Telling Truth Well: The New McCann Era

In a sea of corporate blandness McCann has always had one of advertising’s great lines and positionings — 'Truth Well Told'.

It's sat at the heart of McCann for more than a century and is the sort of proposition modern agencies spend months trying to invent for their clients (with varying degrees of success). But for global CEO Tyler Turnbull, global CCO Andrés Ordóñez and global CSO Harjot Singh, who make up its leadership triumvirate, their job is not to simply admire the motto created by agency founder Harrison McCann: it is to weaponise it and take it into battle.

This matters because McCann is entering its next era at a moment of unusual consequence — Omnicom’s acquisition of Interpublic at the end of last year has redrawn the holding-company map, and McCann has emerged as one of the global creative powerhouses tasked with propelling the new holding company forward.

The brief to the threesome is large and awkward: integrate talent, reassure clients, re-energise culture, prove the value of creativity, and make a network born in the age of mass persuasion work in an age of AI, fragmentation and changing client needs.

The trio’s answer is to treat 'Truth Well Told' not as a creative philosophy, but as a growth framework.

Singh talks about moving truth across the whole brand system. Ordóñez (otherwise known as 'AO') has introduced 'Rumbles', bringing global talent and clients together to solve major problems in five days, and Turnbull talks about stripping away the corporate noise (that otherwise might have dominated the merger) and creating an environment so their people can do the best work of their careers.

Creative Salon: It’s been about five months now since the new leadership team came together. Could you talk us through how the integration is going, and what is still left to do?

Tyler Turnbull: It’s hard to believe it has been five months. From a McCann perspective, I think we’ve done a lot as a team since joining.

We had a number of advantages coming in. One was that Andrés and I, and many others from our FCB team — whether Tina Allen [chief talent officer], Danilo [Boer, global creative lead & partner] or others — were able to come into McCann together. And of course we then got to meet amazing people like Harjot, Ida [Rezvani, global chief client officer] and many others around the world.

What has been really powerful is the combination of the entrepreneurial spirit that has always been true to McCann, and which is also true to how we operate, with the DNA of McCann around 'Truth Well Told'. That is not just a positioning, but an operating system that we have been building.

The momentum we’ve been able to drive in Q1 across some of our largest partners has been exceptional. When I look at what our teams have been able to do at the start of this year — from a business perspective, a work perspective and, most importantly, from a cultural perspective — it has been really inspiring.

In the first quarter alone, we brought our top CEOs and global business leads together for a growth summit in January. Andrés hosted the first Global Creative Council at McCann in February. Harjot hosted our first Global Strategy Council a couple of weeks ago. It feels like the communities across McCann are really unified around making sure we do the best work of our careers and show up in our full proposition: as one of the pre-eminent premium creative networks in the world.

It is also one of the most global. That has been fascinating to me. The majority of the McCann business is outside North America, and that gives us a real footprint in the markets that matter most for major global brands. It also gives us access to talent in a way that has been really special for us to lean into.

Harjot Singh: I would support what Tyler is saying. The other thing that is interesting about integration, especially as it applies to us, is that it can be very tempting to think about integration as being structural.

What I love about what we are doing as a leadership team is that we are thinking about integration behaviourally. We are being very mindful about what we are integrating people around.

As Tyler said, all of us — Andrés, Tyler, me and the extended team — are integrating people around 'Truth Well Told' as a growth engine. That gives everybody a shared language. Whether you are in strategy, creative, data, commerce, London, Singapore or Brazil, people have the same language.

Even something like the “rumble” is integrated around a 'Truth Well Told' construct. So we are integrating around a belief system rather than just a structural way of doing things.

CS: It does sound like you have rekindled 'Truth Well Told'. It is probably one of the biggest agency brand propositions. Was it something you saw right at the start and thought: this is something we recognise and want to grab hold of? Did you want to re-own it, because it seemed to have existed but in slightly wishy-washy terms — on PowerPoint charts, but not much more than that? Now it seems like your rallying flag. Is that fair?

Singh: Yes, absolutely.

Turnbull: Andrés and I have spoken a lot about how much we envied 'Truth Well Told', so Andrés can probably speak to that.

