: our people. We are a people business, and I think that our people are different. 

Secondly, look at the heritage of how DDB grew up. We weren’t a network that was gifted with a client that had a business they wanted to take around the world. As a result, the way we evolved was very much as a federation of agencies. We would go to each individual market. We would find the best people in the industry. We would start a partnership. That partnership often led to a working relationship, then often to acquisition and then to joint ownership. That way, we became extremely strong locally with a good understanding of local cultures, but were also connected on a global level through our network. No other network, to my knowledge, has been built on that basis. We are both strong locally and we are strong from an international connectivity point of view. 

LBB> And Asia Pacific specifically? 

JZ> We were kind of the last frontier. Ten years ago, we were very strong locally but hadn’t been connected as a network. What we have done over the last ten years has really been to bring people together so they can benefit from the other offices and connect into a network, as well as being a strong business in their own right. 

LBB> Back in 2011 you spoke about the lack of a definitive model that could track and define accountability in creativity and branding.  How has this developed in the last two years? 

JZ> How many pages do we have? Without going into it too deeply we are in an industry that is very troubled. We have clients who are driven by consultants that believe the best way for clients to improve their profitability is to marginalise what they pay their service providers. I don’t just mean agencies, I mean all service providers. As a result we have a lot of cost pressure from procurement and corporations who think they can go to a cheaper agency and there will be no difference. 

I’d like to punctuate that with a thought. 

Originally for a business to grow, it had to go through a period where invention was paramount. You had to invent new things, create them in a factory and offer them to consumers. When differentiation started to dry up, companies had to start to acquire and eat each other up, so they grew through acquisition and mergers. Consolidation is now at the point where it is really hard to find growth by combining companies. Clients are now once again starting to realise that creativity is the only area they can get real growth for their business. Unfortunately, that’s in contrast with the procurement pressure on price. If you add all that up together, it’s sort of wonderful. The answer to it is that if we had a better, more quantitative method of measuring the results of creativity, we would have clients that wouldn’t come to us to ask about reducing price. They’d ask “how do we improve the connectivity and the results of our advertising to get more value from our expenditure?” That question is not being asked. That is a big issue. Not just for us, but it’s a big issue for the industry. 

LBB> How did you get into advertising? 

JZ> That’s easy, I’m not in advertising. I’ve never been in the advertising business. I have never come to work and thought that I am in the advertising business. I am in the client solution business. I came from the client side of the business; I was a creative client, I created products, I took them to agencies and we developed advertising. I’m now sitting inside an agency and I’m looking at what value we can bring to our clients. If that’s what we can do better than anyone else, we will grow more, we will deliver more value and we will get more business. It really is quite simple when you think of it like that. 

There are a lot of people in the ad business who think they are so important, that it’s all about them and it’s all about their business. It’s really not. It’s about our clients’ business. I think that if you hold that belief you have a chance to live through our troubled times and place yourself in a position where clients will need us and respect the value we add. 

LBB> How do you implement that within DDB Asia Pacific as a business? 

JZ> In many different ways. Our agency in Singapore has 33 digital technologists. They are people who are looking at technology not in terms of how technology can be used for advertising, but simply to find what it can do. Our creative people take their findings and build a bridge between technology and how we can use that in the creative processes. In that instance, we are pushing ourselves to understand technology as it impacts the modern world.

Our guys in Singapore recently invented a way of harnessing brain waves to open a car door. They just did it because they asked ‘could you?’ You put a headset on, stand there and think and the car doors pop! It’s real Star Wars stuff. Now, of course, we all got really excited because it’s super sexy, but its connection with advertising isn’t exactly obvious. A year later they had a vitamin drink client called BRANDS, whose positioning was all about strengthening your inner self and your mind power – they used that technology to demonstrate the strength of your brain waves when you drank BRANDS Essence. 

Not that long ago for Starhub, our Singapore team invented a device that allowed you to point your smart phone at the TV, taking you directly to a live website. 

In Japan, there was a really good example of non-technological invention. We had a client that was making business decisions and we asked them how they decided between one product and another – the client didn’t really have an answer. We went through econometric model processes and took all the factors that might influence sales of products in any particular time – the weather, the sentiment, what the newspapers were writing about the economy – and created an econometric model. We then applied back to the decision making. That meant we could say “if you choose this product, your sales will go up, because sentiment can influence sales”. That’s not the kind of thing that ad agencies do. In all of these little ways and in different markets, we’re pushing ourselves to reinvent the process. 

LBB> Talk to us about your TEDX presentation…

JZ> It’s a bit theoretical and business-related but the main thrust is that there should be a class action lawsuit against CEOs. Why? Because they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing that has no determined value.

For example, look at how companies’ stock values are created. There are two concepts that analysts use – GAP and CAP. GAP is the amount of differentiation tone a brand has versus another. CAP, which stands for the ‘competitive advantage period’, is the duration of that advantage. So, if I’m an analyst looking at Coca-Cola and Pepsi, it’s those two factors I’d look at to see which of the two businesses I should buy, hold or sell. 

Nobody has associated the fact that communications, branding and marketing are completely controlling both GAP and CAP, yet how many CEOs are actually asking how much an ad campaign, execution or strategy is going to improve market share price or the value of the company? Why isn’t that dialogue and discussion happening in our industry? 

I was frustrated with this process and took it further. When I was a marketer, we used to look at how we spent our budgets on the basis of what we were going to achieve. It was all about the factory. How would we make the factory run? How would we get stock and be able to sell it without having too much left in the warehouse? How could we get the sales force motivated to sell just enough? With a good forecasting system. And we would do that in a communications planning form by using an old model called ‘awareness, trial and repeat’. 

