Our agency positioning came about after a chat with Paul Phillips at the AAR. His challenge to us was that media agencies were all a similar shade of vanilla. In the sea of “data-driven, people first independent agencies”, he sagely advised us to be distinctive and show a little bit of attitude. Well, who isn’t data-driven and people first? Independent? Well, whilst it’s lovely to see nascent agencies emerge, we’ve been privately-owned and independent for 45 years.
We’re underdog people
Why is backing the underdog baked into the JAA way of thinking and doing? It’s a truth within our culture that has existed from when the founders started the business in 1978 to our award winning work in the last 12 months.
We’re down in trenches with our clients with our sleeves rolled up – fighting the good fight. Legends from our founders have been handed down to the current business. One of which was when, the then directors amended the regional-flighting of a TV campaign based on overnight copy sales for a partwork publisher. They then jumped down to the client’s despatch depot to help lift piles of magazine from one van to another to make sure they could maximise the sales.
More recently, when the Turkey-Syria earthquake left a devastating impact, the JAA team were able to react rapidly and ensure media was live in all media channels across digital, AV and print within 24 hours. This is not without some personal cost to the agency. However, the studied serenity of the agency is similar to an open-plan kitchen in a top restaurant. Everyone is intensely focused on the outcome. It is hard not to feel immensely proud of the agency team in these moments.
You are not the size of your budget. You are the scale of your ambition
We have also always backed our clients when they have been faced with budgetary or time constraints. One of our other founding myths was when we launched ‘Launderette’ Levi’s campaign with BBH by being the first advertiser in the UK to buy Channel 4 solus with a cherry-picked programming strategy. This world famous campaign not only usurped the market leader, it created culture which ripples nearly four decades later.
In more recent times, you may have heard that we created a braille newspaper cover wrap with Metro which won Campaign Media Awards Total Communications Campaign last year. This also delivered disproportionate outcomes relative to the modest spend and also created cultural ripples.
The more well-read planners amongst you will probably have also noticed that our underdog positioning also doffs our caps to Adam Morgan’s marketing classic ‘Eating the Big Fish’. Well…guilty as charged! However, we have distilled some of this thinking in our typical JAA no-nonsense way.
The agency for the underdog is not just an agency mission set. It is a mind-set.
