Profile: Global head of McCann Worldgroup Nick Brien

Despite McCann’s global reach, its top executives have traditionally been American - and groomed from within the agency’s American ranks. And so few have had the advantage of reaching the CEO suite without being beholden to entrenched relationships within the agency. Interestingly, Nick Brien, the son of a German mother and Australian father, has none of the long-standing loyalties within the organisation that could stand in the way of changes needing to be made. 

Replacing John Dooner this year, it has been said Brien holds the toughest job in the agency business right now. He has inherited a network that’s reeling not only from the structural issues that plague most multi-billion-dollar global ad networks in an era of rapid change, but also from growth and union issues in one of the network’s biggest Asian markets, Japan. But Brien is also well suited for the challenge. With a reputation for turning around struggling businesses, he isn’t afraid of making bold decisions or unsettling egos and taking calculated risks. 

Six months into the job and he is bringing in much-needed change. From McCann’s global HQ in New York, Brien outlines for the first time his vision for Asia. He reveals a major restructure of the IPG network’s business and his decision to strip Michael McLaren of his Asia-Pacific responsibilities and divide the region into four key geographies: India, China, Japan and Southeast Asia/Australia, led by Prasoon Joshi, TH Peng, Michael McLaren and Charles Cadell respectively. The ExCo he’s created will drive Creative Excellence (Joshi), Commercial Expertise (McLaren), Talent Superiority (McLaren), Strategic Innovation (Peng), Technology Enablement (Cadell), Marketing/New Business (Cadell), Digital Velocity (Peng).

Atifa Silk McCann, historically, has been the only network in the region where the Asia-Pacific president also has the additional responsibility of being a country manager. How do you plan to tackle the challenges in the land of the giants? 

Nick Brien None of our competitors have the Japan presence that we have. And Japan is in a two-decade economic malaise. It is not for the faint hearted. Saying that, it is still the second biggest advertising market in the world. The market has to be taken very seriously because all of our clients take it very seriously. And the level of sophistication means that marketing and advertising has to really be on the money.

The role as it is designed at the moment is mission impossible. No one has been able to do it, and no one can because Japan is its own massive set of complexities. And it’s a huge market [for McCann] - it’s nearly as big as New York. It’s 650 people. It’s complex with union issues, market circumstance issues, and no growth. It’s a share game. It’s a hand-to-hand combat every single day. And you don’t have any other markets in the world where you’ve got agencies owning the media like Dentsu. It’s a full time job in its own right. The new structure will allow Michael [McLaren] to spend more time in Japan, making it brilliant.

Atifa Silk What does your new game plan mean for the region?

Nick Brien We’re serious about our business model. We are serious about what matters most in our industry. But with our leadership we have to organise ourselves and design our roles and responsibilities so everyone’s doing the right thing in the right way.

I’ve already made a number of global changes. We’ve separated Middle East and Africa from Europe. Now, we’ve been looking at the best configuration of regional responsibility to reflect the velocity and intensity of Asia-Pacific. We need intensity of focus and velocity of decision-making.

We need to be mindful of the diversity in Asia, from all the issues with the Japanese economy to all the next emerging BRIC markets, the momentum and the complexity of China, to the scope of the Indian continent. One of the things we needed to do was be thoughtful about how we structured the region. 

It will mean the four ExCo leaders run the region together. They will take on all the obvious responsibilities, such as client satisfaction, new business, thought leadership, creative excellence, communications, finance, HR, and technology. They will divvy up and find a way to take responsibility for certain functions. I intend for this to become more of a dynamic. It’s not just because Michael [McLaren’s] role is massively conflicted between being a country manager and running the region. It’s about taking that principle and allowing these leaders to participate and be involved in running one Asia-Pacific.

This is about making APAC stronger, making communications stronger, the functions stronger because we have 22 offices in the region that need to be part of a highly motivated, consistent and dynamic organisation. What’s important is that we still run Asia-Pacific as a region. Financially its numbers will still run as a region, strategically it will still be invested in as a region. 

Atifa Silk How does all this tie in with your assessment of the group globally, and the key strategic issues it faces?  

Nick Brien The McCann Worldgroup is an exciting combination of marketing skill sets and disciplines. I’ve believed that for some time, and that’s why I joined Universal McCann - part of the McCann Worldgroup - six years ago. I have personally always subscribed to the potential of integrated marketing solutions because I’m an integrationist at heart, a relentless integrationist. I’m also a relentless optimist. I believe that if you have a business and you structure it towards a solutions model as opposed to a services model, you can do amazing things. 

I’ve been in the job six months now, and while I find the network impressive, it is also a business model that doesn’t lean in as much as it should into the integrated solutions play. This is a challenge for us. We have a unique opportunity in the industry to not be a group of companies, but a company of groups. So, an organisation that has an organising principal around solutions marketing as opposed to individual services.