Andrés Ordóñez: Brands that have such a strong foundation are the best thing you can have. I always say: if we don’t have it internally, how can we tell our clients to have it?

When we were where we were before, 'Truth Well Told' was always the one that made us jealous in so many ways. I think our responsibility is not just to keep it as a philosophy, but to put it into action.

That is something we are constantly doing: looking at everything we put out into the world. We have things like rumbles, which are literally 'Truth Well Told' in action, and it all sits under the same arc.

The world is asking for truth more than ever. So if we don’t believe in it and put it into action, what are we doing here? It has given us a very sharp focus on what we need to do to drive growth and to do our best work. If everything ladders up through the global philosophy, I think we are going to do incredible things. We already are.

Turnbull: It is also very liberating with our clients and our culture. What I have loved most about it is creating an environment that allows our people to speak the truth and really lean into it.

Sometimes, as an industry, we do not do that. We do not necessarily confront the things we need to solve. Should we be working the way we have worked for the last 50 years? When we asked ourselves that question, Andrés and the team started to develop a different process called rumbles, to work differently in a more modern, integrated and agile way.

Should we be incorporating different things into our strategic planning process? Harjot and the planners have built the 'Truth to Impact' process. So it really is not just a line on a page to us. It is who we are.

CS: I want to come back to Rumbles in a minute. But did the three of you come together and say: 'Truth Well Told' is part of the blueprint for the new McCann? Was its relevance in a post-truth world a deliberate thing? Because truth has become a bit of a grey area, and it feels like you have decided: actually, there is a truth and we can own this. It is more important than ever.

Turnbull: Yes is the short answer. We came together and asked: "what are we?"

For Andrés and me, who are newer to the McCann brand, a big part of our belief as a team is respecting the DNA of every brand we work with. So we sat with Harjot and the McCann teams and asked: what are the core fundamentals that have made McCann, McCann, for the last 113 years?

'Truth Well Told' is the centrepiece of that incredible legacy. But it also allowed us to confront some truths around the industry.

One of the things we talked about is that brand narrative and story have never been more important to the market capitalisation of major brands around the world. Yet marketing as a percentage of total revenue is currently at its lowest point in history — 7.7 per cent, according to Gartner.

For us at McCann, confronting that truth means asking: why is that? Why isn’t marketing getting the investment we know it needs, given the impact it can have? And how can we bring our collection of great talent, capabilities and tools in service of CEOs and CMOs to prove that value again?

That is just one example of how we are trying to live it.

Ordóñez: From a creative standpoint, when we start from the truth, the world can have all the noise it has right now, but when the truth is true — I don’t know how else to say it — it breaks through.

It makes people pay attention. It makes people move. It makes them feel something. Otherwise it is just noise for the sake of noise.

That is why everyone is looking so hard for truth right now. The noise is everywhere, and you don’t really know what to believe. But when you find the right thing and believe in it, and put it out into the world well told, then you get a reaction.

Singh: In a post-truth world, how does this stay relevant to clients?

That takes me back to a conversation the three of us had when we were building out the operating system and the spine for the McCann credentials. We said that while the 'Truth Well Told' platform may not have changed, the application needs to be much more expansive.

For a long time, 'Truth Well Told' was interpreted primarily as a creative philosophy. But what we have done as a team is evolve it into what can only be defined as a growth framework.

Truth is not just what you say anymore. It is what your brand stands for, how your experience delivers, how the media behaves and how commerce converts. The evolution is really about moving from truth in communications to truth across the entire brand system.

It is solving the whole growth equation with truth at the centre. That is valuable to clients because, when you apply it to the whole equation, it can have a much more exponential impact than if it is just treated as a creative philosophy.

CS: Tell us about Rumbles? How do they integrate into 'Truth Well Told'?

Ordóñez: The word comes from the idea that there is a clear enemy for us: the endless round of work that exists in agencies. There are too many meetings, too many rounds and often not enough alignment from the beginning. Sometimes you are pretty much doing a deck for the boss of the boss, rather than doing what really needs to be done.

At that point, you need to call a timeout. Rumbles are made for those moments of urgency, when we gather the very best people in the network.

