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He may favour a ‘mental’ management style but Ben Coulson, CCO of GPY&R Australia/NZ will fight to the death for his team’s ideas and his collaborative, hard-work ethos has got stunning results. He tells Joe Lancaster about removing corporate hyphens and digital debris

Missing the bus is always a bad start to the day. Missing the bus to the gateway exam for your chosen profession is catastrophic. But it was a stroke of great fortune when a 17-year-old Ben Coulson ran a few minutes late and saw his ride to the entry test for a journalism course disappear into the distance. Taking fine art instead, then design, he realised he could get paid for the latter if he sought a career in advertising.

Things have turned out pretty well for Coulson, who was promoted to chief creative officer for Australia/New Zealand at George Patterson Y&R 18 months ago, also serving on the Y&R global creative board. Based in Melbourne, where he was previously ECD but frequently visited the other regional offices, he describes part of his job as “modernising the agencies.” “I’m trying to remove the hyphens,” he says, explaining how when he took over there was unnecessary confusion in structure. “It was like, ‘this is our digital agency, his is direct, these are the people who manage our auto accounts or these accounts…’” he remembers. “My attitude was, ‘You all work in the same building, why don’t you just hang out together and do something good?’”

The regional agencies are in the middle of that journey according to Coulson and everything is now geared around collaboration, starting with the physical working environment. The Melbourne office is completely open plan but more importantly, so is Coulson’s diary. “We tend to yell around the office, we’re all together. You can never get too far from the work. People are free and available to just show you work any time they want.” Does he find it difficult to manage his time? “It’s not a management style most CCOs use because it’s really mental and it’s probably better for your sanity to be more organised and have specific times when people can talk to you, but I just find that if people want feedback on their work you’ve got to be there at the moment they’re thinking of it. It’s best for the work.”

Decluttering the digital space

As Y&R operates a ‘boutique network’ model, where each agency has autonomy in most respects, from logo design to client acquisition, only Coulson and COO Jason Buckley hold regional roles. As a result Coulson spends most of his time hopping around the offices for 24 hours at a time to evaluate the work and encourage focus on the stronger ideas. “I’m that annoying fucker who won’t shut up about the good work. Some days I’ll leave one of our offices and I’m pretty sure they think, ‘unreal, now we’ve got two or three days before he comes back’,” he laughs.

Coulson has a reputation as an incredibly hard worker and someone who’ll fight to the end for an idea he believes in, but if you’re working for him, you’d better be a grafter too. “None of us here are really naturally talented. I’m sure that there are people out there who can think of better ideas than anyone here, but we do well because we think of lots of them – that’s how you make a successful career in advertising. If you sit around and wait for that genius thing to happen, you’re fucked. It’s going to happen once or twice in your life. If you do ten ideas all worthy of a Lion, odds are something good will happen.”

 

That persistence pays off and in recent years Y&R has consistently created brilliant campaigns. While Coulson admits that the agency probably won’t have a contender for the Film Grand Prix at Cannes this June – last year the Melbourne office scooped Craft gold and silver for Steve Rogers’ captivating Schweppes Tumble spot – there are some digital projects he has high hopes for, including Cocktail Revolution for the same client. Aiming to democratise cocktail-making by taking it out of the hands of barmen, an interactive website gives users recipes and opportunities to bring cocktail classes to their workplace, while every Friday they can tweet ingredients to #makeitmix, which are then used to create a drink with a video of the making streamed online. Then there’s Ajax Social Wipes, a brilliant website that displays all the pages a user likes on Facebook and allows them to ‘wipe away’ unwanted ones as if using a cleaning wipe on a dirty surface. It’s a bold step for a brand to promote the eradication of branding, offering ‘anti-spam newsfeed wipes’ that ‘lift brands instantly’. ‘Loving a brand doesn’t mean you love it forever popping up in your newsfeed’ states the site, which itself provides users with a clean, simple and useful execution, something more important now than ever believes Coulson, who found it painful to sit through the case study films while judging Promo & Activation at Cannes last year. “I came back from judging and told our people to avoid ideas that deliberately overcomplicate things. I couldn’t watch another case film where people had an ok idea and then said how cool it was because, ‘we socialised it here and it did this over here and everyone used AR on their phones to access it.’ With too many it was like, ‘wow, you’ve just put tons of unnecessary advertising clutter into people’s lives.” Social Wipes was a huge hit, even with hard-to-please types like tech bloggers.

Doing work that gets people excited about a brand like Ajax is no mean feat but Coulson is a firm believer in his ‘biggest buffalo in the herd’ mentality which is that agencies should do their best work for their biggest clients. “I don’t want to see our agencies having success from a collection of small, or worse, dubious clients. Creative success is totally cool, but if you can win a gold Lion for your biggest, ugliest, most research-driven client you’re doing your job properly,” he says. “They’re paying the bills, so they deserve the best work.” 

A non-defensive riposte to DFR

Historically Y&R has demonstrated that ‘biggest buffalo’ attitude with Defence Force Recruiting, winning scores of awards for work in various categories at local and international award shows. “When I joined Y&R five years ago they hadn’t won a creative trophy, but over that time they became the most-awarded Australian client by a mile,” says Coulson, nodding to projects such as the much-lauded, multi-award-winning Mobile Medic mobile campaign from 2012. Understandably, when DFR ended the 13-year relationship and went to Havas after a compulsory pitch process that lasted a year (government clients have to hold a pitch every three years) it sent a shockwave through the industry and hit the Y&R team hard, who cruelly learned the news via trade press halfway through their Christmas party. “You can’t get sad about that stuff,” sighs an ever-affable Coulson. “Clients are allowed to go and work with other people if they want to. Thirteen years is a pretty good innings on any government client. Consistency of good work across your all your clients is the key to being a really good business. If your agency’s only good while you had a particular client, maybe they were really good and you just got lucky,” he muses. DFR had comprised more than half of the Melbourne agency’s business but rather than hide away and lick their wounds, Coulson and his staff came out fighting, running a ballsy ad in the Australian Financial Review the following Monday announcing that they had a vacancy for a client and that CEOs and marketing managers could expect to hear from them soon. It also wished Havas good luck, saying the agency would need it to fill Y&R’s shoes. Soon afterwards Y&R won a big client, which is yet to be announced.

 

Coulson continues to look to the future. “While we’ve done brilliant work for clients like DFR, Cadbury, Medibank, Schweppes and AFL, our new goal is to prove we can do it for the next client. That keeps our reputation where we need it to be.” With brands like Australia Post (Y&R is on a roster of agencies serving the client) and Heinz to sink its teeth into, Y&R has its work cut out and Coulson believes the way to go is to stick with the simple approach used in the Ajax campaign. “I think there will be a necessary readjustment in the industry back to simplicity of ideas, work that is wonderfully entertaining and doesn’t require too much of you. My favourite commercial last year was Southern Comfort’s Whatever’s Comfortable. It was entertaining and simple. It didn’t ask me to download an app and run around the city interacting with it; I didn’t have to do a thing. I could just sit there and smile and love it.”

Missing the bus but arriving anyway

While he’s certainly always got a smile for you, it’s difficult to imagine Coulson ever just sitting still, contentedly doing nothing. If anyone is capable of keeping Y&R at the top of the ad game in Australia and New Zealand it’s this charming creative who’ll work his fingers to the bone in search of a good idea, then throw it out and fight for his team’s best effort instead. It’s a good job he missed that bus.

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