What you need to know:

• Wunderman Thompson sees profit in purpose, aiming to help businesses define and unlock it rather than “whacking a purpose at the end of their marketing and communications”.
• The WPP-owned agency is bidding to move away from traditional agency work and help brands strategically re-engineer, taking on consultants.
• Some early success, winning UI and service design work for WA-based HBF from PwC, per strategy chief Mel Weise.
• Weise unafraid of working with reputationally-challenged brands. She thinks “grey area” problems require the sharpest minds.
• Incoming economic pain will see brands “probably spend less around traditional comms”, thinks CEO Matt Parry.
• Shift away from volume-based content to strategic services affords protection from in-housing trend. Parry predicts “most brands will have some form of in-house function” over next 12 months.

Wunderman Thompson isn’t shying away from working with the kind of clients Greenpeace activists last month scaled the Cannes Palais to protest against, making ad industry delegates feel somewhat awkward.

The WPP-owned firm has been strategically reshaped under new CEO Matt Parry and now touts an ability to help brands profit from purpose while heading upstream to take on the army of consultants also selling strategic transformation.

Chief Strategy Officer Mel Weise said the agency is already taking business away from the big four – and she’s unapologetic about working with brands perceived by some as pariahs.

“The challenging, meaty work, especially for very intelligent, strategic people, which is who we've stuffed our joint with – they are interested in operating in the grey. The grey is where the hard decisions are made. There are companies out there making enormous compromise and sacrifice to get the world where it needs to go and still keep the lights on and the petrol flowing,” said Weise.

“Working with those companies is also really impactful. Our own belief is that we're here to make a contribution to the world – and that contribution requires hard thought.”

Purpose-profit axis

Too many brands, Weise told Mi3, are “whacking a purpose at the end of their marketing and communications”. Instead she thinks they need to be “remade from the inside out”. Which is where Wunderman Thompson is setting out its purpose-profit stall and its new model – working with brands to define their purpose internally to unlock profit externally.

“The old game was to build a positioning map, put all your competitors on it, figure out what customers want, identify the white space and play there. But it turns out everyone's clever and all your competitors have the same data and everyone's pumping out content. We're ultimately leading all of our brands to the same watering hole, unless you start with something true to the enterprise and true to the organisational value proposition,” said Weise.

“So our strategic philosophy – for ourselves and for our clients – is to start on the inside and work your way out. Understand what makes the business – and the humans within that business – tick, and then work out how you communicate that outwards. So ultimately, your marketing is an amplification of the truth rather than your purpose being a lever of your marketing effort,” she added.

“It’s about making organisations better and helping the good guys win … and liberating the commercial potential of that human motivation.”

Mining grey areas

Weise scotches suggestions that Wunderman Thompson could be accused of hypocrisy by also working with ‘bad guys’.

“People look at our purpose effort and they're like, 'we've got you now because you work for Shell and Rio Tinto and brands that are pulling stuff out or pumping crap in’. No, if you want to sell doors, you stand in the draft,” said Weise.

“The whole point is that if you actually want to help companies orientate their whole organisation around purpose, you go and find the ones with great intentions and terrible track records, because they are the ones that can really use our help.”

Recognising existential threats to business as usual, those challenged ‘grey area’ firms and are more open to bringing in consultants further upstream per Wunderman Thompson CEO, Matt Parry. Six months into the top job, he thinks that is where the opportunity lies.

“We want to be working with clients that have the biggest opportunity to impact their people and the communities that they work in. So we want to be right in amongst those big clients and doing the proper, grown up strategic thinking with them," said Parry.

“We also want to grow our business in a sustainable way. We've all seen the fluctuations of agency life and we want to grow a company where people can have good, long, meaningful careers. For us, that is about positioning ourselves in the right way and diversifying ourselves away from some of those more subjective, more fluctuating areas of the world that we all live in.”

In-housing hedge

Hence Parry claims not to be unduly concerned about brands in-housing what used to be core agency work. Treasury Wines is the latest client building out an in-house agency, appointing former WT exec lead Elsa Beaumont to run it.

“In-housing is a reality and the reasons for doing it are sound in many cases – it's about looking to your partners to get the best value that you possibly can. So if you can control certain parts of your marketing activity in-house and you're confident on the output – we fully support that. We're helping clients get those models off the ground,” said Parry.

“For us it's complementary to where we've been taking our business in some ways away from [high volume work] into a space that we know we can add real value. So [in-housing] is not just a trend, it is here to stay – and I think it's going to accelerate ... In 12 months, I think the majority of clients will have some kind of in-house function.”

Taking on consultants

Weise said Wunderman Thompson has no plans to go toe-to-toe with management consultants across the piste.

“We don’t do audit, management restructuring, or risk and control work, which we believe traditional consultants are best set up to do.”

But she said the firm has had some successful forays into the big four’s traditional domain, winning UI and service design work from PwC for WA-based HBF, though the consultancy still provides the health insurer’s development capability.

“HBF is a massive project. Three years on we’ve completed our service design work, and created a UI design platform that will inform their digital work for the next era, as well as provided some senior development capability,” said Weise. “We’ve also helped shape and structure HBF’s internal design capability, in essence, helping them help themselves to deliver the project.”

“We helped them recruit staff and we’ve trained those teams to the point that we now have light touch consulting with them. We occasionally send in hit squads to fix problems or upskill employees. But by and large we’ve now built a system that they run themselves.”

Headwinds gather pace

Parry thinks the year ahead could be choppy for brands, as well as traditional agencies and publishers.

“I think the pace and the scale of the economic challenge has landed quicker and larger than people perhaps anticipated. The post-Covid bump that we've just experienced is real and it is going to be a tough six to twelve months,” he said.

“Any business in Australia that has a connection to the international supply chain is going to be in for a challenging period. So clients are probably rethinking their plans right now – and we're helping them shape those plans. I think what you're going to see is probably less spend around traditional comms,” said Parry.

“That's going to be a drawback. But I think what clever businesses are doing is thinking about how they navigate short-term pain and set themselves up to come out of it a better business. And that's hopefully where we can add positive value.”

Parry and Weise think looming headwinds underline the need for brands to redefine their purpose internally before articulating externally. “Using the power of your brand equity internally is crucial” said Weise, as workers across the economy face another potentially challenging year ahead.

“Everybody's going to need energy and their sense of purpose for themselves and for the business. Because I think everyone just popped out of the whole Covid experience and thought, 'right, back to it',” added Parry. “But now we’re rolling into the next thing and it is going to be very easy for people to let their shoulders drop. Which is why being really clear about the direction of the business to your people is so valuable.”