Jamie Mollart, Client Services and Strategy Director, Rock Kitchen Harris
Jamie Mollart is the Client Services and Strategy Director at Rock Kitchen Harris, a leading Midlands integrated agency. He's also a member of IPA Client Services Advisory Group, a Trustee of Leicestershire Cares and an Author and Producer to boot, so to say we were pretty excited to spend 5 minutes with him and talk all things strategy, advertising and his personal work is an understatement!
- Jamie, tell us a little more about your experience, expertise and role at RKH...
Half of my colleagues will be hanging on my every word here, going ‘what does he actually do?’. For years my wife thought I just took people out for dinner, so probably she’ll be interested too.
I’ve been at RKH for 17 years, starting as an Account Manager, working my way up to Director in 2012, and then bought it with my two fellow shareholders as an MBO in 2013.
I’m Client Services and Strategy Director here at RKH, so I directly manage the Account Management and Strategy teams. In many ways I’m responsible for the public facing components of the agency and am the ultimate point of escalation for all our clients.
- What projects are you most proud of during your time at RKH?
I’ve been here so long it’s hard to pick out specific examples, but I think one of the things that I’m most personally proud of is setting up our Strategy and Planning department. It’s not something that is common for regional agencies and has really galvanised our creative output across all departments.
I think operationally I’m very proud of how we handled Covid as an agency. We prioritised the staff and worked hard behind the scenes to keep it as stress free as we could for them all, being as transparent and honest as we could while protecting them from the most gruelling elements.
In terms of work, I think the ones that stand out for me most are the ones with strong insights behind them. One of my favourites is a campaign we did for IKEA to launch their new loan scheme. It played on the idea that no matter what you go into IKEA for you always end up spending proportionally more in the marketplace than you do on the things you set out to buy. It was a clever creative execution as well, breaking the offer down and making the offer simple, combined with a lovely visual of a towering trolley of items that you can buy in the marketplace.
My favourite TV ad is one we did for Topps Tiles a few years ago. It was based around the idea that people had an incorrect perception of their brand positioning, so we set a challenge for people saying, ‘think you know Topps Tiles, think again,’ and then demonstrated the breadth and quality of their ranges in an aspirational way. It was great fun to shoot as well; we built beautiful room sets in a studio in Manchester and even managed to shoot a garden room in there. Sarah Beanie did the voice over and I remember her being the most incredible consummate professional, smashing out a 10, 15 and 30 second voiceover in one take for each.
That said I’m particularly proud of the store roll out of the new Vision Express brand. It was an enormous amount of work in a short time period, made even more challenging by the fact that they bought Tesco opticians at the same time meaning their estate grew massively during the process.
- What are the main challenges you're expecting in the industry over the next few years?
I feel like it’s very predictable to say AI, but I’m going to have to. I’m confident that we’ll settle into a collective working pattern with it, but anything this potentially seismic is always going to cause uncertainty. I’m old enough in the tooth to remember how digital was going to be the end of advertising and then the same with social media. AI is the next thing that is going to end everything, but I think as an industry we’re adaptive and smart enough to work our way through it until it just becomes another tool we use. I could be wrong of course and we’re actually letting Skynet loose.
The other biggest challenge we face as an industry is the ongoing volatility of world politics which has an inevitable knock-on effect on economic conditions here at home. Anything that inspires nervousness in the consumer’s minds inevitably has a knock-on effect to the ad industry.
- What are RKH doing to stay ahead of the creative curve?
We invest heavily in people. It’s what drives our business and makes what we do fresh and exciting. We try to employ the best people and then invest in training to keep them engaged with a progressive mindset.
We encourage sharing of ideas and develop a culture where people are allowed to push themselves and make creative leaps. We have working parties who look into new developments, such as AI, and examine how we can integrate them into our day jobs.
Because we are a privately owned business we can take risks, and over the years we’ve been good at taking the right ones; we got into digital very early, we saw the benefit of genuine UX so we built a user lab, we thought our agency needed a planning department so we built one from scratch.
Most importantly though we have a very inclusive culture which allows people to be themselves and express themselves without fear, and fundamentally it’s freedom that allows creativity to flourish.
- You're a producer and author as well. Tell us more about these and the impact these have had, if any on your role and time at RKH...
Probably the other way round to be honest. Advertising is about storytelling. It’s about getting to the nub of truth at the centre of an issue and then working out the best possible way to present a solution to an audience. The same applies to novels and films too. Advertising has taught me to be exacting in word choice, and laser focussed on finding the human truth in something.
I’m trying not to sound pretentious here, but I think of myself as a storyteller who just works in several different mediums. It’s all about using words to generate an emotional response and to create a narrative; it really doesn’t matter if it’s advertising, a film, or a novel, it’s all fundamentally the same.