Campaign Brief Q&A with YoungShand: A hungry agency driven to deliver for challenger brands

(Pictured L-R: Duncan Shand, managing director; Emma Dalton, general manager; Corey Chalmers, executive creative director)

Campaign Brief sits down with YoungShand’s senior leadership team to discuss the indie agency’s new positioning, it’s growth from digital to full-service and future plans.

Campaign Brief: You’ve recently positioned yourself as an agency for challenger brands. What led you to decide on that?

Corey Chalmers: There’s loads of great agencies with similar offerings and a pithy statement about creativity. We just talked a lot about where we could go further, have the most impact and the most fun? Great stories are about overcoming great obstacles. Clients who had a challenger mindset excited us most. They have no choice but to create bold ways to connect emotionally in the ever-evolving media landscape. That’s pretty exciting for us.

Emma Dalton: We’re a challenger agency ourselves, we’re hungry and driven to over deliver. Our integrated Creative, Media and Digital approach just makes it easier for our partners and provides more opportunities to disrupt. Typically our clients don’t have 20+ people in their marketing team so an integrated agency streamlines the process, it just makes sense.

Duncan Shand: We want to work with brands that are hungry to grow and understand that they need to be brave, stand out and be willing to invest over the long term. In NZ many brands just move from one promotion to another promotion, we want to work with businesses that have long term ambitions to grow strong brands.

CB: You began as a successful digital/social agency but have developed into a full-service one in recent years. What does the offering look like now?

DS: We started as a creative digitally focused agency that was focused on driving results. While we’re still focused on those results we’ve developed into a much stronger all-round offering, which means we can work at a more strategic level for our clients developing brands, campaigns, digital and media. This interplay between different skills helps us create impactful, more thought through ideas quickly. It’s exciting.

CC: I can’t think of many NZ agencies that grew outward from digital core to full-service. Ultimately, it’s still all about entertaining, engaging work, combining storytelling with systematic thinking, and bringing ideas to life beautifully. Our offering just looks like the agency we think brands need today.

ED: At our core, we’re still about solving challenges through creativity. We go further than just understanding consumer behaviour –  we work hard to find the true enemy, to find the fight.

CB: What current projects are exciting you right now?

ED: We’re working on an evolution of two iconic retail brands (we can’t share details just yet) but this work will enable them to cement a distinctive leadership position in NZ.

We’re also re-branding a significant financial services client, evolving every touchpoint, brand campaign, full website redesign – the lot.

We’re continuing to work with Oceania to reimagine what retirement living looks like today with an eye to the future. They’re an amazing partner that is really making a difference in their sector.

We’re also working on some really interesting experimental work with our behaviour change clients like Blind Low Vision NZ and The Burnett Foundation.

CB: Where do you see YoungShand in ten years?

DS: Over 10 years our objective is to create 10 truly world class New Zealand brands. We live in a much more globalised world, so our local brands need to be able to foot it with the best international brands and win. Our objective is to ensure we have more successful NZ led brands out there on an international stage. This gets us excited about turning up everyday and creating strong bold work.

CB: What’s it like being an indie in the incredibly competitive NZ ad scene?

ED: It’s an exciting time. Over the past five years we’ve witnessed a rise of NZ indie agencies creating great work. We often look to great indies overseas too like Howatson & Co, Bear Meets Eagle of Fire, Mischief and Uncommon Studios for inspiration and they all have one thing in common: work that makes an impact, with an emotional truth and beautiful craft.

CC: There are a lot of benefits to being locally owned. We’re masters of our own destiny. No European overlords questioning the square meterage per employee or waiting for head office to sign off on new Macbooks for the design team.

DS: Most importantly, we get to choose who we work with, and ensure we have the right offering and talent to service our clients best. We are not beholden to global contracts. We have really focused on partnering with brands or organisations that have the same outlook and ambitions we do (note to self – remember to buy those new Macbooks).