Adweek reported on the wondrous transformation happening at Arnold Worldwide, spotlighting how the White advertising agency hired “an empathy expert to help make the company’s work more inclusive while also encouraging the creative team to employ respect, diversity and empathetic leadership.” Delegating diversity to an empathetic consultant sounds, um, pathetic. Oh, and a peek at Arnold leadership shows the pseudo progressive stunt—like other mad experiments conducted to bring DE&I to the Boston-based firm—failed.
Free consultation to Arnold executives: If you really want to make the work more inclusive and the staff more diverse, hire more people of color. It’s that simple, you culturally clueless cretins.
How Arnold Worldwide Is Remaking Its Reputation Through Strategy
CEO George Sargent talks about big idea thinking, integration and empathy
By Kyle O’Brien
For Arnold Worldwide, the big idea is not dead. It just needs to be translated for the current era. After 75 years in business, Arnold is reimagining itself as a creative agency, but one now driven by strategy.
At the helm of that transformation is CEO George Sargent, who has been navigating Arnold’s path forward since December 2019. In those two years, Sargent has seen Arnold grow by 44%, winning eight pieces of business, including ADP, DuckDuckGo, Bob’s Discount Furniture, and signing Cox Communications last May. Arnold has also increased client satisfaction (NPS) by 10%, launched over 50 TV spots for Progressive insurance—one of the agency’s top clients—and is in the running to win KFC’s coveted creative account.
When Sargent took over, however, Boston-based Arnold was trending downward. The agency had lost key clients, including Hershey, Carnival and Angie’s List and had gone through a round of layoffs. Sargent chalks that up to too much executive turnover.
“There were five CEOs in the 2010s. There were five CCOs in the 2010s. There were five CSOs in the 2010s. The 2010s were unfriendly to the agency…we had experienced some client loss…There was just no stability at the agency,” Sargent told Adweek.
Sargent, who was with Havas Media before becoming CEO at Arnold, brought a media sales background to the creative agency, and his ability to implement strategy to the creative process has helped bring stability. He assembled a new leadership team and saw the need to integrate the separate teams and processes.
“The biggest thing that Arnold needed from a strategic standpoint was to take big human insights into big idea thinking and address the challenge of media fragmentation and address the complexity of the consumer journey,” Sargent said, adding that an additional challenge was to integrate the strategy team so that big ideas showed up in lots of different areas.
Adding empathy and comedy to the equation
Arnold took its communications strategy and made it an important part in how the agency approached creativity, bringing media fluency and a downstream approach to the creative process. Another key piece to changing the culture at the agency was to add a level of empathy. Arnold brought on an “entrepreneur in residence,” Michael Tennant, an empathy expert to help make the company’s work more inclusive while also encouraging the creative team to employ respect, diversity and empathetic leadership.
“We embedded him within the agency for nine months and made empathy, and all the things that are required in order to have an empathic culture, very central to how we work,” said Sargent. “We expect everyone to treat each other both as human beings and also as experts.”
Sargent said that the training has paid off, especially over the last nine months, and the agency is again winning new business with the right attitude.
“It’s just been incredibly rewarding to watch an agency embrace itself and embrace its people and use that in order to grow,” he said.
Another tactic Arnold has used to bolster the team is adding some laughs to the creative.
“On our creative team, we’re thinking really differently about how we attract people with totally different backgrounds. And one example we launched a few months ago was the Arnold Institute for the Comedically Gifted, which is about us finding comedic talent,” said Sargent.
He stated that comedy is central to the agency’s relationship with longtime client Progressive (with ads featuring the character Flo and sessions on not becoming your parents) and Sargent thinks that comedy is underserved as a tactic that brands can use to create engagement. The Comedically Gifted effort provides real working comedians with a steady paycheck to help solve brand problems.
That, combined with smart comms planning, gives the team clarity, breaks down silos and opens up new ways of reaching people through tactics like social media, influencer campaigns and the creator economy.
Utilizing Havas to get ahead
Arnold’s role is to play lead creative agency on its accounts for the most part, said Sargent, and that hasn’t changed as it has turned the ship around, but it is working with partner marketers and agencies to help fill in where it can’t. That involves utilizing the tools that parent company Havas has to offer, including embracing the network’s tech stack to identify fact-based consumer behavior and using the small data to drive the agency’s big ideas. That also means leaning on other Havas network agencies for customer experience, social, gaming and multicultural campaigns.
Sargent said that Arnold’s role for the next 20 years will be figuring out how to create big ideas without the same linear programming schedule that has been relied upon in the past.
“We’re taking an agency that for the last 75 years, has put creativity at the center of the table and used creativity to drive business results. We are modernizing that agency and we have a lot of momentum, and we have an incredible talent base,” Sargent said.
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