Going around the world meeting lots of clients - CMOs in this post recessionary world - it’s clear that whether they are in India or China, they want more impact in their marketing activities. They want their marketing to be more creative and strategic. It has to be woven together, and we have got to be smarter at proving the effectiveness and efficiency of our solutions. 

Atifa Silk You recently held a global summit at a McCann Worldgroup level where you gathered the most important leaders from the eight different companies - 400 or so - in San Francisco. When was the last time the group came together?

Nick Brien That was more than 10 years ago, when John Dooner first launched Category of One, which was essentially a diversification strategy, not an integration strategy.

What we’re going through now is an evolution of the existing assets - basically a retooling and reconfiguration of the current capabilities. The individual brands such as McCann Erickson, MRM, Momentum, Weber Shandwick and FutureBrand are all companies that have an ambition to be the best in the world at what they do. But we want to create a collective ambition around the potential and the power to more consistently be a brilliant integrated marketing communications company. We’re not going to be utopian about it. Not all clients want it. Not all clients say they are going to integrate. But there’s a huge frustration at the CEO level with many of the holding groups that marketing - modern day marketing - is not evolving itself as fast as the consumer is changing, given all of the technology disruption.

The theme of our summit was One World, One Love. There are only two emotions that drive human beings - love and fear. And a fear culture doesn’t work - not in a creative industry. Ultimately, most creative people aren’t motivated by greed. They’re there to do amazing things in a creative fashion. 

Atifa Silk There was anticipation in the build up to the summit that you would set the future direction for the agency. What was the one message you wanted to get across in San Francisco?

Nick Brien I wanted to get across a very clear model, vision, mission and value for the McCann Worldgroup, as well as the whole new corporate identity created by FutureBrand. The vision is to become the world’s leading marketing solutions network, and the mission that we’ve got very clearly is to transform brands and grow businesses because a lot of clients’ brands need transformation.

What are the pillars to do that? They are creativity, innovation and performance. The brand essence of our company has got to become collaboration. Not just what we do, but the way we do it.

So, we know we need to be more creative, we know we need more innovation in our strategy and the way we execute and we know we need to talk about performance. But unless we collaborate, we are never going to integrate. The integration is an end point, a consequence, an output. 

Atifa Silk What’s the biggest obstacle to making this collaboration work?

Nick Brien The obstacles are going to be P&L silos, unclear objectives, and lack of clear Worldgroup leadership structure in the market. So who’s Worldgroup, who’s McCann, who’s MRM, and who’s Momentum. A lack of clarity between the McCann Worldgroup and McCann needs to be addressed.

The fact is, many of the Worldgroup businesses evolved out of and were built and invested in through acquisition and development by McCann. What we need to do now is focus. This much is clear.

We must ensure that the McCann Worldgroup business model is designed against a new vision for our clients, and therefore for ourselves. And secondly that McCann Erickson is still the main temple holding up the entire marquee. It’s the most important brand agency network, given its equity and brand reputation. But it’s got to be more consistent in its excellence. 

And when we look at our brand proposition, it’s fantastic in Asia - in some markets. It’s fantastic in Europe - in some markets. This of course is a network reality. Dealing with a big business made of talent and people, you are always going to have a regional variability and a local variability. An industry study showed that in China the talent churn is over 50 per cent, with client retention and client relationships the lowest level in the world in that market. Perhaps that’s because you’re churning over talent so much in the agency, the clients don’t feel they have any consistency of relationship. 

Atifa Silk So is the solution to tear down the traditional barriers in the organisation? 

Nick Brien It’s not fair to look at any organisation and look at barriers because these are all unintended consequences. I’m not saying in any way that what John Dooner created with Category of One in 1997 was wrong. It was perfectly right and visionary at the time, but it’s moved on since then. A lot happens in 10 years and in fact every year. It’s moving at incredible speed. Look at what happened to the music industry and the publishing industry. Well, we’re not going to wait for the digital disruption to completely upend our business model. And it is.

With our services and solutions model I believe we genuinely have a competitive differentiation in the marketplace for our clients. There’s no reason why if we’re in the solutions business we can’t lean into performance-related conversations and relationships with our clients. And that is an economic argument. When our clients that we’ve surveyed say ROI is my biggest priority, then they need a business partner who creates with them the necessary skill sets - cross serving, cross marketing, cross delivering and cross optimizing the best with the best in a highly customised way. And once we achieve that, we will be able to evaluate in a highly rigorous and precision fashion exactly what impact we have in pushing case sales, foot traffic and so on.

