THERE’S more than a hint of the old school ad executive about The Brand Agency’s founder, chairman and chief, Ken James.
It might be the powder blue leather seats in his generous balcony office or perhaps it’s the short-sleeved shirt and easy smile.
At 60, Mr James is one of the last of his generation still working in the industry. His contemporaries, including Marketforce’s long-serving chairman Howard Read and 303 founder Stephen Wells, have retired or moved on.
But judging by Mr James’ energy levels and passion for his work, retirement is not on the agenda, not while he still gets a kick out of helping clients grow their businesses.
He would be one of the few advertising executives in Western Australia who can claim to have worked on a client account, the RAC, for more than 30 years.
And his relationship with Bunnings goes back more than two decades to when the business was just a small hardware chain.
Mr James has also been around the advertising industry long enough to see returns slide from an average of 21 cents in the dollar 20 years ago to around 10 cents today.
There’s pressure on the marketing budgets as well, and Mr James said major advertising clients would move if they could save even just 2 per cent in the current market.
Loyalty still counts for something, but not as much as the bottom line.
These days Mr James shares his time between Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and New Zealand, where The Brand has just completed the acquisition of a new business.
The business is now 84 per cent owned by STW Group, the largest marketing and communications group in Australasia.
Mr James started his advertising career as a despatch boy in Sydney; and while he laments the passing of the advertising apprenticeship, he is still energised by the ideas and passions of the young people around him.
Despite his fear that computers and mobile phones have done untold damage to ‘real communication’, he is adamant the digital landscape is just another avenue to build brands.
“The bottom line is the fundamentals haven’t changed, our job is to produce a product that will get a favourable response from the consumer,” Mr James said.
“There are so many touch points with the consumer ... and there is a new one every second week; and for an advertiser, fragmentation is a very expensive way to talk to the consumer.
“If you want to talk to everybody you have to talk to them across 21 mediums, but advertisers aren’t increasing their budgets by 20 per cent so what they are doing is thinning it out.”
The Brand Agency has one of the biggest digital departments in the WA industry and Mr James is confident the full-service model is what clients want.
“The bottom line is we create messages that suit different communications mediums,” he said. “We want to be able to look after the whole message, not just building the brand; we need to be custodians of every aspect of communication and that is good for the client.”
