Creativebrief Founder & Chairman Tom Holmes talks to Dean Lovett, CEO of McCann Birmingham
Dean Lovett, McCann Birmingham
I started my advertising career at Cogent Elliott in Solihull in 1977 as a trainee media buyer. At that time Cogent Elliott was the largest advertising agency outside London. It was a great introduction to the industry and provided me with a solid start to my marketing career.
I stayed at Cogent Elliot for two years before moving to Harrison Cowley in Birmingham to work for Peter Tyrell who was my previous media director at Cogent Elliott. I was a media planner buyer at Harrison Cowley for two years.
During that time, commercial radio was developing and I was interested in getting into this exciting industry. I joined Mercia Sound in 1980, three months before it went on air, as an agency sales executive selling radio airtime to advertising agencies. I stayed at Mercia Sound for five years and was promoted to local sales manager.
In 1985 I joined Beacon Radio as Head of Sales and ran an advertising sales team of twelve people.
In 1986 I started my own advertising agency, Campaign Concepts, on my own at the back of a car dealership in Coventry. I specialised in retail marketing. By 1997, the agency employed over 140 people with offices in Henley-in-Arden, Birmingham, Leicester and Bracknell and had a turnover of £22M.
We were taken over by McCann Erickson Central in 1997, where I joined as a member of the Board running the Consumer Retail division. In 2000 I was promoted to Managing Director and in 2002 became the Chief Executive Officer.
In the last 15 years the agency has grown 500% to become one of the largest agencies outside of London.
Today McCann Erickson Central has offices in Birmingham, Bristol, and Luton and a staff of 250+.
TH: Firstly Dean, what does the Birmingham brand stand for?
DL: Business-like: There is a great amount of investment in the city, from the redevelopment of New Street Station to the Birmingham International Airport expansion and plans for HS2. In addition, there’s a new John Lewis store set to open in the city centre and a new leisure and entertainment complex is planned for the NEC. These developments will be integral to Birmingham continuing as a major business epicentre, not only within the UK but globally, as well.
Linked-in: The city has reliable services, communication links and transport links such as the M6 toll and Birmingham International Airport, while the railway and motorway networks enable fast and efficient commutes into Birmingham from all over the UK.
Futuristic: 33.5m tourists visited Birmingham in 2011 and the number continues to grow year on year. Through heavy investment, Birmingham is paving the way for its own future and in turn, creating an environment where businesses will want to invest in and operate in as well as becoming an attractive city for people to visit.
This is only set to continue through The Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP, which plans to increase economic output in the area by £8.25 billion by 2020; create 100,000 private sector jobs by 2020; stimulate growth and business profitability and boost indigenous and inward investment. This is a hugely positive piece of activity that is going to help shape the future of Birmingham as a business-oriented city.
TH: What are your views on Birmingham’s marketing to date?
DL: As an agency, we’re very much in touch with the Birmingham marketing scheme. Our PR department is retained by Marketing Birmingham to raise the profile of its leisure and business tourism programmes: Visit Birmingham and Meet Birmingham. Activity centres around maximising key initiatives such as the region’s Food Festival and profiling its conferencing and events offer and expertise.
TH: How do you think Birmingham should position itself?
DL: Industrial to industrious: People work hard in Birmingham; it’s a city full of energetic, ambitious and driven individuals, who help to create productive, efficient and successful businesses. It’s industrious past is arguably fundamental to this mind-set and has made the city and the people within it what it is today. Furthermore, these attributes will serve to propel its growth as a major hub for business.
TH: Are the city’s brand values reflected in your own agency culture?
DL: Absolutely. Midlanders are self-effacing and not at all arrogant; we are proud to acknowledge that this modesty is wholly reflected in our agency culture. We are not arrogant with our clients and we don’t talk down to them. Instead, we genuinely want to work alongside them and build strong, dependable and mutually appreciative partnerships.
Also, we know we’re not a London agency, so we know we have to try harder to stand out and impress. Having such an industrious, driven attitude is pivotal to leading a local agency successfully, as is knowing how to capitalise on location and environment to differentiate the agency from the competition.
TH: Does being based in Birmingham influence your creative output? If so, how?
DL: To a degree. It can’t help but impact from a staffing point of view – the broad-thinking and industriousness demonstrated by Midlanders is certainly evident in our creative output.
