Cheil Benelux Is an Agency of Brief-Makers, Not Brief-Takers

Daniel> A few years back there were other people in the agency, not only in our positions but in a lot of positions. For some reason, during covid etc., it happened that we had a new CEO, there was no creative director, there was no managing director, and a few other senior positions. And then Cheil hired a friend of ours, Tim van der Sijde – a young, talented account dude – from Ogilvy. We met him there when we were freelancing. He became managing director of Cheil. He asked us if we could join him as the creative directors. We were freelancing, so at first we thought absolutely not. But then at some point we thought it's interesting, because Cheil is an agency built out of Samsung but for a whole lot of years an independent agency network, not super known, but with a very firm base of great innovation work, and a lot of work for Samsung. So a good start, with fertile ground to grow creatively.

Tim> The fact that they were pivoting towards this quite young managing director, we really saw as a cool move in the right direction. It's always good to have young management. We thought they really want to do different things differently over at Cheil. That got us in the right direction. 

As Daan was saying, the freelance world gave us so much opportunity, so much freedom and so much varied creative work. We were enjoying being so fortunate as to be able to look inside a lot of different agencies and see how everything's going in there. So it felt a bit strange to narrow yourself down to one agency again, but it did provide us with a great chance to change the structure and the direction of the agency a bit. And we really felt they were open to it.

Daniel> Cheil is filled with talented people. So we're 75 people, which for Holland is not small. Fertile ground to make a creative agency out of it. That's our mandate – to bring this big ship, which is very good at delivering fast-paced stuff at volume, up the creative standards and also widen the client roster. It's a lot of Samsung, which we love, but also the people here can do a lot more. And a lot of people in the market didn't know. So that's our first assignment – to let people know that we do that. And it's working. We've been working with Samsung, which is a great organisation, for years – and now we can do it for you, if you want.

Daniel> We did a lot of work for the government. In Holland, our New Year's Eve is like a war zone, with fireworks mayhem.

Tim> Everybody's allowed to buy fireworks and set it off in the least orchestrated way, people getting drunk and just throwing fireworks around. So a lot of accidents happen. We did a campaign last year that's been going on in Holland for 50 years, maybe. Every year there's a safe firework campaign. So it's kind of famous. But we got to do it this year, which was really nice. 

Daniel> We’ve been working with Basic Fit too, a company called Coulisse, who do super high tech window blinds. We started working for HelloFresh recently. We work for Dusty, a company who makes workwear.

Tim> We see this as part of the plan. The first year we spent changing the processes inside and making this agency more eager to be creative, changing the structure of the company a bit. That was our first-year plan. We did that, and now we are looking ahead at how this can pay off in new clients. So the second half of our plan is now getting the word out there, getting new clients to come on board and take on this challenge with us.

Daniel> We are a bit in between because we have offices in two places in the Netherlands, but also in Brussels, so we are a Benelux agency. We're not global, but at least regional by nature. Then again there are a lot of Dutch people working here and Belgian people working in Belgium, whose background is more in the local agencies.

Tim> We hope to be having international-agency ideas with a local-agency approach. Most of the time we speak English during lunch, just because there are a lot of different nationalities over here. We don't make a lot of local television spots, for instance, like a lot of those local agencies do. So we're not a typically Dutch boutique agency. We are a network agency, but we do have the size of a boutique or smaller agency, so we can really deliver at speed and we don't have the slow processes of a lot of other network agencies, we hope.

Tim> Well it's a Korean network agency to start with, so that's really interesting. 

Before this period, we were freelancing. The biggest difference with that for me was as a freelancer, you're just a hired gun and you want to come up with solutions as fast as possible, as efficiently as possible. You come in and solve the problem. With an agency like this, with big clients like this, you play the long game and you try to manage relationships. Every project that you do, every brief that you take, has implications for the next one. That's what's really interesting about it. Because as a freelancer you never think about how you can take this brand from where it is now to another place in two years. But as a creative director for Cheil, we constantly think of how we can take the Samsung brand, or take the Basic-Fit brand, and move it to a different place in one or two years. 

