Clemenger BBDO’s Rebuild Starts With a Mission to “Make Work Australians Talk About”

Dani Bassil, Simon Wassef, and Adrián Flores are on a mission to re-establish Clemenger BBDO Australia as a powerhouse, starting with an upcoming run of work tied to a refreshed proposition: “Make work Australians talk about.”

“I didn't think I was ever coming back to Australia,” chief creative officer Adrián tells LBB in a wide-ranging interview alongside Dani and Simon.

“I have recruiters reach out every year to test the waters ... I was never vaguely interested. But when someone says Clemenger's looking for a CCO, of course you're going to take that call.”

CEO Dani wanted “a different perspective on the work,” so she didn’t opt for predictable hires.

“Almost every CCO or ECD in this country, and it really feels like that, has done a stint here, which is amazing, because we bred that. That's an incredible thing,” she says. 

“But I didn't want to just hire people that have been here … And the really good thing about Clems is, when you call, people tend to answer.”

The trio has been together for five months: Dani returned to Australia after two decades in London in the back half of 2022. Chief strategy and experience officer Simon was hired in September 2023 from whiteGREY, and Adrián joined as CCO in May, returning from the US to Australia for the role. 

Simon’s first job: A refreshed agency proposition. While agencies often procrastinate nailing their positioning - a classic case of the cobbler’s shoes being worn - “We went, 'No, this is the most important brief: who are we and how do we show up and talk about ourselves?'”

“When I first met Dani, she said to me, 'We need a proposition. Haven't had one for a long time,’” he says.

“Clemenger [has] always traded on creativity and the power of creativity. That's not negotiable, but clients now want to know, 'Well, what kind, and how does that fit into my broader ecosystem? I've got 10 agencies in the village, what's your thing that you either use to rally them all, or that's different to the rest?'”

Clems’ leadership landed on something ”that’s in the walls of the place, and in the DNA”: to make work Australians talk about. The agency is now referring to itself as Clems to match the market’s nickname for it, and has rolled out new brand assets.

“Everyone talks about distinctive brand assets, and they don't have their own as an agency. We have them, and we are very proud of them. And so now we leverage them everywhere, on all of our work,” Simon adds.

“Now, it has to be true, it has to take the company somewhere, and take our clients somewhere that they want to go as well.”

The finalised proposition holds the agency accountable for diversity, too. As Simon says, “If you want to make work Australians talk about, you better be representative of who Australians are inside the building.” Dani notes that a storied agency being run by “three immigrant kids” is “a point of differentiation for us, definitely.”

Big boss Troy Ruhanen, the incoming CEO of Omnicom Advertising Group, told LBB on a recent trip to Australia that agencies need to do a better job of marketing themselves. He wants his agencies to go on the offensive with clients and have a point of view. 

When Clems showed Troy its updated positioning, the leaders knew his “bullshit detector” would be finely tuned. “He's either gonna call it out or not,” Simon recalls. “And he goes, 'Cool. That's a point of view'.”

That point of view will start to show up in the work, Adrián promises, starting with the Myer Christmas campaign, which launched this week and stars a mischievous creature called Humbug. It will be the agency’s final piece of work for the brand, which LBB revealed is up for pitch. 

There’s another five or six pieces of work to launch between now and January, which will “give everyone a sense of my approach and my style.”

“I'm excited for this next little run. I think it'll say something about the direction we're taking the agency,” Adrián says.

Simon agrees, “hand on heart”, adding, “People like to talk about strategy. It's kind of boring.

“I think everyone wants to just see the work, and then you go, that's evidence of our approach, our methodology. 

“The more work there is that's evidence of that, the more you start working out, 'Oh, people are responding to this. There's a bit of heat on this approach.’”

When the industry thinks of Clems at its best, it thinks of Meet Graham. Telstra CMO Brent Smart has lamented the lack of recent ideas like it. BMF CCO Stephen de Wolf, who was a Clems CD at the time, told LBB Meet Graham proves big ideas aren’t hard to sell. 

Adrián confirms, “that’s the scale and grandeur of the type of work we want to do.”

“This is a job that comes with a pedigree to it, and there's also weight, and you want to live up to those expectations,” he says. “And I didn't come back to fuck spiders, as they say. Iconic work, that's all we're about, right?”

He’s worked across New York, London, and Sydney, but he grew up in Queensland’s Toowoomba, and was raised “very Mexican”. He says he’s never had the luxury of avoiding risk, because he’s always had to work hard to find his place in the world. That shapes his creative process. 

“I'm still an outsider. In Mexico, I have a slight accent. My Spanish and my slang is out of date, very different. In Australia, I used to eat different food at school. My parents looked different from everyone else. 

“I've pushed myself and lived in different places my whole life and constantly had to re establish myself ... if you're constantly turning up to new places as an outsider, you've got to learn to be a quick study of what's around you, and the benefit of that means that you get to understand people better than they understand themselves.”

Simon’s career, meanwhile, has taken him to Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and London. He says his international experience hasn’t necessarily altered his thinking, but has widened his cultural context. 

“We are always looking for a competitive edge in everything, and if that means there's a reference that he [Adrian] and I have from something else that nobody saw because we experienced an obscure moment living in California, we're going to use it, but then we're going to find the way to make it relevant for here.”

Adrián recently made his first two batches of creative hires, including the promotion of Ant Phillips to ECD. He says there’s more hires to come, including further bolstering of the creative leadership team.

“Anytime a new CCO comes in, there's some people who decide that they don't want to be part of that,” he says.

“To Dani's point, we are trying to change the way we show up and the types of work, so that requires different types of thinkers and different types of people.”

The next few months will set the tone for the next chapter of Clems, and reveal how the newly-defined proposition shows up in the work. 

“All this stuff that's coming now we're super jazzed about, because it's evidence of the point of view,” Simon adds. “It's been designed the right way, and it's got the right people around it.”