Saatchi & Saatchi – Now M&C Saatchi
The Advertising agency of the week is Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the most important agencies in the advertising industry. Saatchi & Saatchi was founded in London in 1970, by brothers Maurice and Charles Saatchi. The company is now well established all over the world with 140 offices in 76 countries and over 6,500 employees.
One of the first ads which attracted media and public attention on the small agency was “Pregnant man” ad. Jeremy Sinclair, a young copy writer who had been recently hired, created the Pregnant Man ad for the Health Education Council to promote the use of contraceptives. The copy says “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?”. The controversial ad helped the young agency to build his reputation.
The “Pregnant man” was soon followed by many other incredible ads which contributed to raise the agency reputation. In 1978 Saatchi & Saatchi became the first ad agency to be hired by a political party in Britain; the campaign which shown a huge amount of people lining up outside an unemployment office, helped Margaret Thatcher to achieve the prime minister position. As it is easy to imagine, the campaign gave an incredible exposure to the agency, who started to be taken into consideration by important companies.
Saatchi & Saatchi was seen as producing breakthrough creative works with an exceptional capacity of providing the right communication for the right product or service. An important element which helped the agency development is constituted by Saatchi & Saatchi’s capacity of employing people who became stars in the advertising industry including John Hegarty, Tim Bell and Martin Sorrell. In the early years of the company formation, the two brothers decided for a business acquisition growth strategy, which brought Saatchi & Saatchi to acquire over 35 marketing services businesses, including 4 significant ad agency networks.
In 1988 Saatchi & Saatchi is the largest advertising agency in the world but an enormous financial crisis is about to start and the agency share price fell 6.2% in two days. In December 1994, the Saatchi & Saatchi’s board members, under shareholder pressure, sacked Maurice Saatchi as Chairman. Suddenly a great number of senior executives resigned and joined Maurice Saatchi in a new business which would become known as M&C Saatchi. The newly formed advertising agency would soon be followed by historical and very important clients like Mirror Newspapers, Retailer Dixons, British Airways, Quantas and the Conservative Party. Now M&C Saatchi is a worldwide established advertising agency with offices all around the world, producing creativity for many famous businesses under the same core principle:
“Brutal Simplicity of Thought”
the creative crowd 