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‘The reality is you adapt or you get left behind’: How Saatchi & Saatchi’s new leadership team is carrying the agency’s legacy
In their first group interview as a leadership team, Saatchi & Saatchi's chief executive, Pat Rowe, and co-chief creatives, Mandie van der Merwe and Avish Gordhan, sat down with Mumbrella's Lauren McNamara to chat about upholding the agency's history while being opportunistic for the future.
As one of the most famous creative agencies in the world and in Australia, the leadership team at Publicis Groupe’s Saatchi & Saatchi have got a lot of responsibility that goes with maintaining the agency’s high standard.
And having experienced some turbulence over the past 12 months with a number of senior changes and new starters, the agency is now feeling settled and ready for the next opportunity.
With a relatively new C-suite team of chief executive Pat Rowe, co-chief creatives Mandie van der Merwe and Avish Gordhan, and recently-appointed chief strategist Rachel Walker, the team has certainly had their work cut out for them.
But, boasting a client roster featuring some of Australia’s leading brands – Toyota, Arnott’s, Vodafone, Nescafe, Heineken, NRMA, TPG Telecom, Dettol and Visa to name a few – the future is looking bright.
Rowe, who joined early last year, tells Mumbrella it is a privilege to lead the team. He describes every day as an “exciting opportunity” for everyone who works at Saatchis to keep the standard of work, collaboration and creativity where it needs to be.
“I’ve loved every minute of it,” he says. “I think it’s such a privilege.”
(L-R): Rowe, van der Merwe and Gordhan
He says Saatchis has experienced much of what the rest of the industry has in terms of challenges – client budgets being squeezed, a larger emphasis on ‘more for less’, the impacts of clients using their own platforms and ecosystems, and the need to adapt.
“All of those things have cascaded through the industry, and every agency has had to cope with that,” he says.
“The reality is you adapt or you get left behind. We’ve adapted, and we’ve adapted quickly.”
This year, the agency has restructured, bringing in extra skills and bigger investments in data analytics, social, CRM and Salesforce capabilities, CX and more, to better service its clients.
“From our standpoint, it’s making sure that creativity has always been, and will always be, our core business. But how and where it is applied for clients changes,” Rowe continues.
“And I think the people we have, the quality of work that we’re now starting to do, it all sets us up for a really exciting future.”
To ensure creativity is truly at the core, the agency made a huge hire late last year, nabbing Australia’s leading creative duo. In September, it was announced that van der Merwe and Gordhan would be joining Saatchis after less than a year at competing holdco creative agency, dentsu Creative.
And while it can often take six months, or maybe more, to understand a place and feel settled, the pair say they’re already very much part of the furniture.
The volume of work they have undertaken in such a short time span has “fast tracked” the pair into understanding who they are working with – both internally and client side, how Saatchis fits into the entire Publicis Groupe, and how they want to future to look.
“We’ve been really busy, and it’s been a lot, but it’s also an opportunity to get to know our team from a creative point of view, and it’s really helping us see what the next step is for where we want Saatchis to go,” van der Merwe says.
Gordhan jokes: “While we haven’t slept much, the positive is that we feel really embedded really quickly, which can often be the hardest thing.”
With a new team often comes the misconception of a lack of alignment – big players with big ideas struggling to come together. But Gordhan says its quite the opposite at Saatchis now.
“I feel like I’ve known Pat my whole life… so it doesn’t quite feel like a new team.
“I think the mistake is thinking that because we haven’t spent a lot of time together, that there is that lack of alignment. But truthfully, I’ve seen in businesses that have been together for a very long time, that lack of cohesion at the top of the food chain, and the way it affects every part of the business underneath it,” he says.
“That’s not the case here.”
Feeling settled from the get-go, van der Merwe and Gordhan have made their focus clear: Ambitious, long-term growth to build on Saatchis’ scale of influence and achievements for clients.
“Our focus is always the work, the ideas, the product. It’s the excellent work that make our clients businesses improve,” Gordhan says. “But that doesn’t just happen because you’ve got an excellent creative team, it’s more than that. So the focus is putting together the foundations for sustainable success.”
He says it is easy for agencies to have short-term wins, a “little highlight here and there”, and while it is important to celebrate those, its also crucial not to lose sight of the overarching goals.
And with Saatchi & Saatchi having such a high standard and good reputation in the industry, Rowe also stresses that it is a big responsibility to maintain that.
The Saatchis team took home the 2023 Grand Effie
“We have a very enviable client list, we don’t shy away from that. The quality of our ideas and thinking is paramount to everything we do. And we can be different by having this level of creativity with the level of big business – it’s creativity at scale,” he explains.
Van der Merwe adds: “Our philosophy is ‘Nothing is Impossible’… And there’s very few agencies like us that can do what we do.”
The leadership team will work to continue building the agency’s creative reputation, growing its client base, and expand the place where its creative thinking is driving results.
“We’ve got to take fear out of the room,” van der Merwe continues. “So that our philosophy can truly be unlocked. We’re futured-focused on reinforcing Saatchi & Saatchi as a creative platform, but also want to bring modernity to the offering.”
Looking 12 months ahead, she says she will be “high-fiving every in the room” if the agency has solved its clients’ ‘impossible’ challenges.
“We are extremely optimistic about the future,” Rowe concludes. “We’ve had a great start to this year, we’ve won lots of new business, and yes it is tough out there and we’re enduring that, but we’re pushing to the future.”
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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Avish GordhanLeadershipMandie van der MerwePat RowePatrick RowePublicis GroupeSaatchi & SaatchiSaatchis
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