We have been doing this for two years now, but it is a way to change all that. Instead of going through endless rounds of work, we put everyone together in one room around one main, clear problem. We need to find the truth and put it under the arc.

There is creative, strategy, data, designers, media and all the tools we can put together. We work hand in hand with clients to solve a problem in five days.

By day five, we have a clear answer that is ready to go to market. We get there faster because the rounds and misalignments dilute the work and the impact it can have in the world. Rumbles focus everyone on one problem, with the decision-makers in the room, the best minds against it, the best tools and a strong solution by the end of the week.

CS: Is that something you do on all business, or is it a specific kind of sprint?

Turnbull: We have used it for big, high-profile moments for our brands — major platform creation, or the most important campaign a client is investing in on an annual basis.

They work incredibly well for big global brands that have multiple markets, because we can bring in creatives, strategists and planners from around the world. We also bring in amazing capabilities from across our world: FutureBrand, which is a team we work very closely with; McCann Content Studios; McCann Truth Central, for example.

It is exceptional to see what can be done in such a short period when people are focused and together. We have done almost half a dozen from a McCann perspective in our first three months of the year, and the universal feedback from our biggest clients has been incredibly positive.

Ordóñez: What is really interesting is that when you talk about it, people have a perception of what these things are. They say: “I’ve done this before. I’ve done a session, a brainstorm, a workshop,” or whatever people call it.

But the difference with the Rumble is that it is designed to move things forward. It is not just about filling the wall with imagination and saying: “Look at all these possibilities.” No — we come out of it with a plan that is approved and ready to go to market, and that starts moving the business.

Singh: I can attest to this. I have been at McCann for 15 years, going on 16. To Andrés’s point, everyone in advertising has experienced some version of speed thinking: bringing lots of people into a room, trying to solve a problem, getting a lot of smart people within an unreasonable timeframe to solve an ambitious challenge together. That is not alien to our industry.

But I cannot tell you, even as a sample size of one, that in the 27 years I have been in the industry, I have ever experienced anything that creates this level of energy, speed and collaboration in the way a Rumble does.

Having attended one and a half so far, I have learned three things from them. Andrés and I are partners in them; we sit together, think together and look at the work before, during and after.

The most striking thing is that it starts with: will the work matter? Does the work matter? That comes from the diligence of the briefing and the groundwork. Then: will the work move the needle commercially? We are an agency holding ourselves very accountable to the outcomes we create, not just the outputs. We have a clear understanding from the client of the business problem and commercial objectives.

And then the most important thing is that it shapes culture as it happens. I have never seen anything that does all three as seamlessly as a rumble does. It is truly very unique to us.

Ordóñez: You do get outputs. One client said, when she finished, that we had struck the perfect balance between magic and logic. Another CMO said: “This is the best presentation of my life.” There was another client where we did not know we were pitching until he told us at the end, and then he said: “McCann or nothing.”

These are global CMOs and senior people in important businesses saying they have not experienced anything like this. They are saying we are striking a balance between magic and logic. There are agencies that are incredible at magic and others that are incredible at logic, but striking that balance is not just a process.

Anyone can follow a process. This is about casting, understanding the business and knowing how to move things around. There is a magic to that madness that we have somehow figured out. We keep learning Rumble after Rumble, and it is working.

Turnbull: One of the things we think about a lot is: "what is the model clients most want to engage with today?"

From our perspective, they want a tight group of senior people who intimately know their business, are extensions of their team and have a track record of making great work together. You can feel that in how we structure our client leadership teams.

But they also want scale at speed. We have been thinking about how to deliver in a different way that reflects the modern world, not the old one. No client is looking for an 18-week process to get to a creative idea. They want a tight group thinking about their business in a condensed period.

Rumbles allow us to showcase speed, entrepreneurialism and focus, and apply our scale in a way we have not before. That is why it has been so interesting.

CS: Harjot, can we ask you about the logic side? You mentioned a new planning process, or perhaps a new operating process. Could you talk us through that?

Singh: I would not say it is new. I would say it is a more optimised operating system.

