NICKY BULLARD SET ON JOINING THE DOTS
Nicky spoke to Maisie McCabe at Campaign magazine ahead of her move to MullenLowe Group UK as Chief Creative Officer.
Originally posted in Campaign.
For all the disruption over the last decade or so, there is still relatively little movement of senior executives between agency disciplines. I can think of a couple of people who have moved from one sort of shop to another, and with varied success. So it was interesting to find out who MullenLowe Group UK had chosen as the replacement for its short-lived chief creative officer Ewan Paterson last week.
Instead of hiring a traditional advertising creative leader in Paterson’s mould, MullenLowe has chosen Nicky Bullard, the European chairwoman and UK chief creative officer at MRM, McCann Worldgroup’s customer engagement agency, as its CCO.
Bullard has a stellar CV, and in February celebrated winning both Agency Leader of the Year (Customer Engagement) and Customer Engagement Agency of the Year at the Campaign Agency of the Year Awards. But it is still unusual for a creative with an integrated background to take a group-wide role.
It made me wonder why that is. Why, despite the innovative and creative things being done across the marketing services orchestra, there can still be a tendency to assume the advertising maestro should be holding the baton. Ben Golik, chief creative officer at M&C Saatchi since its merger with Lida, is an example of a “direct” creative in overall charge but there aren’t many more. When I asked Bullard about this, she was characteristically bullish, questioning why “someone who has only ever done ads” would be more qualified to co-ordinate across disciplines than a creative who has worked across multiple ecosystems. It’s a fair point.
She describes her new role as being in charge of a dot-to-dot picture. She gets to oversee the whole thing and make sure that everyone’s lines combine to make a single image. It’s a great metaphor and an interesting indication of where MullenLowe sees its future. With divisions like Profero and Mediahub working alongside the ad agency, MullenLowe is targeting marketers and brands wanting a joined-up approach. It’s a far cry from DLKW’s heritage of big, populist TV but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
There is a tendency among some advertising people – and, dare I say it, their commentators – to value big, bold films more highly than other communications. It might be subconscious but the bias is there. There is an expectation that middling shops need to pull out a “Long wait” or a “This girl can” in order to properly arrive. But, despite the bounceback in TV last year, audiences are more fragmented than ever.
Could the more sensible approach be to think properly multiplatform?
It’s not the first time Bullard has pushed boundaries with her role. She brings to it experience of true agency leadership. When she moved to MRM as chairman and CCO of its UK shop, it was pretty unusual for creatives to take a broader executive management role, Robert Saville excepting – though he started off as a suit.
Interestingly, there was precedent in the group: Rob Doubal and Laurence Thomson, co-presidents at McCann London from 2013. Since then, Laura Jordan Bambach has been a positive force as president at Grey London but it’s still pretty rare. And that’s before we get to Bullard’s position as one of the early female creative leaders in the UK, if not the world.
Campaign named Lida its Customer Engagement Agency of the Year two years in a row (2013 and 2014) while Bullard was its ECD. She says making MRM Agency of the Year was part of her pitch for the job there. At that point, it had hardly figured in Campaign’s shortlists but has now claimed the top prize. Getting MullenLowe Group UK’s divisions to create bold, joined-up ideas that deliver more than their constituent parts could hope to might be a bigger task. But Bullard is not one to bet against.