I think Cheil differs from other other network agencies. I think we move a lot faster and are really quick on our feet. 

Daniel> We worked for BBDO, for instance, and for J Walter Thompson where we had other functions so we weren't as deep into it. But from our perspective then, BBDO was massive. We could ride their wave, but we weren't creating the wave. Now we are at Cheil, as a network it is expanding, reinventing itself. We speak a lot with our German colleagues, our Spanish colleagues. We are in the global creative board, where we have monthly talks with Malcolm [Poynton, global CCO] and with other creative directors about where to go with the agency. So it's partly building Benelux, but it's also helping find out what our position as Cheil is in the world, because we do a lot of things really well, but there are also a lot of growth possibilities. And that's very interesting and also very different from other network agencies we were part of.

Tim> That being said, we took a lot of valuable lessons from BBDO and J Walter Thompson, that we absolutely implemented here, and also lessons that we’d already implemented in our style of work. They're both brilliant networks that have shaped our careers.

Daniel> That's something we really enjoy. Like you said, we have international teams, we have local teams. We want to have it that way. We want them to move as one, but we need the different flavours. Cheil has a great retail studio team that builds flagship stores, etc. They used to be more of a separate silo. We are getting them in now because these are people that can think spatially, build stuff and think in construction pretty fast. That makes all briefs much more interesting. And it's also the stuff that we've been doing for the likes of HelloFresh and all the new clients – somewhere on the verge of activation and spatial design, getting all these things together. On top of that, we have a pretty good in-house content studio. So we can go pretty fast, we can film stuff, we can edit and design. Building and nurturing this creative cross-pollination space is really interesting. 

Tim> We ourselves, had to transform from brief-takers into brief-makers. And the same thing kind of goes for everybody on the creative floor. We try to implement a way of working where everybody asks questions and looks at the brief from different sides. So everybody is a brief-maker.

Tim> Our absolute focus this year was on Samsung ‘ShotControl’, an AI tool we created for the Dutch 3x3 Basketball players that eventually helped the team get to gold at the Olympics!

The project started over a year ago, when we submerged ourselves in the world of 3x3 Basketball and also launched a social campaign to make the sport famous in Holland. Getting into the fabrics of the game, we found out when fatigue hits, and players start missing their shots more often. By placing cameras in the training facility and developing a machine learning tool we could map out the positions players were most successful from when taking their shots.

We then turned this data into an easy to understand heatmap. Small details that could have a big influence on the game. It’s been a great journey where we could really combine our love for technology and creativity in the most prestigious arena of the world: The Olympics. 

We think that a journey like that is the beauty of our profession: getting to know and understand something you didn’t know anything about before and then finding ways in and coming up with ideas to help people and brands ahead.

It all starts with curiosity. And we hope that curiosity inside of us will never go away.’

Tim> That's actually something we've been working on from the day we started here. 

Daniel> In June for Samsung, we launched a pair of shoes that could call your mum by doing a dance. Another kind of tech – less purposeful, more for fun.

Tim> A limited edition sneaker. There were only six you could actually win by becoming a Samsung member. So they wanted to make a really memorable prize. So we put this innovation into a shoe.

            

Daniel> We try to operate somewhere in the middle of creativity, tech and commerce. There's a bunch of interesting global and regional brands that do that. We would love to help solve a branding problem which also helps them in their physical or digital retail spaces. Our strong point is to do it with a technological solution, either building a product or a service that people can actually use, that's durable, not a one off. 

Tim> Positioning and making them famous with technological innovations is nice. Coming up with things that really benefit people and therefore really drive brand preference. That's what's really cool. I think we just need to build more and more stuff that's actually useful, because when I talk to my family they're always talking about how annoying advertising is and what they want to know if that one funny commercial that they see once in three months is one I made. But it's so cool to be able to build something that actually helps people and to connect a brand to that. I think there's a lot of future in that. And I think that Cheil is really ready for that future of potential clients.