DDB Group Aotearoa is part of a large global network, yet aims to behave like a small agency – priding itself on being flexible and agile. We sat down with four of its chiefs to hear more about their big-little winning formula.
In a conference room overlooking the Auckland city skyline sit four top dogs at one of the country’s most highly acclaimed advertising agencies, DDB Group Aotearoa.
You’d think it might be intimidating. But Group CEO Priya Patel, Chief Strategy Officer Rupert Price, Group Chief Creative Officer Matty Burton, and Chief Creative Officer Gary Steele are a fun bunch.
All are expats and have been in New Zealand for five to 10 years and only Patel, who was MD at DDB Australia from 2018-21, had worked elsewhere in the global network before. So, what brought them here?
Their answers share a common thread: the creative work being produced here was enviable for a small and geographically isolated country. Our reputation for No 8 wire ingenuity might result in a few rough edges, but that was also a draw.
“The scrappiness of New Zealand means loads of innovation, smarts and proactivity and it makes the work here really special and different,” says Patel.
“I’ve been watching New Zealand since the beginning of my career and the work created was always exciting. I don’t know what it was, but it was always just pushing boundaries a little bit more,” adds Steele.
All four have extensive experience across a number of global agencies but their eyes were continually caught by work emerging from the Land of the Long White Cloud.
The landscape – in terms of geographical isolation, population size and the marketing scene – has led DDB Group Aotearoa to evolve in a different way to its global counterparts, growing different companies to embrace different specialisms. Its Mango arm, for example, connects to PR and social media influencers, while Track is data and CRM focused, Tribal is all things digital innovation and Takitoru looks at work through a te ao Māori cultural lens.
“If that sounds like a lot, it’s because we are not just one thing. On the one hand we create lateral solutions for business problems and, on the other, we open up completely new possibilities using both creativity and technology,” Burton explains.
Price says that though all aspects of the business fall under a traditional global advertising group, DDB Group Aotearoa’s fastest growing parts are the non-traditional branches that accelerate innovation.
This set-up fuels the entire group, the four agree. The limit to their creativity is endless, they say, because each arm can feed the need of other parts. For example, if the team at Mango has one idea that calls for a digital solution, they can look to Tribal for help.
“As a business we’re far less reliant on traditional media than people might think, it’s just traditional media is more visible – so that’s what people see and what people assume we do,” adds Price.
The company doesn’t have a set ‘house style’, instead it aims to build the right solution for the client problem. Steele says some of the most “DDB-esque” work is that which combines the group’s entire expertise. He points to the Samsung iTest campaign, which received the prestigious Black Pencil award in 2022 – only the second time it had been won in New Zealand.
Steele highlighted that Samsung have a perennial problem: how to get people to switch from their much-loved Apple phones. While many ad campaigns worldwide aimed at emotional connection, DDB Group Aotearoa made use of Tribal’s tech capabilities to come up with a web app called Samsung iTest, which allowed iPhone users to try out Samsung’s features from the comfort of their own phone.
“We asked the question, ‘How can we get people to experience Samsung on an iPhone?’ And we had a specialist team who just went, ‘Yeah, sure, we can build that,’” says Steele.
“It makes it much easier to take a step back and go, ‘Let’s look at the whole problem, not just part of the problem,’ and begin finding solutions and ideas from anywhere,” says Price.
Just this year, DDB Group Aotearoa was the brains behind McDonald’s Driver Tax campaign, a body of work that saw the agency combine the minds of their agency branches to get the campaign running across traditional media, such as TV, radio and outdoor but also in-app and instore.
“We have different front doors and if a client like McDonald’s wants it, we can pull that all capability together to provide one integrated response,” says Patel.
“It very much depends on the client needs and asks, then we can tailor it for what they’re after.”
This way of working – and the impressive results – is what makes their global counterparts jealous of the small yet mighty New Zealand office. The world has been envious for almost 60 years: DDB Group Aotearoa was founded in 1966.
For decades, DDB Worldwide has proven its approach works. So when its people are left to be innovative and experimental, they like to keep in mind their heritage while looking ahead at what is to come: pushing the boundaries, yet always remembering their “successful and proven past, mindset and methodology of building great brands”.
Patel adds that the “different front doors” can lead to new ways of arriving at a solution to any given problem.
“Ultimately, we’re looking after brands and trying to solve problems – we are the guardians of these brands and their ongoing brand platforms,” she says.
And, says Price, along with tradition, “we need experimentation and innovation. I think one without the other just knocks you out of balance and you’ve got to have both.”
Being part of a worldwide group works for the New Zealand office, says Burton, allowing the team to respond with the agility and speed of a much smaller outfit, yet have strong international backing behind their creative ideas.
“We may seem big in NZ, but we try to act small. We’re fast, we’re scrappy and we make things,” adds Burton.
“The scale we do have enables us to broaden what we can deliver, broaden our skill sets and broaden our mindsets when creating creative solutions. We are not experts at everything, however we do focus on being experts at creative collaboration.”
The local market structures are different to the rest of the world, says Patel. It’s smaller and “flatter”, often with no gap between the C-suite and lower level employees.
Patel says the work here is “integrated by nature”, and because the media landscape is different, you can’t bombard people here with constant ads to get brand awareness, you have to “attract and draw them in”.
“And so yes, I feel like the ideas are smarter. I feel like there’s more humour and playfulness in the work here. And there’s a lot more diversity built into the work here,” she says.
DDB Group Aotearoa’s mission is lead the DDB network globally and set the standards for great work. But it also needs to meet this market and create work tailored for people here. That requires a more flexible approach than is asked of their siblings in Paris, London or New York and the team reject the idea that large agencies are slow and ‘gifted’ clients by the network.
Patel says that all work is won and held on a local level and DDB Group Aotearoa has to work hard to continually retain its clients.
“We live and breathe what New Zealand does. It is a big agency locally, but we behave like a small agency in our close partnership with clients,” adds Steele.
Another ingredient in DDB Group Aotearoa’s recipe for success is the competitive environment that is Kiwi Adland. The four say the reason their agency can reach such heights is – in part at least – thanks to the wider industry, which clearly punches above its weight.
A landscape like this is a breeding ground for ideas and results in incredible and creative work, they say.
“The business here is just so much fun. The industry is so much fun, it’s so much more experimental, it’s so much braver and it’s so much more forgiving if you make a mistake,” says Price.
“And for that reason, it’s a fertile bed for creativity and that is why the mindset here is so positive.”
At the time of writing, DDB Group Aotearoa had just nabbed another Agency of the Year award, its fourth in 2024 alone.
There is no stopping this small-yet-large multi-armed beast, which will continue mixing innovation and tradition to push the boundaries of creativity even further.
My money is on it winning another Agency of the Year award in 2024.
This was first published in the 2024 June-July NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
