The Saatchi Experiment: Being Saatchi

Posted by Tom Ritchie on February 4th, 2011

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This is a really cool article that we picked up on today. We have asked the instigator behind the story to write this in his own words. The following story is by MisterCastro, later to be revealed.

“BEING SAATCHI”

On January 31st Saatchi & Saatchi opened their Summer Scholarship competition on their Facebook site, the first challenge of which was to create a Twitter account and create as much buzz about it as possible, through tweeting, retweets, mentions – all the cool things that people do on Twitter. On 1st Feb, I started The Saatchi Experiment using @Saatchi_grads as my Twitter account.

I felt that Saatchi & Saatchi had sold the grads a bit short on their first brief. It seems that, for one of the world’s biggest creative advertising agencies, not a lot of creativity had gone into writing it, and certainly not much of that got passed onto their aspiring grads. Don’t get me wrong – Twitter is relevant, it’s influential, it’s important for marketing. And to Saatchi’s credit, they say that they will not just be marking on number of followers, but on ‘social influence’ (meaning they’ll take into account tweets, followers, retweets, mentions and presumably press). But what I felt they should be doing is encouraging more creative thought, not telling people to get creative and leaving it at that. So I took it upon myself to write the tweets S&S should be writing, and people started to believe I was them. Kind of.

Young grads want to work for Saatchi & Saatchi. Old grads want to to work for Saatchi & Saatchi. Hell, I want to work for Saatchi & Saatchi. But I think it is more important to get young creatives like myself to create, to discuss, debate, research, doodle, design and dig each others stuff and work together than set them a brief a wait in the sidelines. As I say on my blog, I’m not a subvertist, I’m not trying to undermine the competition. In 4 days I’ve created press, I’ve attracted the attention of influential UK ad men and bloggers and I’ve received huge amounts of help from international agencies. All these people have read my story, and also more importantly are now following the grads that follow me. And that’s awesome.

The cat might nearly be out of the bag. But until then…just play along. Follow @Saatchi_grads, let the world know we exist and let’s see what happens.

mistercastro (aka Dan Castro)
mistercastro.co.uk