AMV's New Guard: Big Ideas, Bold Future

AMV BBDO remains a beacon of commercial creativity in advertising, delighting audiences with standout campaigns for brands such as Currys, Guinness, Whiskas, Bodyform, and Sheba.

Since stepping into the top job at AMV Group, Xavier Rees has wasted no time assembling one of the most dynamic leadership teams in the business, setting a new benchmark for the agency’s ambition.

With chief creative officers Nick Hulley and Nadja Lossgott in place when he began in the summer of 2024, he has since recruited Jemima Monies as group chief growth officer and, most recently, Jo Arden as chief strategy officer. It is a formidable group made up of strong personalities who, together, intend to offer a mighty proposition as they go about rebuilding the business.

Rees explains that he wanted to build the Leadership team that AMV deserves. The very best of the industry’s talent, which could also become more than the sum of its parts. He knew he wanted to assemble a group that would voice their opinions and different points of view.  

“If everyone agrees on everything, you can’t move forward,” says Rees, who believes that different points of view create a brilliant team. “This is about making big advertising ideas that really resonate with people all across the country, across the world, and in a modern landscape. You need people who have different experiences across different areas.”

He also admits that the team is still gelling, with Monies joining in January and Arden in March, but that a strong unit is forming while they deal with the day-to-day of running the business. Equally they’re comfortable with another to have robust debates, even at this early stage, and just as importantly, they’re already having a good laugh together. 

Monies chimes in, stating that this is the first time she has worked in a team where each member is “very different,” which can pose challenges but also bring with it the best results.

“That is the heart of what a good creative process is like,” adds Arden. “But you can only do that if you actually like each other. If you work in an agency where there's negative conflict, that's the recipe for disaster, whereas I think we've got really good positive energy going on.”

Lossgott adds that it works because the team each believes in one another and that she and Hulley have been excited to have that “new energy” brought into the agency.

Big ideas that real people love

And that newness is underlined by the move away from the agency’s three-decade-old positioning of ‘The Work, The Work, The Work’ to adopt ‘Big ideas that real people love’, last spring. Rees describes the phrase as “a galvanising force” for the team that sits at the very heart of everything AMV Group does.

And work coming out of AMV is shifting too - still producing big ideas, but expressed in ways people actually want to engage with, says Rees, who cites last year’s Sheba 'The Gravy Race' and the current creator-led work on Maltesers alongside recent campaigns for Guinness and Tempo, as examples of ideas people love.

He adds: “We never take for granted how lucky we are to work with clients who hand us their most prized possessions — their brand platforms. That kind of trust is rare, and it’s what makes the work meaningful. We get to help those brands grow, stretch, and stay powerful.”

Hulley believes that this [Big Ideas Real People Love] is not a revolutionary way of working from the old AMV. “It’s a new set of words,” he says, adding his belief that the only relevant thing is what the agency does with “its creative soul,” having already produced big ideas for decades.

His longstanding creative partner, Lossgott concurs while underlining the ongoing importance of craft across all AMV’s work as well, claiming it to be “an obsession” internally.

“The only way you can get the emotion that's inside of you and translate it into somebody else's heart is through craft,” continues Hulley.

Another example of a brand campaign that is proving popular with audiences is Currys’ ongoing ‘Beyond Techspectations’, which features real colleagues from the retailer, placing them in humorous but familiar in-store situations.

Through its engaging multi-platform approach, from TV to TikTok, ‘Beyond Techspectations’ has become a campaign that marketers are also looking to learn from and steal from, too.

“It's based on such a solid truth about how people feel about buying tech. It's funny. It's really well written. It's relevant, and it's made that whole business change, which is what we're here to do,” says Arden, who has watched the campaign evolve from afar and is now working on it. That creative confidence has been fuelled by Currys’ brand and marketing director, Dan Rubel, whose vision has helped the brand embrace humour and humanity in a way few tech retailers do.

A new team for a new era

AMV Group is a recent development, too, with Rees launching creator-led social agency Native and formalising their established B2B offering into AMV Works.

Rees describes the broader talent within AMV Group as the “best kept secret” and has been collaborating with leaders across disciplines to drive integration and create a shared culture. His focus has been on ensuring everyone in the business understands the expertise that exists across teams and how those capabilities can come together more cohesively for clients.

Meanwhile, Native@AMV has also come into its own and is being led by recent hire, the former JOE Media CEO and UNILAD founding team member Sam Regan Asante. He and Matt Henry, AMV’s head of innovation, have created the creator-led offer that now works with many of the agency’s clients, such as Currys, Essity, Mars, and VOXI.

Rees points to that pitch, and subsequent account win, as an example that clients are starting to see that creative agencies can produce popular social-led campaigns, revealing that it was won against several independent specialist social shops and showcased another string to AMV's bow.

Room for organic growth

Alongside the Currys contract for Native, Monies reveals that this year the agency has won four new bits of business, while the pitching pipeline remains “non-stop” with the end of last year proving to be “a really fruitful period” for wins. The welcome addition of Arden to the fold will only strengthen their hand, she believes, after coming second in the recent Asda pitch.

Organic growth has been a major focus for the agency, which has begun work on a brief for Starbucks, won last year, and it is about to launch the first work with Philips.

“We’ve turned down more pitches than we’ve taken on,” continues Monies. “There are opportunities that are conflicts or aren’t right for us.”

The team reveals that through their recent interactions with clients in pitches, they are being asked “some interesting questions,” but they are also seeing “massive uncertainty in every single category” as the industry experiences the AI revolution.

The team is working closely with BBDO leaders around the world, taking part in Community Councils led by BBDO’s Global CEO, Nancy Reyes, to share best practices, improve ways of working, and ultimately create more effective big ideas for clients across the network. 

“We are also increasingly working within integrated teams with OMG and other Omnicom agencies – learning each other’s language is proving hugely beneficial for our client work,” says Monies. 

Strategic direction

The strategy team is under new management, but Arden says that she’s not currently building a new team because the one she has inherited is proving to be a good one.

“It’s nice when you can build your own team, but unfortunately, they are all really brilliant,” she laughs.

She adds that she is “obsessed” by AI but is wary that the more it features within the strategy process, the greater the risk of moving away from real people, something she aims to avoid. Arden credits the agency’s former chief customer officer, David Edwards, with the introduction of ‘Home Truths’, which sees strategists once every quarter sit on the sofas and in the kitchens of people across the country to learn what’s on their minds.

“I think it is the strategist's job to keep themselves next to the customers that they sell to,” she states, adding that this is an initiative that will continue, while also building on the use of synthetic audiences too.

And the use of AI is something that Rees is encouraging across the agency to grasp a better understanding of its advantages, including through Omnicom’s own AI platform Omni, which offers them a safe environment to experiment through.

“If it’s helpful to people they are going to use it - and they do use it,” says Lossgott. “What's interesting about it for us is that it just becomes a sparring partner. And if you can use it like that, it's helpful, and you do become addicted to it because it is just like anything else; it is a tool that makes you better at your job.”

When leading one of the biggest agencies in Europe, there is a constant expectation to achieve big things and deliver campaigns at scale. The next generation of AMV Group, under the leadership of Rees, is clearly hungry to continue doing just that.