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Holding companies are having an identity crisis. Between mergers and acquisitions, whistleblowers and generative AI, clients are largely overwhelmed and confidence is shaken.
In the midst of scale and promises of AI-enabled tech efficiencies, BBDO is repositioning itself to court clients more proactively. The Omnicom-backed creative agency this month revamped what traditional account leadership looks like, hiring Daale Carter, formerly president of Energy BBDO, into the newly created global chief client experience officer role at BBDO.
“There are a lot of capability stories out there. There aren’t a lot of stories or pictures about the client’s experience,” Carter told Digiday. “We’re really trying to look at how we use client experiences as a true differentiator that we showcase.”
As the hold co model changes, and competition gets stiffer, clients are reassessing how they want to work with agency partners. It’s not that the client experience has been forgotten, Carter said, but in the push to scale, clients are getting lost in the shuffle.
Digiday caught up with Carter about her new role, AI expectations and post-merger plans.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
What’s the purpose of your role – the newly created role of global chief experience officer?I’m sure there’s no surprise, there has been a lot of change and transition across the ad world — and more specifically, within Omnicom. Part of that change comes a lot of scale, a lot of access to really great tools and technology. But for BBDO specifically — and actually, Omnicom has introduced this role at the holding company level as well — was just a realization that, as you’re scaling, there’s sometimes such a strong focus on that scale and the tools and tech that the client and their experience maybe gets lost in the narrative.
What exactly does that look like in practice?One of the things that we did as an example is account management is seen as the gateway or the owner of the client relationship when actually it’s the responsibility of every single person that touches client business. We also got rid of the term account management, and shifted it to business leadership, and I think the crux of what was missing lies there, because clients want to be led. Clients don’t want to reach out to their agencies and have agencies just be responsive. They want agencies to truly lead them.
The other thing that has been a real shift for BBDO is a real relentless focus on clients’ business challenges. Because when you’re a creative agency, sometimes the expectation is superficial. It doesn’t matter how you get there, you get a brief. If you land on a really amazing, creative exercise, all the work is done. But if you think about the scale of issues that clients are facing today, they can’t all just be solved in a really beautiful creative campaign. They’ve got real numerical, socioeconomic pressure.
How does the agency shift from “traditional agency” to “enterprise partner” (especially with AI) change BBDO’s client pitch?Relationships become ever more critical because in our conversations, clients are looking for us to guide them. They’ve got AI overload. They’ve got tech overload, and they’re looking for guidance from a real human being that says, “This makes sense for my business, and this is how we should utilize it or we shouldn’t.” I had a client who had come to us and essentially had said, “I’ve written scripts. I’ve put some stuff into AI and it’s come out with scripts.” And then they admitted that the scripts were devoid of any level of humanity or relativity and what they really were saying was, “I want you to show me how you’re using AI to be forward-facing or to be future fit as you think about the creative process.” They didn’t necessarily want to write their own scripts using AI. They were looking to see us guide them in terms of how they should be thinking about AI.
Post-IPG Omnicom merger, what’s been the sentiment from clients?They just wanted to be kept abreast of what the changes are and how we’re building. That’s what they’ve cared the most about, and that’s what we have been committed to. We use the term the Year of Distraction. It’s been a distraction for the industry, for the agency, for our clients, and the way that we’ve been able to manage that is not to be distracted in how we work with our clients and just to focus. That being said, the media tells me that there are lots of clients who have concerns. That’s just not our real experience on the ground. In general, if you have strong relationships with your clients, to the point why relationships are so important, it’s not impacted by that.
Despite all of this, you cannot get lost because we are committed to the plan experience at the core.
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