Claire Hollands on bringing 'Nothing is Impossible' back to life at Saatchis

Saatchi & Saatchi has never lacked history. What it has perhaps missed, in more recent years, is a clear sense of how to embrace that history to power its next chapter. For chief executive Claire Hollands, that has been the task of her first year: to take one of advertising’s most famous agency slogans, 'Nothing is Impossible', and turn it from nifty inherited legend and soundbite into something more tangible; a living operating principle.

Hollands, who began her career with a detour through medical school before finding advertising via agencies including Leo Burnett, AMV BBDO, and MullenLowe, talks about 'ambition' with the conviction of someone who sees it as both personal sustenance and corporate strategy.

Leaving medicine, she says, forced a reckoning. “I did it for a year and realised that medicine wasn’t for me. It was quite a brave thing to step out, because I’d gone from a very focused career path to actually not knowing what I was going to do.” The result was a geography degree, a stint in an agency while at university, and then what she describes as sofa-surfing her way around London shops before landing on the Leo Burnett grad scheme more than 20 years ago.

That circuitous route seems to have given her a clear-eyed view of what leadership should look like when she inherited an agency in need of clarity on what it wanted to stand for in the next chapter of its rich history. The first priority was culture. “I’m very much a culture-driven person,” she says. “I believe in high challenge, high support.” What she found at Saatchis, she says, was not a broken culture so much as an under-articulated one: an agency full of talented, ambitious people without a clearly stated centre of gravity.

So Hollands set about defining it with the agency rather than for it. The resulting codes — “put the problem in the middle”, “never blame bravery”, “assume the best of people” — are the sort of phrases that could easily die laminated on a wall or on a creds deck, but she is alive to that risk. “Values are dangerous when they’re just sitting on pieces of paper,” she says. “You know they’re living when people actually say: 'let’s assume the best of this before we make assumptions'. Or: 'can we put this problem in the middle and kick it around'?”.

The point was not to impose a culture from the top down, but to give existing instincts a clearer shape. In the process, Hollands says, something more useful revealed itself: the agency’s enduring appetite for ambition. That, in turn, gave her the strategic hook for the second part of the job, which was defining what Saatchis should now stand for.

The answer was sitting there already, hidden in plain sight. 'Nothing is Impossible' is one of those rare and enduring adland lines that has entered the wider mythology of the industry, while rivals chop and change with them with prevailing fads.

But like many old slogans, it had become easier to admire and recollect with fondness than to apply with any practical purpose. Hollands’ instinct was not to replace it, but to revive it by giving it operational meaning. “I wanted to bring it back, but bring it back with new meaning,” she says.

The reworking is simple enough: after all 'Nothing is Impossible' simply means 'we realise impossible ambitions'. But its value, in her telling, is that it gives the whole organisation a shared logic. It works as a client proposition, a cultural signal and an internal management tool all at once. “The best positionings aren’t just a statement of intent or a marketing tool,” she says. “They should live and breathe through a whole organisation.”

That is now how Saatchis talks about growth, work, capability and careers. For clients, it is about identifying and solving for “impossible growth ambitions”. For creatives, it means aiming to make work that becomes “the reference”. For the agency, it defines the sort of role it wants to play within Publicis Groupe. And for individuals, it has become part of how performance and progression are framed. “Every single individual has their own impossible ambition,” Hollands says. “It’s almost become not a replacement of appraisals, but the output of an appraisal.” (And more on her 'impossible ambition' later on).

What is striking is how deliberately she has chosen to lean into the agency’s own brand at a moment when some rivals are letting theirs dissolve into larger corporate structures. Hollands is unapologetic about that. “I find it hard to have our name above the door and not think it’s a differentiator or a point of distinction,” she says. “I’m a big believer in agency brands.” It would be odd, she suggests, to advise clients on building strong brands while failing to invest in your own. And in a market where clients continue to talk about wanting top-tier partners, a strong agency identity remains part of how that ranking is formed in the first place. [Incidentally this is a topic Saatchis' chief growth officer Oli Richards has also written about.]

This does not mean Saatchis is pretending it exists outside the group model. If anything, Hollands seems more interested in making the agency an effective front door into Publicis Groupe’s wider capabilities. Saatchis, she says, should be “a doorway for growth” — sometimes solving a problem itself, sometimes pulling in the right expertise from across the network.

EE is the obvious example, a founding Power of One client that brings together Saatchis, Digitas, LeShop, production and retail expertise in a genuinely integrated way. But Hollands is careful not to overstate integration for its own sake. Not every brief needs a giant multi-agency construct. Sometimes the value lies simply in knowing what to plug in, and when.

Still, growth is the lodestar. Hollands talks repeatedly about taking clients from one state to another: EE from “telco to techco”; British Heart Foundation from fatalism around heart disease to a more active belief in prevention and cure (see its 'In Living Memory' campaign).

OVO, meanwhile, moved from passive to active energy management with a new platform, ‘Do Energy Differently’.

The point is less the sloganised “from/to” itself than the discipline beneath it. Saatchis, in her telling, is at its best with clients on a growth trajectory, on a transformation agenda, or confronting the risk of decline and wanting to change course before it hardens.

That positioning also explains the kind of creative ambition she wants the agency to pursue. Hollands points to CCO Franki Goodwin’s framing of the “impossible ambition” in the work as becoming “the reference”: the work people talk about, cite, envy.

The examples she reaches for are telling. With EE, it is about escaping the category’s race to the bottom on price and using audience intelligence to build a broader platform focused to the role the provider plays across its customers lives – EE does more.

With John Lewis, it is about moving the brand conversation from Christmas to the Golden Quarter and now, increasingly, from quarter to culture.

The recent Mother’s Day work, Hollands suggests, signals a more socially and culturally responsive chapter for the retailer, one that sits alongside the grand seasonal set-pieces rather than being overshadowed by them.

For all the rhetoric of ambition, though, Hollands knows these things require proof, and that proof usually arrives in the form of account wins. And winning Aviva late last year mattered because it validated the model rather than merely flattering it. “It was particularly pertinent for me and the leadership team, because it was validation of everything we put into place,” she says. “Not only does it work, we can actually win with that kind of approach.”

There are other signs of the broader ambition she wants the agency to have beyond the work itself. Hollands talks warmly about Upriser, Saatchis' schools programme, not as one of her own initiatives but as something worth nurturing because it reflects the sort of influence she wants the agency to have outside its immediate commercial interests.

The statistic that sits underneath it is startling: roughly nine pounds a year spent on creative subjects per secondary school child in state schools. Upriser, which began with Harris Academy in Greenwich and has since been scaled into a wider blueprint involving other agencies and creative partners across the UK including ITV, has now reached around 10,000 children. “Why wouldn’t you want to shout about that and support that?” she says. “If there was ever an impossible ambition, that’s probably a good example of a Saatchis one.”

And as for her own impossible ambition, her answer is “To shift from being underestimated to being undeniable.” That journey is well on its way.