Saatchi and Saatchi girl

Who is this? Why is she on my blog? This is from Saatchi and Saatchi...

"Creativity in Japan was at rock bottom. This was (still is) the second largest advertising market in the world and yet international creative competitions were rarely won. Almost all the advertising was formulaic and relied on the use of celebrities endorsing the product; there was little attempt to build long-term brand values and much of the advertising was so similar it was impossible to identify the brand from the campaign.

Every client and Agency copied what the other was doing as if they were too scared to do something different.

'We are saying that to be different is to be good. We want to be the nail that sticks up. It’s the only way of ensuring that the advertising cuts through the morass of meaningless messages,' was my mantra at the time.

...

We had no receptionist in the Agency. Greeting you with a kiss and a hug was Mayu, a DJ and Muse; a spunky girl dressed is if she had just come from a night out in Shinjuku. She DJ'd the music that pounded through the agency. Her task was to make everyone happy. All day she walked around the agency, wandering into meetings, sitting at someone's desk, showing visitors around the gallery. There was no receptionist’s desk. Her cordless switchboard could work even when she was outside the building. On more than one occasion a new business prospect has come in because they have been inspired by the way Mayu had answered the phone.

But this wasn’t her only job. When MTV started broadcasting in January 2001 they signed Mayu up as a VJ to host a weekly request show. She became one of the stars of the channel.

The gallery set the tone acting as a creative stimulus to everyone who worked at Saatchi & Saatchi, providing a constant source of inspiration, both from the work and the artists who exhibited there.

As the Gallery was open to the public, it meant that the agency wasn’t isolated.

'Isn’t remarkable?' I said in an interview. 'Here we are, attempting to connect and communicate with the consumer every day, yet we close ourselves off behind concrete walls. We want to be an open space that everyone can come in to'

[Ed: I just love this idea]