South Africa: Fran Luckin

As ECD she helped Ogilvy Jo’burg bag silver and bronze at Cannes Lions 2011, but Fran Luckin thinks not winning can be better for you. Despite this she aims to drag South Africa’s ad industry into the digital age and land a Titanium next year

Like many people, Fran Luckin, Ogilvy Johannesburg’s executive creative director, fell into advertising somewhat unexpectedly. After studying English literature Luckin was set for a life in academia because she “didn’t know what else to do with an English degree,” but on graduating felt that all she would be doing was “ripping other people’s work apart and not creating anything”. When South Africa’s AAA School of Advertising embarked on a recruitment drive at Luckin’s university her mother suggested she go for it and it was during the interview process that she discovered, actually, she knew more about advertising than she realised, and that her almost slavish attention to TV adverts as a child had paid off.  “It was kind of in my DNA, I guess,” laughs Luckin. “And I was a writer, and loved writing, so the interviewer invited me to study a postgraduate degree in copywriting.”

Winner doesn’t take it all

After stints at The Jupiter Drawing Room and TBWAHuntLascaris, Luckin landed at Ogilvy, where she has worked for eight years, and has overseen some great creative executions for clients, such as KFC, Cadbury’s and Exclusive Books, picking up a number of awards, including a silver and bronze at this year’s Cannes Lions festival. Despite good international award success, the 2011 Loeries weren’t as productive for Luckin and her agency and while, of course, everyone likes to win, she actually believes that sometimes not winning can be more beneficial.  “If you look at the Ogilvy group’s performance [at The Loeries] then we did well, but Ogilvy Jo’burg didn’t really shine,” she explains.  “And I think that can be a good thing.  One reason [we didn’t do well] is that they’ve made winning a Loerie a lot harder, which is great, but I also think that when you do well you never sit down and ask yourself why you did well, what made us win, and as a result you just assume you won simply because you’re good. That’s not a good assumption to make. When you don’t win, you need to sit down and examine why that is and what you should be doing better.”

What Luckin believes Ogilvy, and by extension, the rest of South Africa, should be doing better is digital and integrated advertising work. There is an arm of Ogilvy Johannesburg, called 1984, which is geared towards taking on less ‘traditional’ projects and which looks to explore new avenues and opportunities for clients, and Luckin describes them as “a bunch of really bright young guys who have experience in developing content [and who are] really great at fresh thinking and examining things for brands that go beyond a TV ad.”

Going digital

Integrating digital and less traditional projects has been tough for South Africa, in part because of the lack of internet bandwidth and also the lack of accessibility to it for a large part of the country. “We do have some catching up to do when it comes to digital,” she concedes, “and bandwidth has been a problem, but [digital thinking] also requires a cultural mind-shift, too, and it’s not been easy to achieve that.” Luckin thinks that a lot of clients in South Africa don’t believe that the internet impacts on consumers’ lives enough, that integrated campaigns can be too much work and that it’s just easier to do a TV ad because, “here a TV ad can still reach about 90 per cent of the population”. Luckin is not to be dissuaded though and aims for Ogilvy Johannesburg to be one of the first South African agencies to become a leading Cannes Titanium Lion contender. “There’s major work going on here to achieve that goal,” she states, “it’s one of the agency’s KPIs over the coming years. And that’s exciting; you’re constantly having to change and work to make it happen. It’s a challenge, and I love a challenge.”