What we have to remember is that the consumer is a person and the challenge for us engaging with people is to become much more human, authentic, relevant, and customised. 

Atifa Silk What shape do you ultimately want the Worldgroup to take, and what do you want it to stand for?

Nick Brien The Worldgroup has to mean something. It is now designed and evolving with clarity about who we are and what we do. We need to be very clear in the marketplace about what our brands stand for, and what our business model is about. I think that’s a relief to people. In all honesty, you can’t have brand inconsistency with a global brand. You don’t buy an Audi in Germany and want it to be a different Audi quality in China. A Rolex has to be the same everywhere. So our brand consistency is very exciting because I feel this isn’t just the usual talk of improving and being stronger. 

We are changing the business model, and we are leaning to a solutions offering and a solutions conversation, with a vision that says integrating marketing communications is better. And you know why? It’s because our consumers are integrating - consciously and subconsciously - every day. They do it everyday from the moment when they wake up — with what they read in print, what they see on websites, on TV, or with a piece of direct mail. You look at brands like Apple, and they seamless and brilliantly optimise every touchpoint with the consumer in an unbelievably amazing way.

However good our disciplines and companies are, if Momentum isn’t working closely with MRM and MRM isn’t working closely with McCann then it will all fall apart. But we’re not a holding company. McCann Worldgroup is an operating company of eight different businesses. I want those different businesses to work together in a highly collaborative way. I also don’t want to get away from the role that McCann Erickson plays in this.

Many of our global clients expect that McCann Erickson will lead the conversation - perhaps not exclusively, but McCann is always going to be very important because of the creative idea. The power of the creative idea is paramount in all of this. Without a brilliant idea, you’re not going to get the results - whether you execute it online or in-store. There has to be a big idea. 

Atifa Silk As you strengthen McCann’s creative output, how challenging is it to attract top creative talent to the agency? [Brien recently persuaded Linus Karlsson to decamp the highly successful New York office of independent shop Mother to run McCann’s New York and London hubs] 

Nick Brien Top creatives see the power and potential in McCann, the client base, and the network. Like all legacy brands, they see the opportunity - just like Tom Ford did when he went into Gucci, or like Stella McCarthy did when she went to Louis Vuitton.

There’s no issue about McCann being a well-established brand because it is synonymous with global advertising. It created the industry along with the others. So what I’m pitching to these creative guys is the opportunity to come in and fundamentally reinvent, turn around and lead.

We already have some great people like Spencer Wong and Prasoon Joshi. We have powerhouses around our network. What we are looking for now are catalysts in leadership roles, who are managers. I think David Lubars is probably one of the best examples of that in the industry today. His title is North America but in reality he acts global. He’s a first among people and has created a very rich, talent intensive network through respect and collaboration. That’s the kind of individual the creative community wants to be led by. They’re not interested in titles or ego, it’s about the credibility and authenticity.

We want to be unexpected and surprising. Our clients trust us, and they know us. They know we’re consistent as a partner. They know we have diversified capabilities. But they don’t know how well we can mix our capabilities. And they don’t know that our creativity is as brilliant as it should be. Now, is that a profile issue? Is that a product issue? Well, this is why we are going to have more regular presence at Spikes and Cannes. I believe you’ve got to have big brand ideas that aren’t just advertising ideas. They are promotional ideas, social media ideas, design ideas and retail ideas. A good big brand idea suddenly becomes an idea for all execution possibilities. 

Atifa Silk Tell us about Prasoon Joshi’s role as chairman of the creative council. 

Nick Brien We have created a collective leadership for McCann Erickson - bringing together our [five] most senior creative leaders who will meet quarterly to evaluate our creative products. Every office from next year will have a creative excellence target. We call it the Creative Excellence Challenge. All the businesses will be part of a creative collective. Prasoon is going to lead that for the first year. We’re going to rotate it, rather than having a silver bullet global creative director for McCann, which we’ve decided is not the way we’re going to go now. We have very powerful players in the region, iconic leaders, and I’ve asked Prasoon to lead for the first year. He’s a statesman, a collaborator.

Atifa Silk So, is the rotating chair a case of managing egos?

Nick Brien Not really. It’s more pragmatic, based on ability and I didn’t want it to be obvious that creative leadership had to come from the Atlantic. And it’s about diversity; for Prasoon to be leading the global charge, at least for the first year, sends a message that we are a global company, not an American company. The fact that I have come in, and I’m not an American says the same. People say, ‘you’ve come from the media side of the industry’. Well, yes. But before that I was on the creative side, and prior to that I ran Arc. So we are a global, multi dimensional business, and we need to send out every signal that diversity is key, not just in terms of senior leadership but also in terms of ethnicity. Prasoon plays on the global stage and he was the logical choice.