Inside Clemenger Melbourne’s Comeback Plans and New Home

​Clemenger Melbourne is in a new, art-filled office space above Mecca Bourke Street, just a few hundred metres from where it was founded in 1946. Chief creative officer and Clems Melbourne alum Stephen de Wolf is five weeks into the job. New additions like chief experience officer Suzanne Croxford and chief media officer Stuart Bailey are making an impact. The business has had seven months to operationalise its merger with CHEP and Traffik. And it’s ready for the challenge, and “privilege”, of making the once-iconic agency famous again.

Melbourne managing director, Thomas Penn, acknowledges the Clemenger brand carries weight, history, and legacy in the city he moved to six years ago from the UK. He arrived in 2019, a couple of years after Clemenger Melbourne was crowned Cannes’ Global Agency of the Year and swept the globe with a run of work known by campaign name alone: ‘Meet Graham’, ‘Hungerithm’, ‘Until We Belong’, ‘Naughty and Nice Baubles’. A year after his Melbourne arrival, in 2020, Thomas saw Clems honoured with multiple Agency of the Decade accolades.

“There is something about this agency brand that means something really special to this city,” he tells LBB in the ad agency’s new office.

“We're all so mindful of the fact that we are standing on the shoulders of giants and the incredible legacy that this agency has had in the past.”

At the start of the year, CEO Lee Leggett took the reins of Clemenger 2.0, merged with CHEP and Traffik to restore glory and combat a culture of transactional creativity, as BBDO global CEO Nancy Reyes told LBB at the time.

“We can take so much of the brilliance that made Clemenger famous the first time around and start to imbue that with some of the really modern, progressive, full service capabilities that came from the likes of CHEP and Traffik,” Thomas says, “to really take the Clemenger name on to the next iteration of the type of work that we want the agency to be famous for. I just think that's a real privilege, honestly, and something that I don't think any of us take for granted.”

The local client list includes Mazda, Asahi, Officeworks, Kmart (the first post-merger pitch it won), Simplot, 7-Eleven, and Bupa. Thomas says, “There is no other list of clients at any agency in the country I would rather be partnering with. Honestly, sometimes I pinch myself.”

In Mazda, it now has the longest-running agency-client partnership in the country: 48 years. "The IP that we have built up in this business around some of our clients is pretty extraordinary," Thomas says. "If you look at the Mazda team, we've got people here in our studio department, in our production department, in our creative department, who have worked on Mazda for close to 20 years.”

CEO Lee explains clients ask Clemenger, “Can you help us navigate this moment of transformation?”

Just as clients are navigating transformation, so too is Clemenger. It will be shaped by Nick Garrett’s vision for Omnicom Oceania. Nick, who used to run both Clemenger and stablemate Colenso, told LBB last month, “if you can harness the best of what BBDO has done historically, and the best of what made CHEP really interesting and dynamic, that's really extraordinary.” Stephen de Wolf’s return gives Clemenger “a real opportunity … to become the agency they've been promising for about a year now,” he added.

​Stephen wants to push the entire market to be better. “I'd rather we were all pushing boundaries, because we haven't done that for some time,” he said on a panel earlier this month. “All ships rise if we're doing great things. That is my ambition: push the industry's boundaries.”

Coming back to the agency he helped make famous feels like home, he says, but a home “with more under the roof.”

“Experience, data, design, media, tech, production, and, crucially, big ideas, are a powerful mix that can truly prove out creativity as a lever to grow clients’ business.”

Thomas notes clients’ reaction to Stephen becoming the agency’s creative leader. The response was universal excitement, he says, because they want “really good, solid, strategic partnership” that leads to category-breaking, growth-driving, “industry-defining” work.

“Clients are looking to us to help guide them through what is, in lots of cases for their industries, quite turbulent times,” Thomas continues.

“They're always going to come to Clemenger for really, really good industry-defining creative work, but they're coming to us for the type of work that clients were coming to CHEP for, historically, which is integrated, smart, through-the-line strategically-led creative work.”

One of the CCO’s biggest opportunities is partnering with chief media officer Stu Bailey to “bring media upstream”, and show clients how housing media and creative under one roof leads to a multiplier effect.

As Thomas says, “Clients aren't looking at their business challenges in silos. They're not thinking about how the brand comes to life through a digital experience, through a physical experience, and they don't want a partner who looks at things through silos, either.

“The type of capability that we have here means that clients feel comfortable building and developing and nurturing those long-standing relationships, because they know that they can talk to us about multiple things, and we can be there. What they're struggling with and is keeping them up at night tonight could be very different to what is keeping them up three months from now.”

To further strengthen those capabilities, the agency hired Suzanne Croxford as chief experience officer in June (she joined alongside executive strategy director Nicole Armstrong from AKQA). Lee says Suzanne is tasked with thinking about the customer ecosystem, connected commerce, and ensuring an idea matches the way people shop. The landscape has changed significantly, driven by behemoths like Amazon, Temu, and TikTok Shop, and “AI has played a pivotal role.”

“It's not enough anymore for anyone to be thinking about a creative campaign as a creative campaign, without thinking about how it shows up,” Suzanne says.
“What are the right channels? What's the role of channel? How does that actually look through-the-line to get the most value out of that investment? And so that's really my focus.”

Her capabilities, combined with those of the likes of chief technology officer Mark Gretton and chief data officer James Greaney, “is pretty unrivaled in this market,” Thomas adds, “which means that we can always help, whatever the ask or the business challenge.”

The team wants Clemenger Melbourne to retain its own culture and personality. Thomas, for instance, “could never see myself being in Sydney. There is something about Melbourne that I have just completely fallen head over heels in love with.”

The new office at 280 Little Collins Street is affectionately known as ‘the pink house’. It’s the same building in which Mecca has just opened the world’s largest free-standing beauty store.

“There is something quite symbolic about the fact that we've moved back into a building that is, as the crow flies, about 200 metres away from the building that Clemenger was founded in in 1946,” Thomas notes.

The Omnicom businesses are housed together; Clemenger’s floor is characterised by tones of pale pinks and earthy terracottas. Heide Museum of Modern Art has loaned Clemenger a range of works from its collection, which adorn the walls and a terrace overlooking bustling Bourke Street.

“Our goal is to make our new home as creatively inspiring as possible, and we’re lucky to be surrounded by some of the most incredible pieces of modern Australian art,” Thomas says.

Being in the heart of the CBD, surrounded by art, at the beginning of a new chapter has revitalised his love for the city Clemenger is ready to make its own again.

“I've started taking my digital camera on my commute with me, and I'm taking photos to and from my walk to the train station, because being back in the city, I've re-fallen in love with this place, with the architecture, with the restaurant scene, with the cultural scene. It is a special place.”