Last week, Colin Drummond came aboard Deutsch LA as partner and chief strategy officer. He now serves as chief strategist across all of Deutsch LA’s accounts, including Taco Bell, Volkswagen, Target, Dr Pepper and Snapple Group.
Drummond formerly was chief strategy officer at Ogilvy & Mather West, overseeing strategic planning on such accounts as Cisco, Beringer and Arco, and helping to build the agency’s West Coast-led planning capabilities. At Ogilvy he had also recently taken a lead role in the respositioning of the American Express brand.
Prior to Ogilvy West, Drummond served as VP, director of cultural and business insights at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. He was elevated to this role after a stint as VP, associate director, cognitive and culture radar, at Crispin. During his Crispin tenure, Drummond deployed a team of social strategists, account planners, journalists and business strategists to benefit clients including Burger King, MINI and Domino’s.
SHOOT caught up with Drummond to discuss his new role at Deutsch LA, the expanding scope of experts helping to garner brand and consumer insights, and lessons he learned along the way at Ogilvy and Crispin.
SHOOT: Define your role as chief strategy officer at Deutsch LA. What are the priorities on your agenda?
Drummond: I’m responsible for overall strategy at Deutsch for our clients’ brands and how it’s applied through digital and traditional means and so on. It’s an account planning function.
Coming over here is the best possible scenario for me. Chief strategy officer Jeffrey Blish has taken on his new role as executive planning director and has so much to offer. I am responsible for all the accounts, more closely involved in some than others. Jeffrey is staying involved on certain key clients and specific research projects and his insights can only help to make my transition here easier.
SHOOT: What lessons learned during your Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Ogilvy tenures strike you as particularly relevant to what you hope to accomplish at Deutsch?
Drummond: I’ve come to really respect agencies that have what Crispin has–absolute brilliance at being culturally with it. Crispin does an amazing job of making the brand feel current, modern, up to date, fun and relevant. They’re addressing cultural trends as they are happening. I have a huge respect for that.
I loved Ogilvy for being a company that knows how to build lasting, enduring brands over many decades–with clients they have had relationships with for many decades.
I’m now trying to do both at Deutsch–to understand what the ingredients are for a lasting brand, making sure we do the fundamentals to put that into place; and at the same time to make our brands contemporary, dynamic, interesting and intelligent.
We talk about building brands and sure that’s about communication–both digital and traditional, being engaging and conversational with people. But the other component, the real home run brand idea is one that inspires and supports behavior at the client organization. Everybody at the client needs to be clear on what they’re there to do–and that inspires product innovation and making the customer service and retail experience as positive as possible.
SHOOT: What attracted you to Deutsch?
Drummond: There’s something in the air at Deutsch, a great confidence that comes partly from a lot of recent success and really great work. They’re winning a lot of new business. They have a philosophy of investing in hiring the best people. I wanted to a part of all this and at the same time thought that I could contribute to what’s going on.
SHOOT: What work at Deutsch resonated with you as a strategist?
Drummond: What they’ve done with Taco Bell, a brand that had lost its mojo. It felt like a place where people weren’t going, where it wasn’t fun to go–and that’s all changed. Deutsch has creatively and strategically helped to bring the brand back to life. It feels energetic and fun, with great new product. Deutsch understands the brand and has made some great advertising for it.
The other work that stands out for me is what Deutsch has done for Volkswagen, dating back a few years with the “Darth Vader” Super Bowl commercial. That blew everybody’s mind back then and ever since they’ve followed up with great pieces of storytelling. This place knows how to tell great stories for brands.
SHOOT: You have held positions that at the time were considered atypical–roles that were new to agencies such as VP, associate director, cognitive and culture radar, at Crispin Porter + Bogusky followed by a tenure as the agency’s VP, director of cultural and business insights. How have roles and accompanying responsibilities in your agency field of expertise evolved over the years? And what voices have emerged–social scientists, business strategists, planners, journalists–as brands look to more meaningfully connect with prospective consumers?
Drummond: It all comes from a philosophy that you get better insight when you have people who see the world through different lenses. There’s been an overreliance for many years on some forms of traditional market research. This market research is still important. In my view, it’s foundational in terms of making a good presentation, and understanding a great opportunity in a product category. These are still great building blocks. But it’s not the only way to understand the world.
Other professional voices can shed light on a brand, a category and certain human behavior. Journalists are great storytellers and are naturally reporters of how human beings operate in the world. That’s truly valuable. Social scientists are trained to see certain structures as to how cultures work, which can be incredibly revealing about human behavior. Anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists all contribute to a world view that is super valuable. That’s what has spurred on these sorts of ad agency roles and hires in recent years.
Traditional planning and planners are still foundational and important. Bringing in other world views adds that much more.
SHOOT: What work are you particularly proud of during the course of your career thus far?
Drummond: I joined Crispin one month after the agency won the pitch for Burger King. I was either personally doing the planning work for Burger King or overseeing it for the whole time I was there. Our work won countless awards and Burger King’s business did really well. One of our first projects for Burger Kings was “The Subservient Chicken”; later the “Whopper Freakout” campaign won the Grand Effie and various other awards. The overall work was groundbreaking.
