Creative Profile: Matthieu Elkaim

ECD Matthieu Elkaim tells Tim Cumming he likes it hard, fucking hard. Work, that is. That’s the biggest lesson he’s learned in a short but stellar career that’s seen him take the creative reins of BBDO Paris at the age of just 32. For a guy who claims to just want to have fun, he seems to take this creativity stuff pretty seriously… 

For Matthieu Elkaim, executive creative director at BBDO Paris, there are two basic human needs that shape and provide for all the others – escape and fun. “I was a very bad student,” he laughs, looking back to his early years at school and college. “My priorities were to play with my friends outside, to not respect the hours, and just to have fun.” His older sister, of course, was a straight-A student, “always perfect, and when I grew up I decided to be different,” he adds. “By that I mean, the black sheep. The less I respected the rules the better I was. It’s one of my motivations. It’s a part of why I decided to work in advertising. I just wanted to have fun.”

An offer he couldn’t refuse

After three internships, including one with Publicis at age 18, he eventually joined TBWAParis as a junior copywriter in 2001. He was new to the French capital. “I don’t have a Parisian soul,” he says. “I grew up about 30km from Paris, in a small new city; not very exciting.” His father, however, worked in the industry as a media buyer for Publicis’ group of companies. “He found me my first internship. I remember him always reading the newspapers to check the adverts. So from when I was very young I was interested in the media, communication, the whole business.”

Now in his mid-30s, Elkaim has risen to the top of the Parisian advertising scene via key creative partnerships, as copywriter alongside some of the city’s best art directors – including Emmanuel Bougneres and Pierrette Diaz. In 2012 he was invited to leave DDB Paris, where he had partnered with senior art director Diaz for the best part of eight years, to take up the reins as ECD at CLM BBDO.

“I was talking to Mother and Fallon in London about a CD job, and some other agencies in the US,” he remembers, “but when BBDO suggested I take the role of ECD, I was 32 years old. It was such a chance to get the keys of the creative department. CLM, the French agency, has always been a beautiful, great agency with such a heritage – very big, popular, smart campaigns – and BBDO was certainly the best network in the world. The mix of the two – I couldn’t refuse it. As simple as that.”

He is currently ECD of both CLM and Proximity, with a brief to reinforce and strengthen the creative department at Proximity, and to create bridges between both agencies, with more integration. Which means overseeing around 400 people and 70 creatives.

“BBDO is a fantastic house, really, like a family, but without any bullshit words,” he says. “Even at the network level, I can access [global CCO] David Lubars very quickly if I need to ask something. It’s a very friendly network. What I love is the good mix between international and local accounts. That’s pretty cool.”

The local and the global are two engines of creativity that demand very different styles of driving, Elkaim believes.

“Great creativity is definitely local,” he says. “It is very hard today to create something really outstanding at a global level. There are too many decisions, too many people to please, and suddenly the common denominator becomes the lowest. It is very important to remain a strong local agency, because it is definitely the best way to make the most outstanding work. Working only for global accounts is very interesting, especially for the strategy and brand platforms, but in terms of pure creativity – it’s hard. Very hard.”

The theoretician of creativity

Elkaim’s first industry mentor was Eric Vervroegen, CD at TBWAParis, where Elkaim was junior copywriter – the baby of the agency, who grew a scratchy beard to look older. There, he worked with Emmanuel Bougneres on campaigns for the likes of Sony PlayStation, McDonald’s, SNCF, and Amnesty International.

“I started to really know this job in terms of involvement, hard work and creativity, with Eric Vervroegen,” Elkaim says. “What’s really important is that he was a theoretician of creativity. He was able to look at campaigns and say: this will win gold, this will win silver, this will win bronze, this will win a Grand Prix. And he was right. It was crazy, really. He was very demanding, in terms of art direction. He told me to work harder and to never be really satisfied,” he laughs.

“When I started in this job, I had this feeling it was pretty easy and cool, but the reality is very different. It’s a fucking hard job. You need to work a lot to find the great ideas. It’s not just waking up and going to the bathroom and thinking, ‘Aaah!’ That’s not the job. [Realising that] was a very important moment in my career.”

At the same time, Elkaim was ambivalent about Vervroegen’s prize-oriented approach. “It wasn’t really the advertising that I loved, it was very Cannes-oriented, award-oriented. It was surprising, beautiful, a breakthrough, but not in a good way. Very strong images. I was very interested in the smart advertising I saw in the UK, the clever concepts. I was more conceptual. I love this dimension in my job, and I believe good advertising is a very strong visual with a very smart concept. And the concept was lacking in the Parisian scene.”

At the age of 24 he moved to DDB, still a junior copywriter, and teamed up with senior art director Pierrette Diaz. The creative culture that he found there was very different – just what he was looking for. “It’s the culture of observation. It’s all about human behaviour, and simple observation and how you can play with that and build a concept all around this little thing. For me, advertising is so smart when it is like that, because it talks to people.”

