When Bates Asia announced a joint venture with London- and New York-based CHI & Partners, the move was greeted with scepticism by many in the industry. Bates’ reputation had been in a steady decline for years and a new, longer name and logo change seemed an unlikely fix, especially as CHI & Partners had not changed its name in the West. But the executive chairman of WPP’s newest network, Johnny Hornby is keen to prove that the joint venture is more than just skin deep.
The ambition, says Hornby, is to gradually roll out at Bates Asia the aspects he believes have helped made CHI a success over the past decade, forming a new, nimbler employee-owned agency with the reach of a global network.
The easier changes have been made with “dazzling speed”, says Hornby. Already all 14 of Bates Asia’s offices have been rebranded with the black-and-white logos of Bates CHI & Partners and several equipped with the large round table that is part of CHI’s ‘Big Idea’ process. “David [Mayo, CEO] and Mark Sinnock [CSO] spent time with us last summer taking in the big ideas process and now all of the Bates offices have done at least one big ideas day,” says Hornby.
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CHI’s big ideas process is a four-hour brainstorming session the agency has with all clients. “Both client and agency senior partners from multi-disciplines sit around a table and go through four aspects of the client brand as a springboard to creating work.”
Hornby’s faith in this process stems from his days as an account man at Ogilvy London in the early 90s, caught between client and creative department. “In the old days you were judged by how you sold creative. But I came to realise the account man is the client’s voice internally, and a good one will refuse to leave the building until they have an idea that will sell itself.”
Today’s creativity is about bringing together component parts to form an ingenious whole, says Hornby. “The role of an account person today is rather like a conductor in an orchestra.”
A more immediate benefit from the JV is the network’s larger global footprint. “Before this, CHI’s clients would say: ‘You want to be our agency in 70 markets, but you don’t have any presence or understanding of Asia’.
“As for Bates Asia, an Asian network without a connection to London or New York is hard to sustain.”
These changes have already started to make a difference to Bates’ fortunes in Asia. The new network recently won global duties for the Intercontinental Hotels Group. And just last month, it was appointed as global creative lead for Taiwanese tech brand Asus. “It’s been rather nice to turn up at pitches and now be able to say, here’s a planner from Asia, here’s the creative team from New York,” says Hornby.
But the core promise of what the new network has to offer will take longer. CHI was founded by Hornby and his partners Simon Clemmow and Charles Inge and from the beginning was based around the idea of an agency with a larger proportion of senior partners that all had a stake in the agency. “Our model is like a law firm and to tell the truth, we borrowed the model—or stole it—from BBH, and it’s essentially solved the key problems of senior level turnover and clients feeling that the people they appointed in a pitch, aren’t the ones handling their account,” says Hornby.
“I strongly believe that if you can populate an agency with four good people at the top, and get one good brief from a client, you can rebuild that agency.
“One of the smartest things we did when we first started was to hold the pitch in the client’s office, not at the agency, because if they’d walked in the door they’d never have given the work to an agency with seven people.”