Since the late 80s, the pre-digital era, there has been no new communications model used by marketers. When IBM runs studies that say 80 per cent of clients are confused by what’s happening in the world, of course they’re going to be confused – there has been no disciplined approach to understanding what is happening and how we model that behavior to drive results to achieve certain outcomes. 

In the process of finding out more, I spoke to head of Monash Marketing, Mike Ewing, and explained that I wanted to be able to write the next communications model for the marketing industry. We have him now working with a number of our clients to try and help create what we call ‘DROI’ – Return On Investment and ‘D’ to include Digital. It’s a modeling method that will give us an opportunity to be able to say to clients something that I often say already: “have you thought that you are spending too much money on media?” 

When a client is asked that they usually disagree. But you have to persist and ask the last time a media agency told a client they were spending too much money on media? Of course the response is always ‘never’ – they are, after all, in the business of the client spending on media. We are not in that business. We are in the business of, on the large part, writing and creating work that comes off a media schedule. The world has gone upside down; we really are in a bad place when we have to start and develop advertising and creativity to meet a media schedule. Who is driving the process? Because so much money goes into media, the clients believe they should drive their execution, but we all know you can’t have media driving execution. What happens to the creative impact? So everyone is looking at efficiency of spend, which is a little bit like the procurement people. Efficiency of our spending – efficiency! What we should be doing is putting double the pressure on effectiveness of our spending. 

There are a lot of things in the current system that are wrong and there are a lot of things in the system that clients don’t understand. That occurs when you follow a procurement-based process.  It kills creativity. Why would you walk into an agency and stick acid into the veins of the thing that you are there to buy? Clients should test and probe. They should be asking us how the agency is going to bring innovation, they should talk about the issues that my brand has and share their long-term vision. They should be asking, “how are you going to make that vision happen for me?” “How are you going to evolve my brand?” “What’s your understanding of brands?” “What have you done before?” None of those questions are being asked and that, in essence, hurts creative. 

In many agencies, writing a creative brief is still a very loose process. And we really need to change this now. We put far too much burden on our creative people to go away and think laterally, inventively and in a half-directed fashion. 

With the progress of neuroscience, there is an opportunity to gain better understandings of how people behave and what they will respond to emotionally. We can appeal to the cognitive brain, helping our creative people take a direction that is already pre-identified. If we can identify emotional drivers in the key category and in the brand itself and can use that for briefing our creatives, we can then come up with different creative approaches within a genre and emotional driver. The moment we do this we free up our creative people to produce better ideas. 

With simple direction, we take away from clients changing their minds or being easily swayed. If we don’t have a good solid foundation of the basis upon which the creativity is built, we can’t support our people. That’s one of my real priorities this year – to build that into our system so the creative process can be protected, solved and really utilised by clients to get better results. 

LBB> CEO and Chairman for a region is an impressive title and one that many of us are unaware of what it actually entails. Can you explain it a little to us? 

JZ> My job is to help build a framework and business that enables creative to produce the best work. Firstly I believe there is a better way to brief the talent we have that helps them to produce work that will work better for clients. 

LBB> Cannes is steadily approaching. What do you hope to see during the week for DDB Asia Pacific? 

JZ> The last two years DDB Asia Pacific has done an incredible job creatively. We’ve punched well above our weight within the DDB network at Cannes and I’ve been really pleased with where we’ve got.

We’ve had some creative changes and the work is starting to come through from those new. We’ve been through a period in which we’ve realised that if you spend enough money to enter awards you will be successful. This year I wanted to substantially reduce the costs of entering awards. This is the first year we’ve cut back our entry costs in Cannes. We’ve been more diligent with how we review our work so we don’t have as many entries. I don’t think we’ll slip, but I don’t think it’ll be a year of continued growth for us. With the money saved I want to give it back to my creative people to help them to continue to be fully resourced to make the best work for our clients. 
 

LBB> DDB China came out with one of my favourite ads for VW Beetle at the end of 2012…

 

JZ> Yes, I love that ad. Part of the beauty of it was the fact that there was no heritage for VW in China. What it had to do was actually create heritage without one existing. And it did so, brilliantly. It was a fascinating piece of insight into the Chinese audience, the heritage of VW and the building of the brand in a whole new market. It was incredibly successful for the client. There is so much VW work that I love it is hard to mention. I love the work out of Sydney they do for the Touareg. The award winning park assist work.

 

LBB> Is there a piece of work that you’re really excited about from DDB Asia Pacific… the ‘It’s going to be the one?’

JZ> I like some of the Singapore work for Starhub which has won many effectiveness awards and demonstrates such a high-level of integration.  I like the amazing work for McDonald’s in Hong Kong. It’s done incredibly well. It’s not been judged well in local awards but it’s done very well in the international ones. I love the Coastguard, fishing work from New Zealand, that’s fantastic. We have so many pieces of work across all of our agencies – ‘Gabriella’ from the Philippines – I love that. 

I can pull down so much great work from all of our agencies – that’s our strength. There are very few networks where you can do that in all markets. We don’t have a pinnacle piece. We have great work across all offices. 

LBB> What can we look forward to seeing in the future from DDB Asia Pac?

JZ> I have a very simple goal for the business. A lot of people don’t realise that consulting companies have been hired by some of our clients to cut costs – we are in that cost bucket. The financial goals set by those consulting companies have seen a 40 per cent reduction in the costs of service suppliers. Agencies do not make anywhere near that. 

So if you look at the next five years, our industry is in quite a troubled time. My objective is quite simple. I want to help our people demonstrate what they do and reinvent the process of how we engage with clients to add strategic value to their business. I’m not in the business of thinking about making ads. I’m in the business of helping clients make good business decisions.