He also won his first Cannes metal – two golds – for a print campaign for Volkswagen’s commercial vehicles, and the following year, with the Shox poster campaign for Nike. “Two beautiful brands. I’ve discovered, as I grew up in advertising, that I love brands. I love brand strategies. I love to think for the brand, not just doing creativity in itself. It gives me the anchor. You always have to take into account the brand issues, its strategy.”

Surviving death by iced tea

Over the next five years Elkaim rose to become a senior creative at DDB Paris, but those twin drives for fun and escape still had their hold. “I don’t like comfort. I love to escape. I hate my comfort zone. The best way to stay creative is to put yourself in danger. Out of the comfort zone. After five years I said to myself, is this it for my whole life? No! I don’t want this feeling of having to pass an exam every year, with Cannes Lions, it’s impossible. I want something more.”

What he got was the Unilever account for Lipton tea, via Nick Bell at DDB London, who had become worldwide CD for Lipton, and appointed Elkaim as European CD on the project. His colleagues registered surprise, then concern. “Everyone looked at us with big eyes,” he says. “It was a case of, OK guys, you’re dead, your career is over. It was a death sentence.” He laughs. “At this moment, I knew it was a good choice.”

It was no death sentence, of course, but it wasn’t an easy ride. “It was really hard work… We invented a new language and a new creative platform, and it worked well. But to do what we really wanted to do with our vision, it took two years of very hard work. The last year on Lipton Ice Tea, we established a good concept with two fantastic and very cool TV commercials, and with this, we moved the brand from nothing to something. It was such an experience, but at the end I was exhausted, really exhausted. When it’s Unilever, it’s really tough – you have to convince so many people in so many markets.”

By 2012, he was ready to make another move. “It was the same drive – I wasn’t having fun. After three years with Unilever, I needed that, I needed to feel again. This job, it is so cool and fun, it is about ideas, but at that moment, I felt like I was a machine. I wanted a new project, a new challenge.” Potential moves to the US, UK and even Australia were tested out, but it was the invitation from BBDO that sealed his next move. He took a couple of close friends with him – Olivier Lefebvre and Benjamin Marchal, creative directors at DDB Paris. “I wanted to build this project with people I like and can collaborate with,” he says.

The bottom line – is the line

Elkaim had barely warmed up his chair at BBDO before he was pitched into a decidedly 21st-century bout of brand damage limitation, after a naked man was left in the background of a shot of kids modelling threads on a beach for online retailer La Redoute. Oh dear. The resulting internet furore could have been a disaster. “It was all about crisis communication, based on a real fucking bad buzz – a real mistake,” says Elkaim. The solution was to ’fess up, create ‘fails’ in 14 other La Redoute images, and invite the public to hunt them down, with the winner getting dressed from head to toe in La Redoute gear. Job done.

“We told the client, guys you made a mistake,” he says, “and the best way to become human for a brand is to accept mistakes, to accept that you can make mistakes. It is, after all, what defines humanity from a robot.” The strategy bagged a PR gold at Cannes.

A live weather billboard for La Redoute was another success. Operating day and night for a month, the interactive poster delivered live weather reports alongside models wearing appropriate clothing. Fashion and weather were fused into a grand narrative, and in the centre of Paris. What’s not to like?

“One of my goals when I joined BBDO was to explain that the world had changed and that we needed to embrace the new media and new kinds of approaches,” he says. “Not just digital – we didn’t need to become a digital agency, that is a fucking mistake – but we needed to be an agency of today, which would include those platforms.”

To achieve this, he directed his teams back to their own personal digital usage. “I’d say, guys, think about the life you are living right now. You use the internet every day, your laptop, your Apple watch, your smart phone.” That was the line he wanted them to follow. But below that line lay a more permanent, heavy bottom line, one that ran through the whole of advertising. “Even if we have access to new technology, and many ways to broadcast and play with the media, one thing remains true,” he says, “the role of the good idea. What is the line? What is the line at the end of your fucking idea? What is the concept? Explain. It’s a concept before it becomes an integrated campaign, so what is your great idea? The message, the creative concept, the idea remains fantastically true in our job today. And that makes all the difference.”

All you need is love

For Elkaim, what excites him today is that it’s the clients who are now calling for more creativity, for a new kind of activation, a new kind of approach. It’s a two-way street of innovation in communication – all to focus the attention of the people in the middle – the consumers. “We need to be better and even more creative than we were before,” says Elkaim. “What’s great is that clients are starting to understand that. I am passionate about this job and what makes the big difference today is that the great agencies, the great campaigns, come from passionate people, passionate creatives and from passionate agencies. Passion is key in our industry, we need to love advertising to make it well.”