#AOTYAwards MY 2021 spills: The Clan finds success in courage and sensibility in the new age

The Clan prides itself on being more than just a creative agency but rather agents of change. Aside from its capabilities in creative, branding, influencer, strategy, film, and media, Clan expanded into the experiential tech space through its sister agency EDT. Among the list of brands it has worked with include Grab, Toyota, Maybank, Nespresso, and Tourism Malaysia.

The agency's tenacity over the years paid off, winning it the bronze award for Creative Agency of the Year at A+M's Agency of the Year Awards 2021. It also won gold in Most Effective Use – Launch/Re-Launch and was the finalist for Most Creative – Specific Audience, Most Effective Use – Events (Physical / Virtual), and Most Effective Use – Video.

Clan’s business chief Syed Nasir (pictured right) and chief creative Casey Loh (pictured left) tell A+M what is needed for agencies to succeed in this day and age and ways to strengthen the client-agency relationship.

This interview is done as part of MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s winners' and finalists’ interview series for AOTY Awards 2021. To find out more about the awards, click here.

Tell us about your agency and what makes it special?

Syed and Loh: Clan was founded to challenge how an agency is managed and how it manages its people. Our very essence lies in taking chances and pivoting quickly, altering the agency according to the needs of our clients and the industry. We’ve added media to our mix, video production to our teams, expanded on experiential tech through EDT (our sister agency), and completely overhauled the agency to move as quickly as the industry changes. It’s in our spirit to be experimental and have an insatiable appetite for doing things better.

Over the span of more than eight years in existence, Clan has seen shifts in not just its client base but also its scope of work. We started off doing more social media and digital work but have also gone on to launch massive nationwide ATL campaigns. Now we’re aiding up-and-coming local brands to grow from the ground up, providing brand consultancy and rollout strategies. But one thing remains constant: our culture. “We the People'', is our mantra and our guiding principle, where we put people first in the way we work with clients, the way we answer briefs, and the way we inspire our teams.

This is why we’ve launched “ClanAway”, our remote workcation initiative where we send teams to remote locations to work together for two weeks, every quarter, every year. 30 Clan employees have called a Langkawi villa home in the third quarter of 2021 and we’re aiming to send more in 2022. It’s been proven to foster stronger bonds, create better briefs, craft better concepts, and bring back collaboration in a way that full-time remote work cannot. In a time when the creative industry is facing its greatest challenge, change is crucial. And if we can’t change people’s point of view about work, we can at least change their view. 

What do you think is needed for agencies to succeed in today’s day and age?

Syed and Loh: A fair bit of courage and a lot of sensibilities. And we don’t mean just brave ideas rooted in strategy. That’s a given when it comes to the work. We believe that agencies should also throw caution to the wind, provided they know where the wind is blowing. They have to be willing to challenge the brief but have the data to back that pivot. They have to guide clients out of the safe zone and yet avoid walking them into the dangers of “cancel culture”.

How does an agency do that? It has to come from a place where they understand what a client is going through but also have the freedom to express themselves. Empathy is as important as innovation. Where brands and agencies are jumping into NFTs, we’re tempering that approach with our own metaverse-enabled project with our sister agency, EDT. We’re also going to jump into an NFT collab with an exciting local brand for something that we’ve taken months to work on.

We get courage from the talents we bring through the doors but we get sensibility from dipping our toes into businesses, through smart partnerships that make us more than just an agency.

We’re playing client, consultancy, and innovator all at the same time. So while courage asks us to go further, sensibility tells us the limit.

But this approach is not for all agencies - we have to be at the right size and have the right mindset for it. This goes back to the need for agencies to have the courage to try something new yet have the sensibility which can only come from having context and insight.

How do you attract the right talent for your teams?

Syed and Loh: It’s probably harder to attract talent than it is to meet a one-week deadline for a 360º integrated pitch. We get a lot of inquiries through our website and our social media platforms but the quality of applicants do not always match our expectations. We’ve tried different ways to attract talents from ads to headhunters and even through friends and peers. But nothing beats doing good work and getting great talents out there to notice us. The awards are good but they don’t say enough about the agency. This is why we think our ClanAway initiative will be the best testbed to get talents to join us - see who Clan is like in its real form, as human-like as possible. Here’s a short intro video about ClanAway:

The idea of ClanAway is more than just a carrot that we dangle at talents. It’s proof of our philosophy that while the world has changed in many ways, working together and sharing a laugh over a brainstorm beats any form of tech you can throw between people. We believe that our culture of putting people together in a relatively short period of time to talk about the work makes us the right kind of talent that we were looking for in the first place.

The only difference is, that they don’t know they have the ability to fit in until we make them fit in. So while we continue our search for media hackers, creative leaders, entrepreneurial thinkers, and tech specialists, we will continue to build on our culture and hope that it will be the biggest pull for exciting talents out there.

What do you think makes for great client-agency relationships today?

Syed and Loh: The foundations of any long-term client-agency relationship are set in the fundamentals of understanding and trust. It takes a lot of empathy for agencies to truly know the client’s business and their daily struggles. And it takes a lot of trust from the client to relinquish control to the agency in hope that the best version of the campaign comes to life. Then there is the time it takes for both parties to just sit together and talk through the challenges and opportunities. It’s the agency’s role to be proactive and insightful - providing intel and strategy to the client’s brief. But that can’t be achieved without the client being fully transparent about the mechanics of the business.

We’ve gone to great lengths to always have weekly and biweekly updates and meetings with our clients, spotting trends and threats ahead of time. That proactiveness in taking a deeper understanding of the client’s business has helped us forge long-term relationships with the brands that we’ve worked on while ensuring that we continue to chart new ways to work together.

An agency must be willing to put its best people forward to make headways in changing systems, processes, and working relationships for the better - which sets Clan apart as it’s a founder-led agency that sees decision-makers dig deep into the day-to-day workings of the agency. This is where trust is given but we make it our business to understand the client’s business, every step of the way. And when both understanding and trust work hand-in-hand, we were lucky enough to also help our clients score some awards along the way too, a nice reminder of the strong bonds both agency and client have built together. 

What capabilities will you build on as we head into 2022?

Syed and Loh: With the end of the pandemic in sight, we’ll be looking at strengthening our Branding and Rebranding capabilities as we see a lot of need for certain brands to pivot. It’s not just in a logo or tagline enhancement. We see the need to apply design thinking into the net phase of the industry - the metaverse.

To ensure that we have the right capabilities to consult with our clients in that realm, we’ll be embarking on developing our own platforms and producing virtual merchandise for Web 3.0. We’ll be working with industry experts on this and leverage the skillsets of our sister agency, EDT. We have also brought in 3D animators into the agency to help bring these to life quicker, visualising our thoughts in real-time. There are also smart partnerships that will help drive this change as we apply virtual world ideas in real-life brands that we will be co-owners of, giving us insight into what lies ahead and the freedom to explore.

These are brands that range from an agrotech business to a special needs school for children. Learning and coaching will also be a key discipline we will be venturing into through an HR tech platform that we are developing with EDT, aimed to not only assess talents but also define data points that will study the behaviour and mindsets of talents out there. While all these may seem random to an agency, we feel it is very much in our DNA to be as experimental as possible to realise the true potential of our people.