Proof that two heads are sometimes better than one

“It was our personal f***-you to Fifa” – this from King James Group creative director, Alistair King. The question that garnered that response related to airline kulula.com’s recent troubles with the soccer governing body. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself.

In mid-March 2010, King James’s client kulula.com ran foul of Fifa’s brand police with its “Unofficial National Carrier of the ‘You-know-What’” advert, which used soccer motifs in its design.

The ad fell in step with the successful, irreverent and tongue-in-cheek image that King James had cultivated for the low-cost airline.

“We don’t have an issue with Fifa protecting their sponsors and partners, that’s their right and obligation.

“But to tell us we can’t use the words ‘South Africa’ and we can’t use our own flag. It’s our flag!” added group managing director, James Barty.

Predictably, Fifa’s draconian shenanigans only gave the ad more traction, and the combined outrage of the King James team followed it up with the similarly styled F-bomb.

That level of patriotism and fervent loyalty to its clients is not the only thing that marks King James as one of South Africa’s top ad agencies. The mountain of awards lining its shelves is another.

Leadership spoke with the duo to find out how the kingdom was founded and what separates King James from other ad agencies.

Whenever two very talented people have a working relationship, there is potential for conflict, but you two seem to get along very well?

Alistair: I think what probably has made our life quite tidy here is that there’s no power struggle over our roles in the business. I’m on the creative side and James is on the business side, and I think many ad agencies come undone when there’s a power struggle.

Are we incredibly creatively driven, or are we business driven?

Who is the predominant player in the company? I think that we have managed to restrain our egos; kept our roles clearly defined.

Do you think that is a requirement? A big ego?

Alistair: No, no, I don’t think a big ego. I think an ego. I think you have to have a strong sense of self.

James: And it’s the nature of any successful business, that to be successful, you have to put your company into an uncomfortable situation.

You have to push ideas at your clients, where many businesses would say, “Hey, let’s not rock the boat, let’s rather give them what we know they want.” Whereas any successful business always pushes, or tries to be braver than it really wants to be.

I think that’s where the power struggles can often happen. We don’t fight about that. We don’t fight about our roles or what our business is doing. We just fight about good or bad advertising – and that’s the way it should be.

I don’t think there’s any dominant player in this business and we don’t even have a CEO, by choice, because neither of us wants to be put above the other.

I notice that the two of you tend to finish each other’s sentences?

James: (laughs) There is a like-mindedness. Alistair’s ex-wife used to joke that I knew him better than she did!

But the fact is that you do spend an enormous amount of time at work in each other’s company, so you do get to understand how the other’s mind works.

King James is 12 years old. Were you working together at some point before that?

James: We were both directors at Ogilvy and that’s where we had worked together for a number of years, obviously as colleagues on the Board, and we had a meeting of the minds.

Alistair was going to leave, and I was flirting with the idea.

Why did you think you could start your own thing and compete on the same level as the Ogilvy’s and Saatchi & Saatchi’s?

Alistair: If I even go back a little bit further: I always had it in mind that I would be a creative head by 30. That was my target at university.

Did it happen that way?

Alistair: No, at 25. When we started, I was 30 and James was…

James: …32

Alistair: ...32 when we started King James, but why it happened prematurely is that we were on the Board, starting to become the leadership of a big multinational.

And I was at a point in my career where I was winning many awards for Car magazine and Volkswagen and my reputation, I felt, was in a good place. That matched with the fact that I suddenly didn’t want to work in a big bureaucratic company anymore.

James and I had worked together and I liked him as a person. We never clashed, we simply somehow got the job done and that was very important for me in the choice of a partner.

I said to James, “I’m starting an agency. You have the weekend to think about it.”

Also, I was on the verge of getting married and I knew that a bunch of things could happen: I’d be getting my shares in Ogilvy, they’d be worth something and I would have upgraded my life, new Audi, new house. Suddenly I would’ve been trapped in a company because I couldn’t leave it and that motivated me to say: (a) I’m not happy in a big company; and (b) if I stay any longer, I’m never going to fulfil this thing I want to do.

So James was the first and only person I spoke to. I said, “I want to go. I think we can do better than most of the agencies in town.” And that was probably pure naivety, and we weren’t ambitious. We didn’t head out to change the face of advertising.

Is that how you remember it?

James: Yes, that was it. It was quite simple.

I had to have been slightly unsettled when Alistair and I spoke because to have made a decision on that kind of impromptu basis? I had a child. I was earning and my wife worked for Ogilvy as well. There were complications.

I was also more conservative, I wanted to get a client first. I wanted to secure a client before we left and we pretty much were able to almost do that because we had the contacts. I had worked in the liquor industry before and so we leveraged those contacts to secure our first client.

But ultimately, the meeting of the minds was clear, that we both wanted to do more than what we were doing and we both felt that we could achieve that.

Alistair: And we didn’t say we wanted to be massive, to be a multinational conglomerate. We had ambitions; but realistic, modest ambitions and we’ve always taken steps in that way.

James: It does confuse people. They expect you to say, “We want to become a global group and take over the world”, but in fact, we just always wanted to be a good company and not a huge company.

Alistair: And size is irrelevant. People frown because they think we’re not ambitious enough.

I think too many people put too much pressure on size as a reflection of success. Actually, we could stop our agency growing right now and live a fantastic life for the next 15 years and do the kind of advertising you want to do – and that would be a life well spent.

So it was an easy decision, but the follow-through could not have been, though?

James: It wasn’t, actually. It was highly stressful. We were resigning, we were in breach of fiduciary responsibilities the minute we had our conversation.

