In the second part of our interview with Niku Banaie, he describes how Naked is set up to uncover insight and establish creative work.
Tell me about Naked?
Naked was set up by three partners with different backgrounds who met as part of the management team at PhD in London. Jon Wilkins originally came from Research at places like MTV, John Harlow came from Media and Will Collin was a traditional ad planner at places like BMP.
They decided that the traditional buying structure was tying them down. Most agencies are wedded to production or to a media buy deal. Naked wanted to be a solutions neutral agency, wanted clients to pay for thinking, for solving problems. At the same time, as we’ve grown, we wanted to be more fluid that management consultants.
We set up on a boat and after cutting our teeth on memorable work such as ‘monkey’ on the UK’s ITV digital network, we’ve grown to 80, 45 of which are in the UK – the rest are in Sydney, Amsterdam, Oslo and Paris.
When I was part of a small team that set up and ran Pixelpark London during the boom, we grew fast (to 85 people in 18 months) and one of the greatest challenges was keeping the cutlture and spirit of the agency. How do you cope with your growth?
I suppose it’s two parts: hiring people who think similar and being critical on who you choose. It’s about getting the right people. The process can be learned – the attitude can’t.
We’re also big advocates of bringing new staff in from the other offices to sit with us for a few weeks – see what’s going on, even run a project.
Another thing we do is to get clients involved. They come sit with us – especially during critical parts of the project – why not? They’re part of the team, aren’t they?
During that growth, how do you think you’ve grown and maintained your reputation?
We’re a vocal agency. We get our point of view across through speaking, through articles. People also notice our work from Honda to Heineken to Irange – even if it was done on a small budget like Honda zoomerzine or multi-million pound initiatives. Watch this space as weve got some great things to talk about over the year!
Tell me about your approach to making effective communications?
You have to look at your group and wonder how they communicate. You have to realize that it’s not all about some trendy group and fly post Boston to make a brand grow. You have to think clearer. You have to think about the best touchpoints for your consumer ( and above all remember that you’ve been hired to solve a clients business problem and not win awards.)
How do you get to your creative solutions?
We take on board consumer insight from almost anywhere. You cant come up with differentiating solutions by thinking traditonally. One thing we’ve been watching recently is how urban dwellers view their city as a plaything – look at PacManhattan or Yellow Arrow in London.
Tell me more about understanding consumer insights?
Conversation, reading, observe, hanging out. Actually, it’s important that we don’t hang out in cliché cool places because we end up all saying the same things. That’s what happened to the style magazines – all the writers went to the same places, same bars and clubs. They ended up writing about the same things. It all went stale.
One thing we also do is all sit in the same room. As we’ve grown this has been a struggle but we found a change in atmosphere when we sent people round to a side office to work from. We all need to be in the same room bouncing ideas off each other.
You launched the popular 118 118 campaign in the UK. Tell us about that.
When the directory enquiries got decentralized in the UK a private company came to us with a number 118 400 and wanted us to promote their service. A large proportion of their marketing budget we spent was on a new number that had come up: 118 118. We believed this was essential for the success of their service. Like most businesses there was an 80/20 rule – the majority of calls were being made by a small number of urban dwellers. This helped us focus our ideas: we focused on local city based communications to bring the story of 118 118 to life.
We also knew when the incumbent, British telecom, was going to launch. We moved our launch forward to start before there’s – and through the execution we created an omnipresence in the key markets. When BT launched later with a budget that out stripped ours many times over, no one didn’t even notice.
We’ve heard about how you play with other agencies. Can you shine some light?
As we’ve grown we’ve launched mini cells within other agencies. We’ve created Naked Inside JV-type teams at CHi, WCRS and Fallon.
So, Niku: why ‘Naked’?
Naked is about being bare. Stripping away the bullshit – the world is bigger than advertising.
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