Headed up by managing and strategy director Victoria Moffatt, the unit will have 20 staff and will, according to Saatchi & Saatchi chief executive Lee Daley, be a research and business development unit for a strategic approach
Saatchi says that Industry @ Saatchi is designed to deliver strategic futures for clients at an accelerated pace of development, with each client contact working with the unit for as little as a day or as long as a year.
Moffatt joins Saatchis from the WPP Group where she worked across a range of sectors and companies in London, Chicago and San Francisco. She spent time at Ogilvy, JWT and Millward Brown among others working above and below-the-line.
As well as in-house staff from across the global Saatchi & Saatchi network, it will draw on people from the fields of music, film, art and business to help deliver bottom-line results.
According to Daley: "While we continue to push our world-class leadership in brand communications, clients are faced with ever-increasing short-term pressures to deliver in often turbulent market conditions.
"The need for fresh thinking and challenging marketing innovation has never been greater. Industry @ Saatchi is constructed to deliver breakthrough not incremental innovation."
He added that the new consultancy is designed around a process that demands highly collaborative creative relationships dynamics with clients.
The launch is being seen as a way for the agency to begin to develop new skills as the industry's traditional bread-and-butter 30-second broadcast commercial comes under threat from media proliferation and new technology such as personal video recorders.
According to Moffatt: "We want to get them out of their pin-striped suits and into a new modus operandi."
"We want people to play and to think and to harness their corporate imagination for very serious ends," she said.
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