We were absolutely honourable in the whole thing because the minute we came to a point where we felt we were in a compromised position, we had to resign. It was before we would’ve liked to, to be honest, and we had to make that call.

I actually resigned on [Alistair’s] behalf, he typed his resignation letter from Mauritius [while on honeymoon].

I assume that did not go down well?

James: It didn’t go down well at all, but they handled it well, I think. I think they had respect for the two of us and also, they understood the kind of people we were and we honoured a restraint of trade for two years. We didn’t take any business from them or any people.

They made us work out all the theory, which is hard when you’re starting a business. You want to get going.

So how much of a struggle was it to get started?

Alistair: Do you know where we struggled? We thought that our reputation, my reputation and James’s reputation in business, would stand for something. It stood for jack**** (laughs). We lost 10 straight pitches.

I would put up these award-winning Volkswagen and Audi ads, show off these multiple global awards. Award after award and we’d still lose the business to some agency that has been going for four years.

Whatever reputation you thought you had, meant nothing. [Clients] wanted to know how much success you’ve had as an agency.

James: There were occasions in our first year or two when we sat down and looked at each other and asked, “Is there something wrong with us?”

Alistair: Is the chemistry wrong? Are we looking desperate? Something is not working here because we’re losing to...

James: ...mediocre opposition and...

Alistair: ...crap agencies.

So what was the turning point? Was it one particular account that changed it for you?

Alistair: When we won the Cape Argus account – which we still have – that was good. Then we won Bell’s [Whisky], which was a really nice win for us, so we hired four members of staff and that’s how we built the business.

But I think that it wasn’t until we got 20Twenty [online bank formed by the old Saambou Bank] that things turned.

James: Yes. We named them, we built the bank, we launched them.

Alistair: I think that account put us on the map.

For the first time, people said, “Hey, there’s an agency that can build a brand”, and that was the first time when people even started mentioning King James as a possibility – and particularly outside Cape Town.

James: I think that was our first sort of national project.

But I always believed, it takes a thousand days to make a business, so we never ever rested for one second.

Until 20Twenty came through, it was tough. We went into curatorship for a while, our people’s bank accounts were frozen. We had to give staff loans through the month. There were things like that which caught us off guard.

So I think a business needs to be robust enough to sustain a loss – that was the other part of becoming a proper business.

Alistair: I think there’s a sense of having to tough it out, but we never felt like it was a complete and utter slog. There were always milestones that kept us upbeat.

Was there a sense of freedom in knowing you were doing it for yourself?

Alistair: Totally.

James: Freedom was very much part of it. That’s what I think we both loved most – one of the key motivators was the freedom to be able to run your own show.

Alistair: I also think we worked hard at not allowing our spirit to flag.

I think that in the advertising industry, there are many of what I believe are show ponies – the agencies that make ads to win awards, and there’s much hype around them. But when you look at the company itself, they have maybe four nice ads, but they don’t have any great case studies, real businesses that they built, and there is no real substance for the business.

So once we did 20Twenty, we showed that we could build a brand from scratch and make it successful.

So our whole focus is on being solid as a business and doing real brand-building advertising, rather than getting upset when we’re not in the media and not winning awards.

Having said that, you have won many awards.

James: Yes, we’ve always believed in the power of awards and we always believed that we should do award-winning work. The difference is that we’ve never felt that that should be the purpose of the pursuit.

You have an excellent team here. What would happen if Tom, Dick or Harry were to say, “James, Alistair, we’re leaving to start our own agency.”?

Alistair: That’s just happened! Our first member of staff ever, who’s been with us for 12 years, has just resigned now to go and start his own thing. So we encourage him (laughs).

James: We did the same. We got to a point in our careers where we felt strongly enough to go and start our own business. And if we’d given our staff that kind of confidence and that kind of reputation, then good for them.

But I do remember at Ogilvy, there was a man who was leaving and I bumped into him in the toilet. I said to him, “I’m very sorry you’re going”, and I said something about how we already missed him.

He looked at me and said, “Do you know how much I’ll be missed?”

And I asked, “How much?”

He said, “If you take a bucket of water and you put your fist in it and you take your fist out, that hole that it leaves behind, that’s how much I’ll be missed.”

And the truth is, when we left Ogilvy, no one missed us.

Alistair: We might have been winning all these awards, but someone stepped into my shoes and someone stepped into [that person’s] shoes when he left.

The truth is, we’re all dispensable. Our mere presence probably holds people here back. If we remove ourselves from this agency tomorrow, someone will rise to the occasion.

Ultimately, there may be some who will say, “I’m hitting my head against the glass ceiling, I want to try my own thing.” I don’t think that that’s altogether a bad thing. It just seemed like it at the time for us.

So after 12 years, is the aim still the same – simply to do good work?

James: It’s about creating opportunities against which we can leverage our skills set. So that’s what we’ve done and we’ve partnered where we need a partner, or we’ve acquired where we need to acquire, and we’ve simply followed what we believe to be true.

In some sense, that is leadership in our industry. We believe that it is very much at the forefront of it.

Some are following, some are leading, but basically, that’s the direction we believe communication is going. Whether you own record labels, or you own content, whether you own television programmes, whether you own ad agencies or whatever – those are all blurring, and ultimately, it’s how you apply your creativity to environments which is going to make a winning company. That’s what we believe in, we’ve had hardships.

Alistair: We’re not doing it for a purpose.

Sometimes we just do it because we think it will be a hell of a lot of fun and as creative people, we want to have something to show.

That need to have substance, that’s what we want. We want to have much fun and we want to do what makes us happy, exploring different directions. And as a business, none of it distracts from our bigger goal.

But yes, having a full life feeds the business. ▲

Zaid Kriel