Technically we are in a location where it’s easy enough to commute into London for work, so there’s a certain degree of thought that if people are creative, they will go to the capital. However, location is now less and less an indicator of the quality of work. At McCann Birmingham, our work is award-winning and internationally recognised. We are competing against, and winning against, global agencies and so and being a local agency that acts global means that location is irrelevant; it’s certainly more about the people who create the work and the clients we create it for.
TH: What makes your agency offer different?
DL: McCann is the only international agency based on Birmingham. We’re regional but we offer all the benefits that come with being an international company. We have to compete with other local agencies but crucially and credibly, we are able to provide a global perspective and call upon our international connections.
Fundamentally, we think local but act global - it's the best of both worlds for clients and this is a part of the attraction.
Dean Lovett, McCann Birmingham
McCann Birmingham’s underlying ethos is Passion and Pragmatism. This means we are committed to doing the very best for our clients. We are passionate about the work we produce and have highly refined procedures in place to carry out what we do and get the job done well.
TH: Why should clients consider sourcing work from Birmingham agencies?
DL: Two main reasons: quality and cost. We’d like to think that clients choose us as an agency because of the high quality, award-winning and widely renowned work we produce.
Sometimes, London creative output can be influenced more by what peers will think about the work and the people who produced it – it’s not like that in Birmingham. A cliquey agency culture doesn’t seem to exist here – we are more focused on what our clients think than what our competitors might say.
Plus, more often than not, when clients choose a regional agency, it brings about lower costs, compared to London agencies. We estimate it’s around a 20% reduction.
TH: What sort of clients do you want to attract?
DL: We have a lot of great clients at the moment but we always want to attract more Blue Chip, marketing-focused businesses.
We currently work across the board with Vauxhall, from print advertising to television campaigns, as well as offering regional public relations and social media support for retailers across the UK network.
In addition, we offer integrated services for Sunseeker, the luxury yacht brand, and PR for npower. These are in addition to a breadth of large, multi-national clients who we’ve had the pleasure to work with, both currently and in the past. Other names to note are Bentley, Lotus, Triumph and Stanley; all global clients whose work originated in Birmingham.
TH: What work have you done recently makes you really proud?
DL: Because we’re a communications house, every division under our roof has achievements that they are proud of, from Digital to Media, PR to Creative and Advertising to Planning.
We work with both small and large budgets, from clients who have tens of hundreds of pounds to spend, right up to those who have tens of millions of pounds to spend. Whatever the budget, every client gets great work from us.
We’re particularly proud of the Stanley advocacy work we did, which included integrated input on a brand, digital and social media level.
The Creative department has much to be proud of recently, from taking Elites, a local brand, and putting them on a world stage, to forging an evolving relationship with Vauxhall, which has progressed to the point where as an agency, we are much more involved in the brand’s creative leadership, which is really exciting.
TH: What Birmingham brands do you most admire and why?
DL: Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has done a great job. They’re a major employer in Birmingham – we’re close to the factory so can see their development and understand the Birmingham landscape in which they operate. JLR is arguably the biggest brand in the area and we’d really like to work with them. They’ve put a great deal of investment into their company and produce fantastic cars.
Cadbury is another stand-out Midland brand (albeit now owned by US-based Kraft). Aside from the fact we love chocolate, we admire this iconic brand and its strong rooting in the city. A hundred or so years after it began, its legacy is still prevalent in its activity and is integral to its values and operations. From the growth and maintenance of Bourneville Village, which is still at its heart today, to the harvesting and integration of its history into its brand perception today, there is much that can be learned from Cadbury.
TH: Are there any local marketers who have inspired you?
DL: Karren Brady. She has had a hugely positive impact on the business and marketing scene. What she has done to market herself and her ‘brand’ is nothing beyond ingenious. She’s very articulate and 100% driven, whilst simultaneously balancing family responsibilities with television work and directorships. We truly admire her passion, dedication to business and her ability to never let herself down.
TH: What business would you most like to win?
DL: Halfords is a perfect fit for our agency: a national brand with a local presence and we’re so well versed in working with clients who operate in this way – we could do some really great work for them – but would being a regional agency put them off? Big brands are often attracted to London and might not be aware of the benefits that a Birmingham agency could bring (particularly one that thinks local but acts global)!
TH: Thanks Dean
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