3Verse — the tale of two suits and Ivan Johnson

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Two suits don’t an ad agency make.

Andrew Alexander once worked with Kay Orlandi at Saatchi & Saatchi; he left to start his own video production company. Orlandi, who had moved up to business unit leader at Saatchi & Saatchi, wanted to launch her own agency. The two soon combined forces to launch 3verse from a holiday flat in Cape Town owned by Alexander’s family. Then they found that no creative = no clients.

What to do? Ivan Johnson, executive creative director at Net#work BBDO, was scanning his Facebook timeline when he spotted a post from Orlandi announcing her leap of faith into the agency unknown. Johnson knew Orlandi from her pre-Saatchi, BBDO days, and had been toying with leaving BBDO. He popped an email to Orlandi. She asked if he were serious. He said no.

History in the making

The rest is ad-agency history in the making.

When I meet the trio they are drinking. Booze. Finally, I think, ad people keeping it Mad Men-real. Bursting my bubble just a little bit, it’s a wine-tasting with client Flagstone Wines. On the upside, nobody really bothers to spit any of it out. The journo in me settles right in.

Alexander and Orlandi launched 3Verse in January 2015. The agency went to market in March. By then, they’d realised they needed to land a creative if they were going to sell their offering to clients. Johnson came on board in May. Their first big client, a property developer, would finance the business for its first year. The project got put on ice.

Now the business had no cash, no active clients and three slightly desperate business partners.

Bumped into a contact

By July they would have had to close their doors, but then Johnson bumped into a contact at Accolade Wines (which owns Flagstone), and an introduction to his partners soon followed. 3Verse was back in business! Today, their client list includes a wide portfolio of Accolade Wines brands, Ooba (ATL) and Sanlam Investments (B2B).

The agency has progressed from the holiday flat to shared office space at The Bureaux in Woodstock to a small office in Claremont. Early next year, they plan to move into a larger space again.

According to Johnson, the agency consists of a small group of skilled professionals who have taken a hands-on approach to finding communication solutions. Clients won’t be fobbed off to a junior team [there is none — ed]. He questions big agency structures: what does an ECD do today, he asks ? He just went from meeting to meeting, until he hardly felt like a creative any more.

Black majority-owned

Johnson insists that the senior people sitting in client meetings should be the same people doing the work. He also point out that 3Verse is black majority-owned — important amid criticism that adland hasn’t successfully transformed in terms of both ownership and staff in creative departments. Johnson wants 3Verse to be able to compete with global networks locally — important if profits are to be retained in the country, he says — instead of being shipped offshore by holding companies.

Orlandi explains that the agency name is inspired by the Power of 3 (in this case, strategy, consumer understanding and creativity). The agency is positioning its offering around content — the media-agnostic kind — in that content is what positions brands as useful and/or meaningful. “This thinking is relevant to any communication, no matter the channel,” she says.

Orlandi says she has come to realise that everything ad agencies used to be needs to change. She and her team are still trying to work out what that means for their own business but hopes flexibility and evolving based upon client needs will eventually get them there.

No better time than now

It’s time adland learned to eat some humble pie, she asserts, recognising that agency people are no longer the only experts when it comes to advertising communications.

And as for launching an agency while the economy is hovering on recession? Johnson says there has never been a better time to launch an agency than now: as an industry, adland’s output was better in the ’90s than it is today. Space exists for agencies wanting to do good work again.

 

Herman Manson (@marklives) is the founder and editor of MarkLives.com. He was the inaugural Vodacom Social Media Journalist of the Year in 2011 and has, over his 20-year-plus career, contributed to numerous journals and websites in South Africa and abroad, including AdVantage magazine, Men’s Health, Computer World and African Communications.

 

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