KEY POINTS:
Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide chief executive Kevin Roberts has a polarising effect on people, but as ad folk will tell you, some of the best advertising does the same thing.
The lad who grew up in Lancaster in the north of England worked in marketing at designer Mary Quant in the late 1960s, then in a pivotal move that was to underpin his career, he went to the consumerables giant Procter & Gamble.
He worked with Pepsi from 1982 to 1989 and when running Pepsi Canada famously led a seminar by machine gunning a Coca-Cola vending machine. From 1989 to 1996, he was chief operating officer at Lion Nathan before becoming chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide, the world's best known ad agency.
That last eye-wateringly big career step in 1997 was from No 2 at the New Zealand brewery to No 1, leading Saatchi into a new global structure.
KR - as he is known - has a high profile for his books about branding. Love Marks, released in 2004, is about emotional attachments to brands while Sisomo, released in 2005, says the future of advertising is in using a widening array of screens.
But beyond these high-profile ventures - which are promoted like bibles within the Saatchi empire - KR continues to sing the glories of New Zealand overseas.
Saatchi's New Zealand offices in Auckland and Wellington are comparatively small but Roberts maintains their status on his world stage.
New Zealand and our "pragmatic and practical" approach to advertising are very much a part of the KR brand.
He even hires a New Zealand-owned public relations company - Sweeney Vesty - to promote the worldwide company and the man who leads it.
He has been generous in his promotion of brand New Zealand with a high-octane style that is a far cry from New Zealanders' own self image.
"You have to say that Kevin Roberts is a very, very good salesman and he has done a good job promoting the idea of creativity and 'The Idea' in advertising," said Roger MacDonnell, the long time head of Saatchi's biggest rival in this country, Colenso BBDO.
"He is polarising - people either like him or they don't - which is what you can say about some of the best advertising.
"It is also possible to see him as a bit of a wanker," said MacDonnell - one of three ad men approached by the Business Herald who praised his achievements but who were dismissive of the man.
Saatchi's New Zealand chief executive Andrew Stone is not one of those critics and is a long-time KR admirer. As a high-flying account director looking after Lion Nathan for Saatchi & Saatchi, he worked closely with Roberts and impressed him.
In 1997 - and on the recommendation of Peter Cullinane, the Saatchi New Zealand chairman who held sway with head office - Roberts was appointed worldwide chief executive with a remit to lead the group through a period of upheaval.
Stone has a lifelong friendship and clearly admires Roberts.
But even he admits: "People either love Kevin or they don't."
Roberts leads the world's best known advertising brands and sits on the board of directors for Publicis Group, the fourth biggest communication group in the world.
While he spends part of his time at Saatchi's head office and at the headquarters of Saatchi's parent company Publicis, he still calls New Zealand home.
"Kiwis are pragmatic and practical and used to an environment where ideas predominate - we as a country have had to live by ideas. What is the New Zealand edge? It's being practical."
New Zealand advertising had benefited by being limited to small budgets.
They did not have $42 million superstar endorsements and advertising people had to have a total understanding of clients and their businesses, he says.
Saatchi & Saatchi is now a lot smaller than it was 10 years ago. But he insists that even in the bad times the New Zealand operation has always made a profit.
In contrast to many interviews where Roberts is focused on new catchphrases and branding statements, he is open about the fundamentals for the agency making a buck.
Roberts says its success is partly because of Saatchi & Saatchi's global accounts for Procter & Gamble that includes Tampax, Wella and Duracell as well as Toyota and Starbucks.
"If you lose money with those accounts, then you're a f****wit, he says.
Apart from an office and a few fittings there are very few costs, which explains why the industry pays its staff remarkably well.
The crunch of the Roberts philosophy is to promote The Idea. And the challenge, he says, is to be compensated properly for the value of The Idea.
And he has been very successful.
But there has been a revolution in the way that advertising agencies agencies are paid.
Roberts says that Saatchi was one of the last champions for the commission system that held sway through to the turn of the century. Agencies earned a share of the payment for media time or space each time an advertisement was run.
"The commission idea was stupid," Roberts says.
The other approach has been for advertising agencies to charge clients direct fees for ideas and developing advertising
"The fee route is stupid. We are not accountants," Roberts says.
He says that the system adopted by Saatchi with its biggest client Procter & Gamble should be the template.
"We are rewarded with a commission on sales - the more they sell the more you make, the less they sell the less you make."
Advertising he says, is about moving product. Roberts says that around one third of its income from Toyota is from a similar scheme, but he acknowledges that the partnership on revenue does not always work out.
"Its fine for Procter & Gamble that grew 7 per cent last year. But what about companies that are not growing?"
The concern for some agencies is that you cannot control all aspects of the product - such as pricing or quality.
Roberts is also critical of another trend in the advertising world that limits the potential for performance-based payments. In Adland the biggest bogeyman is the procurement manager.
Ad agencies want to be close to top management and need to be if they are going to create partnerships and secure new and innovative deals.
But Roberts says - and other agencies agree - that advertisers are increasingly completing discussions on campaigns and then sending them to the procurement department to negotiate price with fixed contracts
"It is a growing and a very dangerous trend - with advertisers treated as suppliers and not as creative partners."
Roberts has no doubts about his own role.
"I've been there 11 years and it has grown faster than the market each year. I stand for purpose and dream of the company Love Marks. My job is to perpetuate the enterprise and not screw up what went before me."
Certainly there was a time from around 1995 to 2003 when the local offices of Saatchi were looking decidedly lost. It was losing accounts and key staff, with Wellington, which was once one of the hottest adverting shops in the world, looking glum.
He says he took the agency's bad days very personally. He has rebuilt it - some argue with a lot of investment in the New Zealand agency. And that rebuilding has been down to Stone - aka Rocky - the Saatchi & Saatchi account executive he worked with when he was at Lion Nathan and who was heading his own agency, Generator, before being brought back into the Saatchi fold in 2004.
"Rocky was was my choice and I wanted to wait.
"He bought in [executive creative director] Mike O'Sullivan and that was the dream team coming on.
"You put them in with Auckland managing director Dean Taylor and these people - it's been fabulous," he said.
"We run the company on emotion, not facts. We aren't in the business of curing aids or curing cancer - we run on the idea we are a family, that we have fun and we want to make loads of money for everyone."
KEVIN ROBERTS
Chief executive, Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide
Age: 59
Married to Rowena with four adult children Nikki, Ben, Rebecca and Dan
Career:
1969-72 - Mary Quant Cosmetics, brand manager, United Kingdom
1972-75 - Gillette, international new products manager, Europe
1975-82 - Procter & Gamble, group marketing manager,
export and special operations, Middle East/Africa
1982-86 - Pepsi Cola, regional vice-president, Middle East
1987-89 - Pepsi Cola, president and chief executive officer, Canada
1989-96 - Lion Nathan, director and chief operating officer
1997 - Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide chief executive officer
