
Canvasses
Issue 19 | June 2011
Agency
Wunderman London
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: David Harris; Art Director: Kevan Ansell; Chief Executive: Brendan Tansley
Date
March 2011
Background
When a company grows to over 400 people, who work across a wide range of accounts and who work in a number of specialist areas, it’s hard to ensure everyone pulls in the same direction.
Wunderman London had expanded in many new areas, notably search and social and had won a number of diverse new accounts.
The challenge was to bring everybody together, newcomers and old-timers alike, as one team with one mission.
Idea
What usually happens is the CEO stands on a stage and tells the workforce what the plans are. But in this instance, Brendan Tansley asked the staff to become active participants in the drive to move Wunderman ‘from good to great’.
To encourage them to think imaginatively, each member of staff was sent a blank canvas. They could either be scared of it or they could use it to express their own ideas about how to move the agency onwards and upwards.
Canvasses came from all departments, including finance, data and from the reception desk. Over 80% of the agency painted, drew or wrote something. So when they all arrived at the Rally venue, they were greeted by their work, hung in a frieze around the Royal Institution. Prizes were awarded for the most interesting contributions.
Not only did the collection make a statement about Wunderman as a creative agency, it also provoked a number of discussions in the breakout groups.
The guest speaker was Sir Matthew Pinsent, the Olympic oarsman, whose fourth Gold medal was won…by a canvas.
Results
The agency continues to grow. Morale is at an all-time high. Reception is a much brighter area now thanks to all the canvasses on the wall.
Our Thoughts
I worked with an agency once who had positioned themselves as being all about “fearless creativity” and sat listening to the MD as he told his team that “on this pitch we’ve just got to roll over, I’m afraid. Give ‘em what they want.”
In other words, agencies are great at telling their clients what to do but complete rubbish at doing it themselves.
It’s amazing how few agencies are brands in their own right. And here’s Wunderman London showing how it’s done, through consensus on the one hand and concerted action on the other. Hats off to a management team that believes that how a brand behaves is more telling than what it says.
And, interestingly, Wunderman has been saying very little while it has transformed itself into a thoroughly contemporary agency, now a lot larger in the UK with 400+ people than it’s ‘parent’ RKCR Y&R with 250.
These are people more interested in delivering success to their clients than with headlines in the trade press.