The man who unsank the Patts Titanic

AFTER a bushfire no one wants to work with you, clients don't want to work with you, creatives don't. It's a fickle business, advertising, everyone wants to hang out at the cool place."Ben Coulson frankly admits that five years ago George Patterson Y&R was definitely not the cool place to hang out. The ad agency had lost its biggest client, Foster's, and soon after began to bleed creative talent, starting with creative director James McGrath.Coulson, executive creative director at George Patts, was one of the few senior staff to stay."I was the guy on the Titanic when the lifeboats pulled out, the one playing the violin," he says.Sitting in the funky surrounds of George Patts' Melbourne office, in the old Georges department store building, Coulson can look back on a bleak time at the agency and (almost) laugh.After joking that he stayed for the great office, Coulson says the main reason he didn't jump ship was because he wanted the chance to change George Patts into a truly modern ad agency. He was joined by Russel Howcroft, who, in what could be described as either very good or very bad timing, walked into the agency a couple of days after "the bushfire".Coulson uses the bushfire analogy several times to describe losing the 44-year-old Foster's account and the fallout from other clients and senior staff leaving soon after. More gently, he also likens it to a band breaking up.With Howcroft and a reduced team, Coulson began working on two main strategies to turn the agency around. The first was to work on those existing clients that had typically missed out on real creative input, and the second was to start "building next year's car, not last year's"."George Patts is 75 years old, a famous and iconic advertising shop, from Rita the Eta eater to Louie the Fly. But four years ago Russel and I said we can't be that going forward, we'll be left out, we can't be sitting here making brand commercials," he says."You've got to represent the essence of a client's brand but you've got techniques at your disposal that didn't exist 10 years ago."The proudest sign that George Patts has embraced the digital era would have to be its recent winning of the Defence Force digital work, beating out the country's top digital agencies for the high-profile client. Online work for existing clients like Cadbury has also brought in awards.With 19 years in the industry, Coulson says the traditional approach to advertising has been turned on its head."It used to be that a client would walk in, they'd ask for an ad campaign, which consisted of television, some posters, radio and maybe a brochure," he says. "When the work went out into the world, you'd switch that project off and start working on another one. Now, the first day things go out into the world is the first day the conversation begins with consumers."Working on improving the creative work for existing clients yielded good results, for example, the highly awarded Schweppes burst ad, with slow-motion footage of water balloons bursting overhead.But getting clients to sign on for more adventurous work, particularly when confidence in the agency was low, has sometimes been a grind. "Those kind of things are desperately hard. You sometimes go to work thinking, 'if I take one more kicking today' . . . clients don't seem to trust me like they did a year ago, good talent says no thanks I'm happy where I am."There was a year of getting work rejected. All you can do is keep up respectful communication with your client, try not to have an advertising ego."The first signs that things were turning around for the agency came with some big new clients, such as Medibank Private, about two years ago. More recently, George Patts won pitches for Jenny Craig and Cricket Australia.And then there are the recent awards. George Patts won this year's AdNews agency of the year award and has been highly awarded at Cannes and elsewhere. For the first time in a few years, the agency did not lose a client over the past year.But pressed to name one moment when he felt the agency was back on track, Coulson says it was when the last builder packed up and left after the recent renovation."Our renaissance has been a creatively led renaissance, taking previously uncreative clients and making them award-winning. That pulled us through, that and modernising the agency," he says. "When we had all that wrapped up in this big new building I thought, yeah, now we're healthy."