Leo Burnett introduces unconventional creative structure in Asia Pacific

Leo Burnett Asia Pacific has introduced a new internal creative scheme to foster closer creative sharing, educating and inspiring to set creative standards and drive creativity throughout the network.

Jarek Ziebinski, President, Leo Burnett & Arc Asia Pacific launched the Internal Product Committee (IPC) and will be personally involved with every IPC session.

“I coined the new creative system, a ‘multi-headed regional creative director’,” said Ziebinski. “With this new approach, we are tapping into the collective talents of our network to help drive the quality of our creative output as well as to reach out to more employees, who may not be directly involved in the creative product, to enhance the agency’s culture of creativity. In the end, it is a team effort, not just the creative team, which makes great creativity for our clients a reality.”

“This is an unusual but strategic approach we are undertaking to navigate the changing times in which ideas are the new currency. In the People era that is now, it is imperative that we evolve to stay ahead of the game and to continue to deliver the best HumanKind-driven communication for our clients.”  

The new creative scheme, which recently concluded its beta test rounds successfully with all offices over the past ten months, eliminates the conventional regional executive creative director role while assigning additional geographical responsibilities to selected creative leaders.

Andy DiLallo, ECD of Leo Burnett Sydney, Chris Chiu, Group ECD of Leo Burnett Singapore, Jason Williams, ECD of Leo Burnett Melbourne, Shapoor Batliwalla Regional CD of Leo Burnett Hong Kong, have been charged with additional geographical responsibilities for Japan, Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia), India and Korea respectively.

Ziebinski said, “Regional executive creative directors spend huge amount of time on the plane and may be hard pressed for time to devote the same level of attention to every office. On the contrary, a ‘multi-headed regional creative director’ is more focused and has a lot more power and ability to deliver.”

Modeled to mirror the Leo Burnett’s Global Product Committee (GPC), IPC is an annual event that takes place over a day that involves all agency employees of the receiving office. Local teams of the receiving office will present campaigns to Ziebinski and the visiting creative leader who will then score the work based on the HumanKind scale.  Number of entries and scores from the IPC sessions will be documented on regular basis for benchmarking. A key part of the IPC sessions will also involve feedback and discussion on the work as well as the sharing of speeches and best case studies.