Saatchi & Saatchi
Supporting a Creative Culture
Creativity is a much talked about attribute in the business world, but few companies can be said to be as committed to creativity as Saatchi & Saatchi, the international advertising agency headquartered in England.
Saatchi & Saatchi is very profitable as a result of this commitment. The company has 134 offices in 84 countries, with more than 7,000 employees. Saatchi & Saatchi’s clients include 60 of the biggest 100 spenders on advertising, as well as more than half of the world’s 50 most valuable brands. In the past five years, the company has won more than 3000 awards for its creative and commercially successful advertising campaigns. Creativity has been the cornerstone of Saatchi & Saatchi’s success. The company looks for job applicants on its website by asking,
“Are you an ideas person? Do you think outside the box? Do you even refuse to recognise the existence of the box?”
Saatchi & Saatchi advertised on the Berlin Wall just before it came down, and then was the first western advertising agency to set up an office in East Berlin. The company was hired by Margaret Thatcher in her bid to become Prime Minister, and later by Boris Yeltsin in his campaign to become Russia’s first democratically elected President.
Ian McDougall, a manager of Saatchi & Saatchi’s agency in Wellington, New Zealand, sums up the reason for the company’s success in the following manner:
“The reason for Saatchi’s phenomenal and continuing growth is, according to popular rumour, because it was headed by a creative brother and a money brother. Quite wrong. The real reason is that they were both creative. It’s just that one created ads, the other created balance sheets. The point being, creativity is not the exclusive territory of writers, art directors, film-makers, or poets. It spins out across all areas of commercial endeavour.”
Saatchi & Saatchi has always been dedicated to the idea of ‘spinning out’ creativity over the entire organization. Today the company’s Worldwide Creative Director Bob Isherwood, and its Worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts follow the example set by the Saatchi brothers. The company states that its goal is
“To be revered as the hothouse for world-changing ideas that transform our clients’ businesses, brands and reputations.”
To achieve this goal, the company is devoted to what Kevin Roberts calls ‘Peak Performance.’
“It’s our belief that Peak Performance calls for love and passion. Peak performers love what they do. Love what they do better. And better than anyone else. They live in the now. They think in the next. Then they do it. Then they aim higher.”
Saatchi & Saatchi supports creativity among its members through its corporate culture. The culture is designed to encourage and foster creativity. Any organization may have creative people, but if those people are not given the freedom to be creative along with the backing of the corporation in its entirety, then they will never perform to their abilities. Saatchi gives its employees the confidence to create and the security to fail in the process. Manager Ian McDougall has said
“Some agencies do deliberately impose stress and adversity on their people to create a climate of upset which is meant to stimulate the creative juices. To me, it just seems to create a lot of upset people.”
Another factor that sets Saatchi apart is the culture of risk-taking that exists across the company. A company that doesn’t allow for risks doesn’t allow for creativity. Failure is embraced if it is in pursuit of a goal. That being said, creativity and risk-taking take place at Saatchi within a structure of knowledge and skill, and its people are given the tools they need to accomplish their goals. One of the company’s mottos is ‘Anything is Possible.’ Saatchi & Saatchi gives its people the stimulus to act on their ideas. As CEO Roberts says
“Ideas don’t keep well in storage. You need to act. Forget entertaining an idea. You need to put it to work.”
Written by Gavin Koltze and taken from our Online Development Academy
For more information on creativity programmes visit Call of the Wild's website.
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