Industry leadership, PR recognised at AdFocus Awards
FCB Africa CEO Brett Morris was named Industry Leader of the Year at the recent Financial Mail AdFocus Awards.
When Morris took over as CEO of FCB in 2014, many raised concerns, wondering what the executive creative director knew about managing a business. However, in just two years he has allayed those concerns, implementing changes to the agency’s structure and business model, and creating a new image for FCB. It is fitting, then, that he has been named this year’s Industry Leader of the Year.
Morris has helped FCB shed the staid image it garnered over the years. Under his guidance it has become better at projecting how creative it is, how effectively it communicates and, ultimately, just how good an agency it is.
In the past year, Morris introduced two major changes: last November the agency changed its name from FCB SA to FCB Africa, entrenching its position as the heart of the FCB Group’s African operations; shortly after, it signed an empowerment deal with the Maharishi Institute empowerment group, boosting its black ownership to 51% and female ownership to 31%. Part of the deal with Maharishi involves identifying and training young women to work in the industry.
“If you don’t have empowerment in your DNA, you won’t survive,” says Morris.
As a group, FCB did particularly well at this year’s AdFocus Awards: apart from Morris’s award, its digital agency Hellocomputer was named Digital Agency of the Year and FCB Johannesburg won Large Agency of the Year.
Rob van Rooyen, executive strategy manager of House of Brave, this year’s sponsor of the Industry Leader Award, says: “[Morris] has done a superb job in terms of turning FCB around. It’s been a while since we’ve had a leader from a creative background winning this award and it just shows how well an agency can do when it is being creatively led.”
For the first time in the history of AdFocus, PR has its own category, replacing Branding & Design as a standalone category. PR previously completed with other disciplines in the Specialist category. However, with the number of entrants growing yearly, it was decided to recognise PR as a category in its own right – and Ogilvy PR Johannesburg has claimed the inaugural award.
Ogilvy PR has become SA’s largest PR agency, with operations based in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. It has experienced growth of just over three percent growth in seven years and is second only to London in Ogilvy’s Europe, Middle East and Africa region when it comes to billings.
The Johannesburg office has had an exciting year: it was appointed to handle public relations for the ANC, won new work from Unilever, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, and received local and international awards. The AdFocus jury was particularly impressed by Ogilvy PR Johannesburg’s involvement in government task teams, judging of awards and publication of industry articles.
The big take-out: Brett Morris is the winner of Financial Mail’s AdFocus Industry Leader of the Year award; Ogilvy PR Johannesburg has been named PR Agency of the Year.