Tuesday, 20 February 2001
"Pop star" is not a description you would readily apply to Lord (Maurice) Saatchi of Staplefield. But that's how one of his chief executives describes him. "Pop star", "hustler", "the arch-simplifier"... the list goes on. Everyone has an opinion, but few of the descriptions seem to sit well with the man himself.
"Pop star" is not a description you would readily apply to Lord (Maurice) Saatchi of Staplefield. But that's how one of his chief executives describes him. "Pop star", "hustler", "the arch-simplifier"... the list goes on. Everyone has an opinion, but few of the descriptions seem to sit well with the man himself.
M&C Saatchi enters its seventh year with the satisfaction that it has outstripped Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency the brothers founded in 1970 and were subsequently ousted from, for the first time in a new business league table. As a business story, it received blanket coverage in the national press; to Lord Saatchi, it had an "air of inevitability about it".
A combination of hard-nosed determination and an inherent fear of failure is what pulled in £250m last year - not forgetting a little help from some of the best top-level contacts in the business. Lord Saatchi's associates will tell you he spends practically every night out, entertaining clients. Staff will tell you how the agency's reception area is continually redecorated before important clients' visits.
Lord Saatchi's standards are what prised a slice of the £25m Sainsbury's account away from a rival agency that had held it for 20 years. He also refused to accept that his agency had been turned down for the £40m Rover account when it came up for review. He called the troops back to the agency in the middle of the night to rework the pitch, and eventually won.
I'm sitting in a glass-walled meeting-room on the seventh floor of M&C Saatchi's Golden Square offices, looking out towards the London Eye, waiting for my first glimpse of those famous specs. This is where the agency's five partners reside: Maurice and Charles Saatchi, Jeremy Sinclair, Bill Muirhead and David Kershaw.
Two minutes later, Lord Saatchi appears and instantly starts negotiating the sort of piece he wants me to write before telling me that all personal questions are off-limits.
For the record, he is the son of Iraqi Jews who were forced to rebuild their lives in post-war Britain. He has been married to the writer Josephine Hart - the author of Damage and Oblivion - for nearly 20 years. It's his second marriage. And he has one young stepson and a son from his marriage to Hart.
He is fiercely protective of his private life, and the "pop star" tag is undoubtedly not one he would care to promote. But you can see why it's applied. Despite his insistence on singling out other members of the management team for praise, he remains the star attraction at M&C, in the eyes of both the staff that work for him and the clients he serves.
In six years, M&C has become the UK's sixth largest agency, one place above S&S, with a staff of more than 250 and an international network of 10 offices. Fronting the agency today are the joint chief executives, Moray MacLennan and Nick Hurrell, and managing director, Tim Duffy. Chairman James Lowther and creative director Simon Dicketts complete the top-level line-up. While MacLennan may be comfortable admitting that under the circumstances it's difficult not to feel smug, Lord Saatchi is more cautious.
What was his reaction on beating Saatchi & Saatchi?
"It was noted," he says.
But the reality must have been much sweeter than he's letting on. In 1994, Maurice and Charles Saatchi suffered the indignity of seeing the agency they founded wrested from them by an American investment fund that controlled the majority of shares. Maurice resigned after being stripped of his executive role, and Charles followed. At the time, it was described as the biggest bust-up in advertising history.
Senior Saatchi & Saatchi management and multimillion-pound business followed them out the door. In January 1995, The New Saatchi Agency was born (later to become M&C Saatchi) and its launch made the national News at Ten.
Then in April 1995, British Airways joined the ranks. One condition to winning the account was that the brothers opened three other offices in New York, Australia and Hong Kong. So that's what they did.
M&C was founded with the slogan "brutal simplicity of thought", and Lord Saatchi has built an agency that prides itself on being able to get straight to the point. "There is an astonishing amount of waffle and vagueness, a lack of clarity. Precise thinking and simplicity are the qualities we admire."
The witchcraft comes, he says, in turning simple thinking into striking images. "I find walking into this building an elevating experience. The average age is 28, so it has a very exuberant atmosphere. It is non-political in a way that I have never experienced before. There are no corridor conversations. You can say what you really believe without feeling that it is going to cause hurt or resentment. There is none of the electric tension that exists in most corporate meetings."
Second time around, Lord Saatchi has binned the management books. He maintains that there was no plan other than to make the agency the opposite of everything that Saatchi & Saatchi stood for.
"Paranoia and fear motivate us pretty strongly," adds MacLennan. "It comes from the way the company was born. A spotlight was on us, everybody waiting for us to fail."
At the time of M&C's launch, there were 35 legal writs between the two agencies. "Saatchi & Saatchi tried to strangle us at birth, tie us up in legal matters so that we couldn't operate," says MacLennan.
But it's the lack of a guiding principle that critics home in on today. While other agencies refuse to advertise to children and shun the multimillion pound cigarette or alcohol accounts on principle, what is M&C's enduring business philosophy?
"It's true to say there isn't one," says Lord Saatchi. "The company started without a philosophy, without a plan. It was more like a tidal wave that took us along with it. Aimlessness has been an asset because we don't have the linear ambitions of Saatchi & Saatchi, a company driven by its aim to become the number one agency in the world. It was obsessed by league tables and its position in them. We have raised aimlessness to a high art."
The agency stands accused of always chasing the money and ignoring the issues - ditching its Health Department anti-smoking campaigns in favour of Silk Cut, and, after famously helping the Tories to power, they now work with the Central Office of Information. Lord Saatchi doesn't see the harm in this, and compares it to the work of a barrister. "The idea of being choosy about your clients according to some philosophy is very pompous."
The reason he no longer works with the Tories, he says, is because 22 years was long enough.
And what of the ads? While other agencies have made their names on the back of a single client - Levi's for Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Volkswagen for BMP DDB and Tango for HHCL and Partners - what single ad campaign defines M&C? "There are no defining campaigns," says Lord Saatchi, "because we are eclectic. We do the press advertising for Currys and Dixons, which is certainly the best retail advertising in the country, alongside posters for 'Euro No' and TV campaigns for police recruitment and British Airways. It's very varied, but I hope what they all share is clear thinking."
"They're in for the quick kill," says one of Saatchi's original shareholders. "They are good hustlers with big names that do good work, but I'm not sure it can be classed as great work."
Thirty years in the business are said to have mellowed Lord Saatchi considerably. The man who once famously said "It's not enough for us to succeed, others must fail", now has words like "softly, softly" applied to him. But while M&C might pride itself on an open approach and clarity, Lord Saatchi can be frustratingly vague. What does the future hold? He'd like more of the same. Why is the agency so unloved in the industry? He's unaware that it is. Can he imagine a time when he won't be so involved in the running of M&C? Not really.
And most importantly, what does he make of the rumour that M&C is soon to surrender to the advances of the French giant Publicis? After all, the two already work together on BA. He says he hasn't heard that one. Odd, then, that his two chief executives have. If he were to sell, would Publicis be an obvious choice? You guessed it, he doesn't know.
But what is behind his loathing of being interviewed? He'll tell you it's because the real glory belongs to his team, but a big part of it harks back to something Charles once said. His elder brother hasn't given an interview about the business in over 20 years, some say because he is worried people will be disappointed with the real him.
And no amount of probing will ever convince Lord Saatchi to tell you anything he doesn't want to. For him too, perhaps, the perception is reality.
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