#AOTYAwards 2021 spills: VCCP on its fighting spirit that help it ride through pandemic

Founded in 2019, VCCP Singapore is an integrated communications agency that bases itself on the principles of simplicity, collaboration, un-preciousness and integration around ideas rather than channels. Among the list of brands the agency has worked with include Cadbury, Canon, Cathay Pacific, McLaren, and Telkomsel. It also recently won silver for Independent Agency of the Year at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Agency of the Year Awards 2021.

Craig Mapleston (pictured), CEO of VCCP, told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that it had to step up its game when two of its biggest clients reduced their spending as they were heavily impacted by the pandemic. He also explained the agency's plans to turn around Singapore’s creative decline.

This interview is done as part of MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s winners' and finalists’ interview series for AOTY Awards 2021. To find out more about the awards, click here.

Tell us what these achievements mean for you?

Mapleston: This win makes us extremely proud, excited and of course a little humbled that we’ve received this recognition from such highly regarded marketers. This is a fantastic accolade, made even more remarkable for us because the year assessed was just our second year in existence.

VCCP Singapore is quickly growing into a mid-sized agency, which shows how rapidly we’ve developed - but also comes with some challenges, since most of the team is new to the agency and each other. Being less than three years old means we don’t have veterans of the agency, who know the ropes. We’re all in a similarly formative stage of the agency’s history, and we’re all part of making our future.

So, the one thing that unites VCCP Singapore is a desire to be personally responsible for building and growing the agency. Everyone can leave their mark firmly and permanently on the past and the future of the agency. It’s an opportunity that other agencies can’t offer their staff.

So, this award is recognition of the passion and efforts of our team to create an agency that’s better than where we’ve been before.

What makes you proudest about being part of your agency?

Mapleston: We created opportunity and growth in the face of enormous adversity. The year 2020 was our second year, and while we’d got off to a flying start in 2019, nothing could have prepared us for our two biggest clients being so severely impacted by COVID-19. When people were forced to stop travelling, Shell and Cathay Pacific stopped spending.

As the challenger agency for challenger brands, we all had to step up. We had to confront the issues and immediately find solutions. New business wins with Johnson & Johnson, Telkomsel, Hong Kong Tourism Board, and a wider remit with Shell global business units, more than made up for the shortfall of our more established clients, and enabled us to continue to grow and exceed our plans made before COVID struck.

The fighting spirit and the faith in each other meant that in even the most challenging times we are able to create great opportunities.

And, of course, the other aspect to this success is the faith and trust shown by our clients in the team. We established a blue chip international client base because we have a blue chip team, backed by the heritage of the VCCP Partnership around the world, which is famous for strategic and creative excellence.

What are some of the initiatives you have in place to ensure your staff feel proud to be associated with your agency?

Mapleston: We have a range of initiatives, but the most important aspect of our approach to people revolves around our purpose and principles, which were established when VCCP first began in London almost 20 years ago. Our purpose unites VCCP and is our reason to come to work. We transform the fortunes of our clients by challenging and disrupting the categories they operate in.

And our principles have become our DNA. They guide how we hire, how we work and how we hold ourselves and others to account. Principles such as being lean, honest, clear, approachable, agile help make us the antidote to the bad habits of the industry and help keep us all grounded in shared behaviours, regardless of position.

We encourage our clients to be purposeful and adhere to aspirational values, but it’s amazing how few agencies actually deliver for themselves and their staff.

We have a global staff development platform called THRIVE that allows us to grow through learning and harness our potential. It has everything from the latest learnings on tech, software and platforms to communication, confidence and well-being. THRIVE keeps our people up to date with the latest trends, insights and innovations. We’ve also complemented THRIVE with additional internal and external training on personality profiling, leadership, presentation skills, data analytics, and inspirations from global industry leaders.

We want all of our staff to feel proud of VCCP Singapore and so we ask them all for their thoughts. We carry out an agency wide health check every six months so that we can see how we are tracking from both a positive and negative perspective. This helps to flag the positives that we can dial up as well as the unwanted pain points that need understanding and addressing so that we can improve. This covers everything from our operations through to our culture so that we can constantly better ourselves and the agency.

Last but not least, and especially during the pandemic, the psychological health of our team became the priority and so we created helpful guides for the staff on self-motivation, the importance and tactics to separate work from personal time and dedicated sessions for all staff members to share their ways of coping through the pressures of COVID-19. Beyond that we created internal and external support networks where anyone could receive advice and support for their unique situations.

How are you attracting talent to your agency?

Mapleston: VCCP is fortunate to have a strong heritage since setting up in London in 2002, and the positioning and ambitions are shared in Singapore.

We have the geographic scale and breadth of marketing disciplines to challenge the big networks, but the independence, agility and creativity to take on the local darlings. In short, we can deliver challenger solutions at scale. This is a positioning in Singapore that really has resonated with talent and clients, who are a bit dissatisfied with the bureaucracy of the networks or the limitations of the local indies.

This has helped us to attract challengers, entrepreneurs and go getters who have helped us to run towards trouble; not away from it. Our logo is neatly summed up by a courageous girl standing up to a bear and that is exactly the type of person we are looking to attract.

What are your hopes for the Singapore advertising scene in 2021?

Mapleston: We want Singapore to regain its creative mantle - at least in APAC. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen Singapore agencies slowly slipping down the creative rankings. And we’d like to play a role in turning that around.

An obsession with the rational side of marketing - proving the value of a campaign before it launches - is one of the key factors contributing to Singapore’s creative decline. We all need to understand that marketing is not a precise science. And creativity may be more difficult to assess, but adds exponentially to results.

And, I believe, underpinning the decline of creative standards in Singapore is the declining stature of advertising as a long-term profession, rather than a transient vocation or a stepping-stone to something else.

Now more than ever, creative industries and professionals will be pivotal to solving some of the world’s most complex and potentially catastrophic problems - as well as creating great commercial campaigns.

So, amongst educational institutes, industry bodies, agencies and clients, we need action and role models to bring back the allure of the profession and the significance of our craft. And VCCP will be playing our role in achieving this.