Speed and agility the name of the game, says M&C Saatchi UK group CEO Jo Bacon

“I do feel there is a danger that creative agencies will become little more than a collection of martech-led distribution vehicles,” she says. “That’s certainly not the reason that I got into the industry or why I get out of bed every morning. That’s not the reason I get excited to sit in reviews of our creative work. It’s because the ideas that we come up with differentiate our client’s brands and get them talked about. Agencies need to value what they do more and prize their originality of thought. That’s what agencies need to be all about in the future and will always need to have creativity at the very heart of them.”

It’s clear that Bacon is passionate about creativity, protecting the creative process and valuing the creative solutions that agencies (particularly the humans inside them) push out on a daily basis. While she acknowledges technology is a major ingredient in today’s creative process and, particularly, the distribution of creative work, she’s clear that as agencies continue to develop and inevitably become more tech and data-driven and reliant, they need to fight against becoming little more than commoditized ideas factories pandering to the endless needs of martech platforms and channels that are threatening to steal power away from agencies such as M&C Saatchi.

“At the end of the day, I think creativity is human; there is a human element to all creativity. AI is an idea that humans have had to train, so a truly original idea cannot be created by AI. AI does have an important role in any agency’s future, but I think it will be used as an efficiency tool for production and an effectiveness tool; it’ll never be trained to replace human creativity. It doesn’t have that human edge to have an emotional conversation. Of course we’re investing in AI, but we have a lot of great creatives that are still writing great content and great stories. Excellent storytelling is still very much at the heart of what we do here.”

Bacon is no stranger to big jobs and she’s seen most things this industry has to throw at someone climbing the career ladder. Her career kicked off over three decades ago in account management at DDB, with a move to Saatchi & Saatchi coming three years later, where she quickly rose to board level. After five years at Saatchi, she moved to RKCR/Y&R where she remained for a decade before going media-side with Viacom. Five years later, she returned agency-side taking a group role with WPP. Two years later, she moved back into media with Reach, then back to WPP’s Ogilvy for almost four years before being tempted away to join M&C Saatchi.

“WPP gave me experience on a global stage with one of the biggest brands in the world in a highly structured, highly disciplined infrastructure. And I’m really proud of the work that I did there, but M&C gives me the opportunity to drive, at pace, a really future-facing agency that’s extremely agile because of its size and global integration.

“We move at pace, or at the speed of culture as we like to say, and we’re in the middle of developing a strategic approach to a number of interesting things and have already gone to market to talk about our integrated client-first solutions. Part of our new proposition is something we call M+C Saatchi Plus, which is centered around delivering fully integrated solutions very carefully tailored to our clients’ needs. When you put a team of performance and data people next to a team of culture makers next to social and influence people next to PR and content planners, it offers a very agile way of solving client business problems. That’s what’s really exciting about what we offer.”

Words such as ‘change,’ ‘speed’ and ‘agile’ feature regularly when in conversation with Bacon, giving the impression that if things aren’t moving forward as quickly as she’d like, she might become frustrated, maybe even impatient. She denies this. “It’s not about being impatient, more about being cognizant of being able to move at genuine pace for clients. And being responsive. Most clients I’ve talked to recently need their agencies to not take six months to come up with a strategy or three months to evolve the team’s thinking. My desire for rapid change isn’t through impatience; it’s through necessity.”

It’s well documented that M&C Saatchi has had a tough time since the global pandemic – which agency hasn’t? M&C has offloaded a number of businesses and saw revenues decline by 2% last year. But, the imminent rebrand, refreshed approach to better managing client briefs and delivering effective creative solutions, along with Bacon joining the group’s UK ranks, bodes well for the future. So, what is Bacon aiming to achieve in her new role?

“Success,” she says, “but what does that success look like? For me, it’s many things. It’s building an amazing culture, a real spirit of integration and collaboration, a spirit of creativity and a deep culture of creativity. I think that’s in the DNA of M&C. It’s definitely part of our history and our future, which is having creativity at the heart of everything we do.

“We set our stall out early with the hires that M&C has made with Zaid and myself and also with Rob and Laurence [joint global chief creative officers Rob Doubal and Laurence ‘Lolly’ Thomson]. We want to be seen as a big creative powerhouse of the future with amazing integrated capabilities. So, success looks like working with clients in a different way. It is different here than the big WPP companies because we’re smaller, we’re much more agile, we’re more integrated and doing interesting and independent stuff. So, all of those things really are incredibly powerful for us to be able to make quick decisions and move at real speed. It’s exciting to be here.”

Bacon’s career is littered with long stints – she’s not the type of CEO to move around a lot. She sees a challenge through. That promises much for the soon-to-be re-branded M+C Saatchi Plus. Watch this space carefully. Things will be moving fast.

For more leadership lessons from top CEOs, check out our How I Run My Agency series.