Dani Richa wants to produce great work.
“It is very important for us to do great work that is famous, that works, that builds our clients’ brands, and if it wins awards that’s fantastic,” says the chairman and CEO of Impact BBDO Middle East, Africa and Pakistan.
BBDO Worldwide has an oft-quoted mantra that its success is down to “the work, the work, the work”, and Richa points to Clemenger BBDO Melbourne’s 2017 multiple-award-winning “Meet Graham” campaign for road safety as an example of what he aims for.
More to the point, people talk about that sort of advertising.
Dani Richa will this year be honoured as the Dubai Lynx Advertising Person of the Year. Last year he saw Impact BBDO named Agency of the Year, and BBDO Worldwide was crowned Network of the Year.
Richa himself started out 32 years ago as a creative, an unusual start to a career among the heads of big agencies in the region. He joined H&C Leo Burnett in Beirut in 1986 but quickly moved to Impact BBDO. Apart from a year at Publicis Graphics, he has been there ever since. In 2009 he gave up the creative side of his work to take the position he holds today.
About two years ago, Impact BBDO began moving away from primarily recruiting advertising graduates and those with experience at other agencies.
“I made it a point in our HR strategy that half the people we hire should be from outside the industry,” says Richa,. Although the agency has not reached that target yet, it is getting there. Richa says that today he might look to hire people with tech backgrounds, people from the entertainment industry or journalists.
Changes in technology mean that creativity is no longer confined to the creative industries, allowing Impact BBDO to focus on diversity in its recruitment.
BBDO Worldwide lists 10 values the network looks for in a potential hire: makes the work better; clients love them; ‘we’, not ‘me’ oriented; is a hand raiser, not a finger pointer; is a radiator, not a drain; presents well; possesses healthy paranoia; is a closer; bounces back; does the right thing.
To let staff flourish and make outstanding campaigns, the right clients mean as much as the right environment. They must want the same thing as their agency.
“You’ll often find us saying no to business and waiting for an opportunity in that same category where we can find a client who would want great work,” says Richa.
He won’t reject a client outright if they are reluctant to take risks immediately, but the agency looks for potential and appetite to do great work.
When BBDO does take on a new client, the next step is “creating partnerships with those clients, earning the trust of those partners and then slowly pushing the envelope”.
Work that is daring and different and stands out, though, must be based on strategy and data. “When it does achieve business results then you have the confidence to do more and to push further,” says Richa.
That’s what Richa has been doing for three decades with Impact BBDO: raising the ceiling.