McCann has always had operating systems that have been in step with delivering the most creatively and commercially compelling solutions for clients in that moment. We are fortunate to be the team at this time, and to be able to reinvent and reinvigorate a system together.

Clients all want the same thing: creativity delivered with precision, at speed, at scale and with measurable impact. In that world, you need an operating system that connects the insight to the brand definition, to creative development, and then to deployment and optimisation.

We are able to draw from Truth Central and from our data partnership with Acxiom, for example. If you think about “Truth to Impact”, it is an operating system that integrates us structurally and behaviourally.

Insight through Truth Central and Acxiom connects to brand definition through something like FutureBrand. Brand definition connects to creative development through rumbles. Creative development connects to deployment and optimisation through McCann Content Studio and other Omnicom capabilities we can connect to.

Instead of multiple partners solving parts of the problem, we are solving the whole growth equation with one operating system. That is the magic of 'Truth to Impact'. That is the shift we are focused on.

We are not selling outputs anymore. We are accountable for outcomes. 'Truth to Impact' is in service of that.

CS: Has that become easier since the merger, because you have more capabilities and are more joined up?

Singh: One aspect that will become easier through the acquisition is deployment and optimisation. When you want to deploy and optimise work in the world, you need access to data sets that allow you to distribute content quickly, optimise it and measure it.

So, yes, we have more access to more data sets and more capabilities that allow us to optimise and distribute content.

The initial part, which is about finding the truth, telling it well and distilling it into something undeniable and impossible to ignore, still needs both intuition and rigour. That has always been the case.

So I would say this optimised operating system has made it easier for our best people to make their best work and do their best thinking. The acquisition is particularly useful in deployment and optimisation, more than it might be in the other parts of the journey.

CS: That brings me on to talent. There is certainly an issue in the UK at the moment with talent: people leaving the industry, people falling out of love with it because it has become more difficult, more squeezed by shareholders and client demands, and perhaps less fun. How do you keep people motivated and attract and retain the best talent when the wider world feels quite uncomfortable?

Turnbull: It is a great question. First and foremost, I remember walking into my first agency after graduating as if it were yesterday. I remember how energetic, dynamic, chaotic and fun it felt.

As a leader now, with Andrés, Harjot and the team, I really want to recapture that energy for the next generation. The way to do that is to promise our people that they are going to make the best work of their careers at McCann.

We need to help them focus on that and strip away a lot of the impact of being a publicly traded company, or the day-to-day process — things that are essential but should not be top of mind every second. I see that as my role, our CFOs’ role and our team’s role.

When Andrés and Harjot are on a brief with a client and that is the only thing they are thinking about, we are going to make incredible work. I know that is true across all our teams. So I try to ask: how can we protect people and make sure we are focused on what matters most, which is our clients and the work?

As it relates to the wider world, the turmoil and anxiety we feel every day, the second component is creating a culture where people can show up as themselves and be honest about how they are feeling.

All of us have good days and bad days. What I love about my team and our teams around the world is that there is space for that. I love advertising, but I also have two young kids and commitments elsewhere. Every person at McCann has some version of that dynamic.

What I have loved about getting to know and partner with Harjot, who knows McCann intimately after 15 years, is that he is so aware of how people are doing and where we need to give space or lean in. That creates a culture of safety. And with that comes better risk-taking, better experimentation and ultimately better work.

CS: Cannes is coming up — the first Cannes with the three of you as the management team. What do you expect? What work have you got in? How do you think it will compare with previous years?

Turnbull: I will let Andrés speak to the work, but I would start by saying that Cannes is not the goal for us.

I am proud of how focused we are on our partners, clients and people. One of the things we ask is: "are we doing work around the world, in the markets we are in, that the biggest CEOs and CMOs want?"

That is a slightly different question from: are we winning every Lion available? I love winning Lions, and we know how to do that. We have great work coming that Andrés can talk to. But I wanted to preface it because, when we talk about confronting industry truths, one of the truths we have discussed as a team is that we need more big, populist work that creates and sustains enduring brands.

Some of that work might be recognised and some might not. But the recognition that matters most to me is whether it is driving growth for our clients. I am thankful that a lot of the work you will see in Q2, which will be part of our Cannes story, does just that.

