What you need to know:

• Paul Hutchison took the wheel of M&C Saatchi's media agency Bohemia in November 2022.
• The agency needed a reboot and new vision. So in February, he positioned Bohemia as an outfit that can move people through 'handcrafted memorable media', i.e. stuff that lands with the right people and moves the needle, and shopped the proposition on a roadshow.
• Foxtel Media CEO Mark Frain and TrinityP3 founder Darren Woolley think it just might work and Hutchison has since landed a $20m new client, with three more in play.
• He reckons the industry is too short-term focused, or as he would put it: heads down, firefighting rather than driving growth.
• Hutchison also thinks memorability trumps attention.

Few that meet Paul “Hutch” Hutchison would describe him as: ‘A person who is socially unconventional in a way regarded as characteristic of creative artists’. But Oxford Dictionary’s definition of ‘Boho’ is not far off the mark for the sort of agency he is trying to build – one that is unconventional, creative and does not follow the pack.

The outfit was flying high for a while under its founder and Hutch’s predecessor, Brett Dawson. But it grew too fast, too quickly. After a string of major wins - Lion, Vodafone, Quick Service Restaurants, Caltex among others – it lost a lot of them, quickly. M&C Saatchi stepped in with a buy.

Last year Dawson took on a global role with M&C Saatchi Group out of London, with Hutchison, a Brit, heading in the other direction.

As all good bosses do, he set out on a listening exercise. 

“There was a latent positivity and love towards Boho,” Hutchison told Mi3. “When I was asking around for what people thought of the agency, one person said to me: ‘you're like the quiet table in the corner of a restaurant. We think it's a really interesting conversation happening there, but no one overhears it’.” 

Hutchison, who arrived in Australia having led large British agencies including Wavemaker, MEC and Vizeum, knew he needed to reboot the M&C Saatchi Group-owned media agency.

In February, the 40-strong Bohemia Group relaunched as the agency that 'moves people through handcrafted, memorable media'.

Hutchison explained this means moving audiences emotionally in their attitudes to brands, and moving audiences through the purchase journey, which includes investing in performance data and acquisition smarts. In other words, stuff people might actually notice, remember, and then maybe ultimately buy something.

To join the dots, Bohemia has since been investing in its market mix modelling practice, and is working on what will be its next “big bets”; ecommerce and sharper data planning capability are both priorities.

The new boss, naturally, said the prop is gaining traction after shopping it to stakeholders. But don't just take his word for it. Foxtel Media boss Mark Frain, who worked with Hutchison in the UK early in their careers, thinks it can work – if Bohemia can leverage the capability of the wider group.

“I’m not surprised he has come out here and his new proposition is getting some traction,” said Frain. “As an outsider looking in, there’s no doubt Paul and his team have the capability. But what will really make this pop is leveraging the capability of the creative group, whether that is in areas like digital performance or dynamic creative that aligns to their strategic thinking.”

Combining creative and media

Hutchison agrees with Frain – and a collective approach is starting to put some runs on the board. In late March, Bohemia and M&C Saatchi won media and creative for the Australian Retirement Trust, making it the agency's largest client with an annual media spend of $20 million. 

The agencies won the business in separately run pitches, but helping each other out – which could provide a blueprint for further integrated pitches. 

“Working with M&C Saatchi is a massive opportunity to grow and scale the business. We've got three live pitches where we're going in as a fully-integrated agency model,” Hutchison. The next few weeks should underline where that collective approach is working, and where it might be improved.

Either way, the combination of indy pedigree with broader creative firepower is starting to win plaudits.

TrinityP3 was the consultancy that facilitated the Australian Retirement Trust pitch process. CEO Darren Woolley told Mi3 Bohemia impressed by building a rapport with the client and demonstrating it could grasp the challenges of the financial services sector.

“David Angel ran that pitch and said the client was impressed that they could bring some fresh thinking to the process,” per Woolley. “Where large agencies can bring the scale and muscle, Bohemia is an example of indy that brings the smarts.”

Other recent client wins are French multinational energy management company Schneider Electric and New Zealand’s largest retirement living provider Ryman Healthcare, which is trying to crack Australia, a market which Hutchison said provides an opportunity to engage with the affluent over 50s audience that adland often ignores.

Memorability and humans

There are two industry trends in which the Hutchison-helmed Bohemia is rowing against the tide: an obsession with attention and machines. 

Hutchison believes the industry often frames attention as an outcome, but believes attention is one component to achieving the more powerful goal of memorability.

“We've been doing some work with some neuroscientists to understand how memories are encoded,” he said. While logically you have to get attention in the first place in order to stand a chance of building memories, “attention is actually responsible for about 20 per cent of memory encoding. But other things like context and emotional storytelling are actually more powerful", per Hutchison.

He also believes some media agencies have begun to rely too much on machines doing the job of humans. 

“There are agencies out there who have machines that generate media plans based on inputs. We use machines to process large sets of data, but we don't rely on machines to give us the answer,” he said.

When pushed to explain how Bohemia’s use of tech is different from the competitive set, he added: “The trick is in how you use it, whether you are being data-led or data-fuelled. At Bohemia we are data-fuelled; we use technology to give our people the information they need, but humans end up making the decision about what we do for our clients.”

Longer and shorter of it

Another bugbear he is hoping to change is short-termism, moving more towards what he describes as heads up thinking rather than just heads down. He recently hired National Client Partner Kimberly Stafford from UM to cultivate deeper and transformative client relationships.

“A lot of the conversations are around the short term and I think there's an opportunity to start thinking of a slightly longer term view for our clients, such as what are we doing to help drive transformation in their marketing communications over the next year or two.”

Changing these dynamics may well be a longer-term project. But given few agency groups are genuinely delivering end-to-end on creative, media, strategy and data smarts, the rewards could be high – if Hutchison, Bohemia and M&C Saatchi can make it work.