Above: Tim Cullinane, Saatchi & Saatchi NZ executive strategy director, and Leif Stromnes, Saatchi & Saatchi ANZ chief strategy officer.
As marketers face ongoing pressure to find new growth and deliver quick returns, Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand is sharpening its longstanding ‘Nothing is impossible’ positioning.
The Publicis Groupe-backed agency says its new promise to businesses – to find ‘Unseen growth’ – is built on a combination of Saatchi & Saatchi’s innate ‘Nothing is impossible’ conviction, artificial intelligence capabilities and access to one of the most robust, accurate and predictive data set in New Zealand.
The new promise marks the latest evolution of a business philosophy the agency has carried for more than four decades.
Now recast for today’s market, it reflects a world where AI and proprietary data are being used not just to improve efficiency, but to uncover asymmetric growth opportunities for clients including Toyota, Heineken, Vero Insurance and Lexus.
Beyond the obvious
“Most brands are focused on capturing the demand they can already see,” says Tim Cullinane, executive strategy director at Saatchi & Saatchi NZ.
“That’s important, and it’s work we absolutely do. But the real opportunity often sits beyond the obvious. It sits in the tensions, behaviours and unmet needs that aren’t yet showing up clearly on our dashboards, not because they don’t exist, but because no one has uncovered them or leveraged them for growth.”
‘Unseen growth’ is intended as a response to this gap: a shift toward combining creativity and connected intelligence to reveal the opportunities and strategic connections that haven’t been visible until now.
See things that others can’t
As part of Publicis Groupe, Saatchi & Saatchi operates within one of New Zealand’s richest data ecosystems, ranking third nationally by number of data points among some of the country’s largest data-powered platforms and organisations.
That ecosystem is underpinned by Connected Identity, Publicis Groupe’s privacy-compliant identity solution, which brings together signals across media, creative, content, commerce, CRM and influence. In New Zealand, Publicis Connected Identity works from millions of unique records and data points, creating a more granular understanding of who people are and what motivates them.
“Publicis Connected Identity changes the quality of the questions we can ask and the answers we can find,” says Leif Stromnes, Saatchi & Saatchi ANZ chief strategy officer. “And it goes beyond simply understanding the consumers better. It is about taking one of the richest data sets in New Zealand and powering these with AI to see what might be possible beyond the obvious. AI offers the ability to think in limitless directions, so when we take good data and use the power of probabilistic thinking, we can see things that others can’t. The result is a view of growth that is less linear, less predictable and far more revealing.”
Expands possibility
Seen this way, the role of AI in the agency’s ecosystem is being defined quite deliberately. Not as the tool that determines the work, but as the tool that expands the field of possibility around it.
Speed matters, but speed alone is not a strategy. The more interesting question is how AI can uncover new paths for brand growth, and support creativity that turns those signals into ideas beyond what’s previously been possible.
For Cullinane, the real impact of this ‘supercharged’ creativity is felt across the entire creative process – expanding not just how ideas are developed, but how the agency defines what a solution can be.
“At its core, Saatchi & Saatchi is a creative solutions business, and the answer to business growth isn’t always a campaign. It could be a product, a service, a tool or a completely new experience,” he says. “The depth of information we have, and the breadth of where we can uncover growth, fundamentally strengthens how we think as an agency. Creativity is still central, not just as an output, but as a way to solve high value business problems.”
About what comes next
In practice, the proposition is not that brands should stop capturing the demand already in front of them. It is that this should no longer be the full extent of their ambition.
“’Unseen growth’ is about what comes next,” says Stromnes. “Using better intelligence to find the spaces competitors haven’t seen, the audiences they’ve overlooked or the behaviours they’ve misread, and turning that into creative and commercial advantage. It means we can spot growth potential within categories before a brief even exists, and proactively bring ideas to clients rather than waiting to be asked.”
This signals a move from reacting to demand, to actively identifying where growth can come from – and embedding that thinking into brand strategy.
“The agencies that create disproportionate value in the next era won’t be the ones that simply follow the map better,” says Cullinane. “They’ll be the ones that can see beyond it. That’s what ‘Unseen growth’ is about. Making the impossible actionable, and turning unseen opportunity into measurable growth.”
