Lee Simpson and Evan Roberts.
A spark once created between two creatives doesn’t need a flame to achieve reignition.
Evan Roberts, former TBWA Sydney CCO, and Lee Simpson, who was CEO at whiteGREY, are back in a new venture, Tightknit Studio.
They worked together at ClemengerBBDO Melbourne (Simpson as managing partner and Roberts as ECD), together creating NAB’s brand platform More Than Money and the celebrated Meet Graham for Transport Accident Commission.
“With Evan, he is a great guy to work with,” Simpson told AdNews.
“We've got straight back into our lockstep again. That happened quickly and was fun.
“You'd think maybe it would take a bit of time but we were immediately straight into it.
“We've worked on six or seven clients now and being busy helps, moving at a pace and working on a breadth of things.
“And I think we've always been those sort of practitioners where we like to be around the work. That's where the joy comes from, having those conversations and and, and shaping the thinking.
“Your fingerprints are more clearly on the things that you're creating.”
The duo see the world getting more challenging for organisations, tackling macro conditions, competitors with deeper pockets, increasingly diverse and demanding stakeholders and almost infinite content in the world of finite human attention.
Even the disrupters are getting disrupted.
Tightknit Studio is built to smooth the knots that companies face daily, “Making the complex beautiful”.
The name Tightknit is a promise of how agency works and what it delivers.
“We built what we call a creative practice, around these tight relationships,” Simpson said.
“There's deep collaboration with clients, and then Tightknit thinking.
“The value of what we can do our best is help guide clients through that complexity and partner with them through it.”
Tightknit works with clients in three versions: an agency model; working tightly with in-house teams; and as an outsourced Marketing function across the full Marketing mix.
“We like to go deep into businesses, help write their mission and their vision into their brand positioning,” Simpson said.
“When you look at the work that Evan and I have done when we worked together at Clems, and what we've prided ourselves on in our careers, is work that is not for the faint hearted.
“You have to keep the discipline there, because you only have to be just two degrees off and travel down the road a little bit, you turn around and you're nowhere near the strategy.
“You're nowhere near an idea, nowhere near the business objectives. Avoiding that sort of slippage is really important.
“It's so easy to just slightly go off course. One of our values is the will to go further to find the answer. And you know that that's probably a good reflection of that.
“First of all, understand the context. Clearly understand and then create the strategic direction. But then also the hard bit is making that happen from there.”
What’s more fun, the big agencies or working for yourself?
“Evan and I grew up and built our careers in network agencies and so I wouldn't want to be overly critical,” SImpson said.
“But the opportunity to create something together and for that to be unfiltered is pretty liberating.
“For me, personally, my last role was a really good opportunity to take a step towards it, because we had a local positioning that we created.
“We're now enjoying being able to work in a way that we want to work, setting the direction he way we want to set it.
“I do feel it's a different conversation with clients, particularly founder-led businesses. You have a founder to founder conversation.
“And I think that at all of the holding companies I've worked at agencies there is a deep passion for making their clients succeed.
“But there's just a different tone to a conversation when they know that the connection to your business is as deep as theirs is to their operation.
“That's something that's quite unique. There's a certain feeling that you have when you're launching your own thing.
“And the industry, the independent community, has been really supportive, and lots of people have connected to collaborate.
“Evan and I, we're a proven partnership and I've done some of our best work together, and hopefully done some half decent things since.
“But we are a product of our past. So you've got to show respect to the people who helped shape your careers, and we always tip our hat to them.”
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