What you need to know: 

• Deloitte last month waved creative partners Adrian Mills and Matt Lawson out the door with a 15-strong agency team and seven retained clients in tow. They've called their new shop ATime&Place.
• The story, per Mills and Lawson, is the ultimate happy ending to a whirlwind seven years building out the creative, brand and advertising unit within the consulting firm, including helping the company to its first-ever Cannes Lion in 2018. 
• Deloitte's decision to abandon its creative and advertising services locally sparked plenty of speculation, but the pair insist there's nothing to see here. As does Deloitte – the consultancy will continue to work with the duo and their new agency both as a client and a partner. 
• Mills and Lawson are have plans to scale their firm towards the bigger end, but expect AI automation to help them do more with less. Part of that will be keeping structure flat, and keeping focus on "brand and distinctiveness and differentiation", rather than "service design", says Mills. 

When Deloitte Digital management decided that advertising was no longer aligned with the strategy and consulting firm’s local play, Adrian Mills and Matt Lawson were given the green light to take things into their own hands.

It comes seven years after the duo were pinched from McCann to set up and scale Deloitte Digital’s first creative, brand and advertising unit in this market – Mills became the firm's creative, brand and media partner, and Lawson partner and APAC creative chief. The coming together of consulting and creative was new, but it was moving fast – just months earlier Accenture Song had sealed the deal on its $63 million acquisition of local creative hot shop, The Monkeys (now being subsumed into Droga5).

Last month Mills, Lawson, and a 15-strong creative and production team moved out of Deloitte Digital’s operation, taking with them a solid list of clients. The independent agency is called ATime&Place, and come next month, they’ll be ensconced in new offices in Melbourne’s CBD.

Already on the roster is Dodo, Deloitte Digital’s founding advertising client, along with Suzuki (for whom the pair were credited with a 30 per cent sales uplift in 2020), Swinburne University of Technology, Energy Australia, Asahi-owned Balter, and the Victorian Racing Club. They’ll also be taking on advertising services for Deloitte itself, after crafting the consultancy’s global Olympics campaign from inside the business earlier this year.

So when CEO Mills says they’ve effectively “started a medium size business” – at least in agency terms – straight of the bat, it's not just puff. Chief creative Lawson, describes it as “a startup, just without the start part ... It was a bit of a no brainer”.

Conscious uncoupling

The deal almost sounds too good to be true, and after a Deloitte-sanctioned press send-out broke the news of the split in August, speculation flew that there was more to it. (Where there is advertising there is always scuttlebutt.)

Lawson says it's not so: “I think we saw that [advertising] wasn’t a strategic focus for them and there was an opportunity where we could take ownership of what was the creative, branded advertising function – the clients who we absolutely love working with and the team who likewise loved working with them.”

Being able to take the relationship forward with Deloitte, he adds, is “a very unique opportunity”, and he underlines there will be no overreach on their side.

“We will not even entertain the idea of doing the type of work that they do, but to be able to still have access to that sort of martech creative idea enablement technology, for lack of a better word, so great.”

Mills adds that the closure of its advertising business in this market is no indication of Deloitte’s commitment to creativity – he affirms that Deloitte is very much “still a creative business”.

Deloitte Digital leader Leon Doyle indicated much the same right off the bat.

“Creativity will always remain part of the DNA of Deloitte and we're focused on continuing to push creativity to play a bigger role in the business transformation needs of our clients,” he said of the organisation's ‘re-balanced’ offering in August.

Globally, Deloitte Digital will still offer end-to-end creative services “that meet our clients’ needs in every local market”, according to a statement shared with Mi3. For Australian-based projects that “have a specific ask for advertising and comms work”, clients without their own agency of record will be serviced in partnership with either Deloitte Digital’s global agency teams or external partners like ATime&Place.

Quietly confident

The legacy of that seven-year run, reckon Mills and Lawson, was giving the consultancy its “creative confidence”.

