FEATURE
THE FIRM
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to find a balance of true Asian
insight with a global execution.”
NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS
“The second thing we’re trying
to do is align ourselves with what is
the business outcome.” This echoes
TSLA's slogan: “We solve business
problems in entertaining ways.”
“Advertising is still wishy-washy
in a sense that we tend to talk about
awareness, retention, and affinity.”
he notes, recalling, “At a very early
stage when I was a 20 year old, we
started aligning ourselves with big,
juicy, complicated, business problems.
So we started diving straight in for,
'Why are you not moving shampoo?'
and 'what is the real problem in your
product?' I think clients appreciate
that a creative agency was a talking to
them about what business problems
are keeping them up late.”
PISSING OFF MEDIA AGENCIES
“We were channel-agnostic from
the start,” Ye confesses, recalling,
“We gained a certain notoriety for
pissing the media agencies off because
we had no respect for rate card. We
had no respect for media plans. We
thought that a media plan was little
more than a cage or a prison.”
adobo magazine | July - August 2016
He explains, “It's like you copy
and paste ads into a media plan as
opposed to actually questioning if
these work. I don’t think all the media
agencies appreciated young 20-yearolds questioning a multi-million dollar
media plan as to why it is spending
so much money on TV and print.
But the clients appreciate it. So we
gained that kind of appeal as well.”
WHO DARES WINS
By engaging in disruptive and
innovative practices once considered
no-nos such as eschewing media
plans, involving themselves in the
client's business problems, and going
parochial, TSLA keeps winning over
an increasingly impressive roster of
clients and expanding across the globe.
It was the not-so-little-and-not-sosecret advertising agency that could.
“We are an agency that handles
difficult briefs,” reveals Ye. Clients
come to them when other agencies
fail. “That’s usuall the phone call I get:
‘I’m working with these guys, I love
them, but they simply can’t crack it.”
Doubtless, Nicholas Ye
and his Secret Little Agency
will continue to shine with its
brilliance. “We saw diamonds
where other people saw coal.”