Profile - Chairman Now

Chairman Now
It's hardly an original back story, Adland boy longs to be in film. But for Danny Searle, BBDO Singapore chief creative officer and chairman, 25 years in advertising have taught him power lies in the idea, not the execution. Searle speaks to Marcus Chhan about platform-neutral ideas, the Singtel dance and why titles matter... to some.

What would any agency make of it? Thrown out of a pitch for one of the biggest accounts to move in recent years and then, after several other agencies pull out, asked to come back in from the cold. BBDO Singapore found itself in just that situation last year and was no doubt faced with a difficult decision, whether to re-enter a pitch, which the client had dismissed them from, or cut and run.

In one of those 'only in Adland' twists BBDO not only returned to the SingTel pitch, which Leo

Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi excused themselves from, but emerged the victor. Naturally BBDO Singapore lead creative and chairman, Danny Searle, doesn't have a lot to say about the incident but he did give Marketing some insight into the hothouse of the SingTel pitch and why BBDO went back for a second shot.

"At first we were like, well, is this a good thing or a bad thing? And then we thought, hang on, we're the agency that has got nothing to lose in this pitch," Searle says.

"We don't have to second-guess or play any games we can just go out there and say what we really think. In the end I think that's what won through."

Now it's all done and dusted and BBDO houses one of this market's iconic brands in the hard fought telco category, it's time to get on with the work. Searle won't give any details on SingTel's upcoming marketing blueprint but did say, when his career wraps up, he would like to be remembered for doing the sort of work which people seek out rather than a piece of work that interrupts or disrupts.

"Work engaging enough for someone to go looking for it. If my work demonstrates that, then I think I would have done a pretty good job," he says. Could SingTel be an account he creates just this type of work for?

Searle wants to be remembered for the work, not his title. He chuckles when he thinks about how he landed the title chief creative officer and chairman for BBDO Singapore.

"I think they just wanted me to sound good on my business card. I am just a creative guy. This region is quite obsessed with titles and they thought I would be too," Searle says.

"In Australia, we had a creative director and everyone else was a writer or an art director."

Born a wandering Pom, Searle didn't spend too much time in England before moving to live in New Zealand and then Chicago, where he attended high school, before settling down in Australia for his University education - and his break into advertising. Like many a creative he longed to be on the business end of a movie camera. But Australia runs hot and cold on film, when the tax breaks are there it's a small but bouyant industry, if they aren't the enthusiasm and money falls away and fast.

"After University it was crashing and the only job I could get in the film industry was being a film editor," Searle said.

This gave him the background to put together TVCs and develop the ideas that drive them. Searle was then drafted by FCB Sydney to be a producer before swapping it for copywriting when he realised that the power of advertising was in the idea rather than the execution.

"More so today with the fragmented media. The idea is paramount and you're just starting to see the very best ideas people being put on new media. For a long time it was new media experts working on it. Now agencies and companies are starting to put their best brains on it and not their cheapest," Searle says.

Searle is unimpressed, so far, with the majority of the marketing work out there in the online space.

"Every client is asking, even demanding, that we do something which is not TV based. The trouble is that these clients are not putting the same budgets behind it, in terms of production," he said. Things will get really interesting when marketing directors in Asia use digital media as the lead media for campaigns.

"The onus is on the agencies to prove to the marketing directors how good it is," Searle says. He reckons Singapore has a very "risk averse culture" and marketers here can be "very by the book".

"You can feel that marketing degree coming out in the meetings and the really effective marketers are the ones that took risks. It's a shame because there's no market in the world with probably more opportunity, at the moment, than Singapore," he says.

With 25 years in the business and a year spent here Searle is happy to tell you what he thinks about the scam ad phenomena "it undermines the confidence of clients in the power of good creativity".

"For a long time it led clients to believe that creativity was a self serving attribute rather than something that was an asset to its business - that for me is the worst thing," he says.

"I know Singapore had a terrible reputation (on scams) for a long time but I think the rest of the world has caught up".

"The industry in Singapore has come of age and hopefully doesn't need it anymore."