Kate Stanners on her Picture Perfect Career

K ate Stanners, Saatchi & Saatchi’s global chief creative officer, modestly questions our assertion that she deserves her place at shots’ round table of advertising knights, believing she’s more Dory the forgetful fish from Finding Nemo, than industry warrior.

Yet she would never have got where she is today, and survived a long career in advertising’s often ruthless environment, without an impenetrable armour of emotional resilience and personal strength. Thick skin helps too: “I’m probably still standing because I’m quite tough,” she admits. Naturally chatty, charismatic and down-to-earth, she exudes a kind of energetic bounce that mirrors the spring of wavy hair that tumbles around her face. This energy is definitely a part of the reason Stanners has reached the industry’s higher echelons and is now one of advertising’s most powerful women.

She has used this power for good. Proving her tireless commitment to hiring diverse creative teams and reversing gender bias; last year she drew attention to the gap between female and male commercial directors at the New Directors Showcase, and in April signed Saatchi up to the Free The Bid project (for equality in bidding for female directors). As a result, Saatchi client and beauty giant Procter & Gamble has promised to use a more equal spread of men and women directors to helm their commercials in the future.

As well as luck and good instincts, Stanners cites inspirational colleagues as key to her success. She has worked alongside some of the industry’s greats, including legendary copywriter Dave Trott [below], whose teachings she continues to follow to this day: “He really was someone that just taught me pretty much everything that I still hold true now,” she says. “I just thought he was amazing – how he thought and how he taught.”

Above: Dave Trott, one of Stanners' own heroes. 

How to make dad proud

She co-founded boutique agency St Luke’s in 1995 with Dave Buonaguidi, Naresh Ramchandani, Tim Hearn and David Abraham, whom she claims to have “sucked dry [for] their knowledge” on how to produce popular pieces and get out of sticky situations quickly. For instance, one time the team were about to pitch at 10 Downing Street, when Stanners realised that she had left all their work behind. They were due to meet the then prime minister, Tony Blair, along with chancellor Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson – not the sort of people you can ask to wait while you nip back to the office. “I just suggested that we sort of wing it,” she remembers. “And you could see my team look at me, horrified.” But what else could they do? So wing it they did… and they managed to win the account.

“I think I’ve often realised that you can do whatever you’ve set out to do, no matter what barrier is thrown at you, that there’s always another way,” says Stanners. “And I won’t accept that you can’t do something. It becomes about utter determination. I think that’s one of the most important traits of creative people: resilience.”

“I rang my dad, ‘I’ve decided to take this job at Saatchi’s.’ He said ‘Thank fuck for that. At least that’s a name I can pronounce and it’s not stupid.’”

Obstacles are inevitable in any long career, but they can also be stepping stones that pave the way forward. Taking risks and failing is as much a part of the learning process as success. Following St Luke’s, Stanners founded agency Boy Meets Girl S&J with Andy Law and David Pemsel. Although that didn’t work out it propelled her towards a job at Saatchi – a name to make her dad, a copywriter, proud. After accepting the position of ECD in 2005, she says, “I rang my Dad up, who worked in the industry, and told him, ‘I’ve decided to take this job.’ He said, ‘Where?’ And I said, ‘Saatchi’s’. ‘Thank fuck for that. At least that’s a name that I can pronounce and it’s not stupid.’ I said, ‘Thank you Dad. That’s great.’”

Initially she was reluctant to enter the business under the shadow of her father. However, after a placement at BBH changed her mind, she joined GGT, where she was placed on the Cadbury’s account – which her dad had worked on in the 60s and 70s – so she turned to him for help, if somewhat begrudgingly: “When I was first given the brief, I thought, ‘Shit, why do I have to work on something that is so associated with my Dad?’”

Above: Cadbury’s Girl in the Bath. 

But in the end she made it her own, on her own. She drew on her personal experience of chocolate indulgence – eating a Flake, her favourite chocolate bar, in the bath with a glass of white wine (“which I wasn’t allowed to have in the ad”), to transform the phallically-inclined ads into one of the most iconic campaigns of the 90s, Cadbury’s Girl in the Bath. 

First to catch the viral bug

It was just the beginning of Stanners’ revolutionary body of work. She is behind some of the most experimental spots of the last two decades, such as T-Mobile’s Life’s for Sharing campaign. Beginning with Dance, a spot that features a flashmob shocking commuters by suddenly getting down in unison at London’s Liverpool Street station, the series kickstarted a trend for creative fluidity. “We didn’t realise [what] we were doing, but we were instinctively making things rather than making films,” says Stanners. “By doing that, we made experiences. And once we’d started that, we started playing with it and we were open to where it went. That was the magic.” The spot went down in history for its groundbreaking approach, going viral long before ‘going viral’ was a fully formed marketing strategy, and teaching the team the importance of PR-ing an ad. 

Above: T-Mobile, Dance

Looking back over her career, she sees the importance of teamwork as one of the things that has evolved most. “I think there’s been a change from the era of the cult of the rock star to a more collaborative, collegiate approach,” she says. “I think the stars of the future are really going to be people who enjoy collaboration, the ones that recognise that this sense of self, ego and ownership will benefit from opening up. That feels like a different approach.” Perhaps the industry’s leaders no longer aspire to be placed on pedestals but instead want to seem more relatable, more human. Which, Stanners believes, can only equate to greater diversity and wider representation. “I think the symbolism of what being great means has changed. It has becomes more [about] invisible teamwork. You can see the benefit when you collaborate with people with different skills, different knowledge and so forth.”

“…you can do whatever you’ve set out to do, no matter what barrier is thrown at you… there is always another way.”

What hasn’t changed is Stanners’ love for the industry. She seems as enthusiastic as she did when she first started on this journey; she’s still inspired by the creatives around her and still has the same insatiable curiosity. Even the restrictions currently imposed on agency creatives – increased client demands, tighter budgets and shrinking time frames – excite her. She thinks the tight constraints breed creativity rather than stifle it.

It’s always been about ideas and the collaborative creative spirit for Stanners. And she’s carrying on that philosophy as she sets her sights on making advertising more diverse – making it about the work, not the people. When she accepted the job at Saatchi, “the wonderful Bob Isherwood just said, ‘Look, we are an ideas company, we’re not an advertising agency.’ And they had me at that."