MANAGING WELL

MANAGING WELL

Deirdre Waldron

Cawley Nea\TBWA’s Deirdre Waldron personifies today’s go-ahead agency boss. Dressed in smart but comfy attire, complete with trendy runners, she has a cheery but business-like demeanour. As with Lucinda Creighton, Waldron, 39, is a native of Claremorris, Co Mayo, but unlike the Fine Gael dissident TD, she exudes a more relaxed, mild-mannered persona.

She sits in the agency boardroom, in offices known for years as the Kodak Building, on the main thoroughfare from Portobello to Rathmines. Landlord Noel Quirke managed the Kodak business in Ireland and later bought the property to rent it out. The agency’s first floor reception was where the printing took place and the upstairs housed the old warehouse.

Founded by Chris Cawley and David Nea in 1992, the duo were hailed as the new rebels on the block anxious to transform adland. Nea was an ideas man with a media pedigree, while Cawley was a driven ‘suit’, well versed in the A-Z of client service. The agency soon created a lot of noise and was voted by Marketing as Advertising Agency of the Year for 2000.

Two years later, Cawley Nea was snapped up by Omnicom’s TBWA network. In 2006, Cawley Nea\TBWA co-founded OMD media with Irish International and later launched sister agency PHD, where Cawley is joint chairman. Omnicom’s other interests in Ireland include PR agencies FleishmanHillard and Drury, along with field marketing agency, CPM.

Unlike Chris Cawley, who got his first taste of advertising at DDB on New York’s Madison Avenue, Waldron’s career start was far less salubrious with a BSc in computer applications at DCU. She was a programmer for six years and then moved on to project management and product marketing assignments, deciding on what features work best for consumers.

She moved to San Francisco and worked there with Smartforce, originally known as CBT Systems, for four years. She rolled out new services, like 24×7 online mentoring and added new system features, again deciding on what did or did not work well for customers. On returning to Ireland, she joined Fidelity.com with regular flights to and from Boston.

Waldron went out on her own for two years, “in the wilderness” she puts it, working on contract for digital agencies, which, led her to being hired by Cawley Nea\TBWA, first as technical director and then as managing director of Agency.com. When Brian Swords left for TBWA in Shanghai in 2011, Chris Cawley asked her to take charge of the main ad agency.

“I see my role here mainly as primarily managing the business,” Waldron says. “It goes back to when I was with Fidelity.com. I was one of five senior managers in Ireland, with over 60 people reporting into me. I had a big organisation and structure, with a lot of experience of managing workflow and process through there. I brought a lot of that with me to the agency.” But Waldron does not fool herself by getting obsessed by digital and process. Adland’s main component is creativity and without people who can come up with ideas that make an impact, business counts for nothing. “We’ve focused on what is in our DNA as a TBWA agency,” she says, “and the all-encompassing philosophy that we abide by here is disruption.”

Last summer, Cawley Nea\TBWA formed a new executive team to develop group operations under Waldron’s leadership. Fergal Behan took charge of client service, Mark Nolan became planning director and Stephen Anderson executive creative director, with Pearse McCaughey assuming the job of non-exec group creative director. Chris Cawley remains as chairman. Using disruption in progress as the agency’s mantra, Waldron wants to embed this message across the spectrum. The agency encountered difficult times, losing some major accounts and not scoring many goals on the pitch front. Being reliant on State business did not help. But they seem to have weathered the storm and are now winning new business again.

Dunnes Stores, Green Isle, new HRI work and Temple St Hospital and, of course, winning all three strands in the Electric Ireland review, is the good news. Irish International and Target McConnells pitched for all three strands of Electric Ireland. Publicis pitched for ABL and digital and Eightytwenty for the digital. Rothco and Dialogue chose to withdraw.

Cawley Nea\TBWA had handled the BTL and digital, while sister agency Irish International looked after the ABL creative work. Waldron admits, albeit regretfully, the ad business is predicated on pitching for external validation. New talent has been hired and she believes the hard work in establishing a new management team paid dividends by the end of the year.

“We had a big strategy around government business and the recession hit us hard,” she says. “Things got pulled back and we cut from under us from around 2005. But we still have HSE and we’ve done award-winning work on the anti-smoking campaign. We’ve done their crisis pregnancy work. The fact is we had a lot of our eggs in one basket and things had to change.”

Pitching was a whole new dynamic for Waldron to get her head around, coming as she did from an IT background. Companies do not have the time, money or know-how when it comes to rolling out creative marketing communications. The idea of providing such a valuable creative resource for nothing in a pitch process is also a major conundrum for Waldron.

“What we provide is a unique and much sought-after resource and yet we’re asked to give it away for free on a daily basis in a business presentation,” she says, while gently shaking her head in disbelief. Waldron knows how much agencies go through when making presentations and fervently believes all but the agency that wins the account should be paid for the effort.

Advertisers should go through ‘creds’ and chemistry meetings. But when a four-way pitch process is up and running, the fact that agencies give of their best talent, resources, ideas and strategies for free, is nonsense. Waldron could never imagine such a scenario occurring in IT. When she joined the IAPI board last year, she helped launch the new pitching guidelines.

“We have had some good successes with the guidelines and some not so successful,” she says. “Some clients have not been able to abide by the time lines and some pitch doctors have not managed to keep them in line in that regard. On the other hand, we had dates pushed out to the full six weeks and the number of agencies were reduced. It’s a constant struggle.”

Waldron also accepts agencies cannot work as a cartel and a one-rule-fits-all should not apply. While a six-week pitch time frame may suit most advertisers, there are times when a two-week turnaround may be more than adequate for some clients.

There were times in recent years when they have had to let people go and impose salary cuts. As part of the new management set-up they are now focused on driving revenue. Despite the hard times, Cawley Nea\TBWA held on to clients any agency would be thrilled to handle. Among them are McDonald’s, Calor Gas, DAA, Britvic Ireland, AIG and RaboDirect.

While Waldron says she’s not the type of woman who will be out seen burning her bra at dawn, she would dearly like to see more women getting to top management positions in adland. But she is a realist and knows that the odds tend to go against them. When asked to describe herself in five words, she replies: straight, private, curious, interested and stubborn.

There are times when the agency will refuse to pitch for business if it is felt the chemistry between the two parties does not seem kosher. Despite industry rumours to the contrary, Waldron says a merger with Omnicom’s Irish International was never on the cards. Cawley Nea\TBWA regularly pitches against II, including the recent Electric Ireland review.

Agency Top Team

AGENCY'S TOP TEAM

Cawley Nea\TBWA is still the top agency when it comes to the IAPI hall of fame league of all-time best campaigns in the Adfx awards. Managing director Deirdre Waldron is pictured with Mark Nolan, group planning director, Stephen Anderson, executive group creative director and Fergal Behan, group client services director. Anderson came from New Zealand.

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