CS: Andrés, how do you think the shape of the work has changed this year? Rather than just asking whether you will win awards at Cannes, have you noticed the work changing — and in what way?

Ordóñez: The work will always keep changing. If we stay on the same path, we become completely irrelevant.

I think people have learned from last year to be more responsible with what they put out into the world. We have to put our clients and brands first, rather than the awards. If we focus on awards and are not responsible with the other side, it can come back to us.

I think we are about to see a round of work that is more real, more out in the world, that drives business growth and moves people. That is great, because right now people are listening and watching more than ever: what we are putting out, and how responsible we are with our people and brands.

Singh: One thing I would add is that our whole body of work lives up to the standard we set for ourselves. We often say that the radical creativity of 'Truth Well Told' is only experienced when something has the ability to move people and markets.

If it does both, then you set yourself up as the most relevant partner clients want to trust for their next challenge. You are proving that you have a system able to create success repeatedly and at scale.

As a small team, we recently shared among ourselves where the work is netting out. I have to say, it was on a Saturday evening when we had a little WhatsApp going around, and I felt a bit misty-eyed. I thought: “Oh my God, I think we’re back.”

Seeing the work in succession, I felt really good about it. It is moving personally and emotionally, and commercially. It is just really solid work.

CS: What will success look like, and when will you know you have reached it?

Turnbull: The team has heard me answer this quite a bit, so apologies to Andrés and Harjot.

As we have gone around the world, we have done town halls in every market. All three of us like having open Q&As with our teams, to hear how people are feeling and doing. That is a question we get almost every week.

What I say to the agencies, and what I think applies globally, is that a successful year for any agency — whether it is McCann London and the UK, or McCann New Zealand — comes down to three things.

First, invest in and do your best work on the biggest brands you already have: the brands that have invested in us, believe in us and trust us. Teams can sometimes forget that and focus on other things.

Second, win a big piece of business in your market that is highly competitive. Every market has a pitch that defines the year. I want McCann to be part of those, and I want us to convert.

Third, make one big piece of work that everyone in the market — from a client perspective and an industry perspective — admires and envies.

If we can do those three things across all our operations worldwide, we will have a phenomenal year. 12 months from now, I will be looking at that both at an agency level and a global level and asking whether we have really done it. And if we have not, what do we need to do to get there?

CS: Finally, what can we look forward to next under your leadership? You are five months in. What are you still looking forward to doing, or hoping to get done before you are happy? Would you ever be happy?

Turnbull: We are a group that is always looking at how we can get one per cent better and keep pushing.

You will see us focus on a couple of areas in Q2. One is AI, across the board globally. We have some amazing new tools as part of Omnicom that we are going to be embedding across McCann, and we will have announcements on that front in the weeks to come.

Second, we have some amazing thought leadership coming out in June, which Harjot and the team can update you on. It is looking at how to manage and activate global brands in the world we live in today. I think it will be very interesting for the industry and for clients around the world, in terms of the new playbook and operating model they can use to drive growth.

Singh: At our global strategy meeting in London a couple of weeks ago, we had 30 people from 15 different countries come together for two days to reconnect. We asked ourselves: what can we all commit to as leaders?

Three things came out: more clarity, more conviction and more impact.

You will see us continue to push 'Truth to Impact' much deeper into how we operate. You will see us create work that is both culturally resonant and commercially undeniable. You will see us strengthen how we prove that you can connect brand, creativity, data and commerce.

The biggest shift is that we are going to hold ourselves accountable to being much more explicit in the way we talk about and prove the role of creativity in driving growth. That is what we have signed up to do.

Ordóñez: From my standpoint, as a team, we love bringing people together. We say “better together”, understanding that we are not going to win one person against all. It is going to be all of us together, breaking silos.

I also think it is about making sure everyone feels proud of our brand. There is a difference between saying “I work at McCann” and saying “I did that at McCann”.

If a client says, “I did that with McCann,” it is because they are proud of the work they did with us. If someone who works with us says it, that is a big shift. It is not only about working here, but about what we can accomplish together. I think we are about to see a lot of that coming through.