While 2020 has had its own trials and tribulations, it has also been a year to showcase those agencies in adland who have been thriving amid the disruption.
One of those is DDB Group’s digital agency Tribal.
The agency has gone from strength to strength this year under the helm of Davy Rennie, winning Small Agency of the Year (Network) award at the AdNews Agency of the Year Awards and adding big brands Kmart and Coles to its already strong client roster.
“June, July, August will be record months for us, with August being our biggest month we’ve ever had,” Tribal managing director Davy Rennie told AdNews.
“We have been open for 16 years. It’s really good to see that the fruits of everyone’s labour has paid off.”
Rennie jumped over from sister agency Interbrand, DDB Group’s branding agency, last year and was tasked with rebuilding the agency from the ground up.
One of his first ports of call was to bring creativity back to the heart of everything Tribal did. After all, it is part of one of the world’s creative powerhouses.
“We had slipped into a business that was a production house,” he says.
“Whilst that was still profitable for us as a business, we really wanted to make sure that creativity was at the core.
“So, we made some hires with what we could at the start of last year - some young creatives who really wanted to do some amazing work.”
The creative team has since grown from a team of two when Rennie started, to between 10 and 12 creatives. Altogether in Sydney, the agency has 24 staff and a growing office in Melbourne.
“We’ve moved our production team from being a specialist production team into a more hybrid team,” he says.
“So our account services and production capabilities have become a much more blended capability for us. That makes sense in the fact that we want our production teams to be able to talk to clients and manage jobs, as well as keep things on track.”
While small in size, Tribal is working with some of the biggest brands in Australia helping to transform their digital assets into some of the best digital experiences in the country.
From daily work on McDonald’s social and new projects with Coles and Kmart, to helping launch Volkswagen’s ecommerce store in just 11 days, the team has been busier than ever.
With the pressure on brands to move online amid COVID-19, Rennie says it has meant many projects have been accelerated for the team but their successful execution is testament to the agency’s strong foundations.
“The VW store is something that’s been heralded at a DDB Group level globally as one of the most creative pieces of work that has happened during COVID,” he says.
“The same on the Volkswagen side, it’s something that we’ve spent a lot of time road showing around the global offices and sharing our knowledge.”
For Rennie, producing great work is only one piece of the Tribal puzzle though.
Already a passionate advocate for mental health, Rennie has been highly focused on maintaining a healthy and positive culture within the agency.
For any agency leader during the pandemic, this is no easy feat.
“We kept everyone updated on conversations that we were having, especially around where we were going as a business, but also had really transparent conversations around where our heads were at,” he says.
“I would spend time when we were at home just making sure I called individual team members for a chat every other day, just to make sure that their heads would be in a good space.
“And if they weren’t, just making sure that we had a conversation and we talked about where they were at. We talked about how we could help.”
For many in what is a very social and collaborative industry, the pandemic has been tough but Rennie says there have been two key things he has instilled within the agency which he believes has held it together during this period.
“We live and die by talented and nice,” he says.
“I think the talented part won us a lot of work and kept us going through COVID, but the nice part really kept the culture together.”
As the team returns to the office with DDB Group’s flexible working arrangements, Rennie is planning for the next phase for Tribal with the new year fast-approaching.
“So 2020 was all about creativity,” he says.
“2021 is about creative technology. We’ll be looking at our technical offering and really strengthening that in different ways.”
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