“I think we differed with a lot of other creative people going into consultancies during that time, because our vision was to not build a creative business on the side, it was to make Deloitte a more creative company,” suggests Mills.

Lawson says that in the last decade, Deloitte’s becoming more confident in “telling their own stories”.

“It was astounding when we when we [first] peeked under the hood, [we were] like, how are you not talking about this? Oh my god, I didn’t even know you guys did this?”

The confidence came on fast. Less than a year into their seven-year run, Deloitte’s Australian team managed to take home the company’s first ever Cannes Lions, winning silver and bronze in the creative data category for its Value of Nature campaign for the Great Barrier Reef.

'Seven-year MBA'

At its “zenith”, circa late 2023, Mills reckons there were 110 people within Deloitte Digital that he would’ve counted as sitting within the creative team, including 60 “doing pure advertising that weren't there when we started”.

Working alongside a “diverse” team of experience and technology specialist under the broader Deloitte Digital remit, the advertising unit could plug into capabilities like VR, motion design, spatial design, UX and UI.

That diversity of thinking and capability is what made creativity work within the business, versus a potential cultural clash.

“You’re rubbing shoulders with the people from Access Economics and then the people from AI and Cognitive," per Lawson. "You can't help but be inspired by that, whether that's how you come up with ideas or bring them to market.”

The outputs were equally diverse, from “high value campaign work” to assisting in-house agencies with high-volume creative executions, he says. And often, they’d be pulled in for projects well beyond the scope of advertising.

“There was another part of the business where the creatives had access to just different problems, whether it was an IoT water distribution network that we had worked on and developed called H 2.0 or it was, an optimisation platform that can optimise massive networks, be that air traffic or transport.”

In short, it was like “a seven-year paid MBA” for everyone in the advertising business, reckons Mills. “It was just a career privilege.”

“For the creatives to be immersed in sort of that level of business and sector knowledge, you just don't really have access to that if you're somewhat sheltered in a creative department,” adds Lawson.

What's in a name?

With a solid agency handed over, and seemingly pipeline potential with their former employers, ATime&Place's co-founders are “genuinely optimistic about the future”. Lawson says that mindset is embedded in the agency name. No gaps, no limits.

“The full saying is there is a time and a place for everything, and I think that’s what we can aim to achieve now – everything … I've always had my creative enthusiasm curtailed by the limits within production, and now it's just genuinely so exciting thinking about what we can all make – it is the best time in history to be a creative person.”

More obviously, the name is a nod to storytelling – “we see ourselves as a world-building business, we build brand worlds, and we help grow them,” says Lawson.

“And the best way into a story is always just setting the time and the place: 'A long time ago in a galaxy, far, far away' – that was the time and place for now a billion-dollar story.”

“We saw an opportunity to create a business that understands technology and its ability to enable, but one that can really create interesting and defined worlds for brands.”

But that also cuts both ways, and Mills says they will be countering “a lot of service design and a lack of focus on brand and distinctiveness and differentiation” within the creative agency cohort. “Now that anybody can make anything they will. So the actual idea and creativity has never been more important.”

Heads vs AI

Scale-wise, the plan is to go big – but not too big. “Good creative agencies that still retain their creative soul tend to be between 40 and 80 people,” says Mills.

Thanks to AI, Lawson says they’ll be able to do more with less.

“That's why everyone in the new place wears a couple of different hats," he says. So far, the hats include Britt Rigoni as GM, Charles Bayliss as ECD, Rob Weir as head of realisation, and Marlese Byfield as head of broadcast production. All carried across from Deloitte.

The plan is to keep structure flat – as Lawson sees it, the more senior people should be the ones working on the client's business.

"Not just because I personally adore it – I still love thinking and writing – it's that it’s the happiest diagram. It's what clients, rightly so, should expect when they deal with an agency, when they deal with a creative business – that the creativity isn't just farmed out to the least experienced."