Meet the ad world’s best ECDs, the creative pair behind Serviceplan’s innovation unit

‘We didn’t even have a desk’

To this day, Röppischer and Langgartner work closely together as a creative pair: Röppischer an art director, and Langgartner a copywriter. While this isn’t unheard of, it is striking that they’re the only creative pair in the top 10 of our ECD ranking this year.

“We still meet every morning,” says Röppischer, “and we still have plenty of routines that remain intact after 13 years”.

Most importantly, they still work very directly on briefs together. The pair heads up a unit within Serviceplan’s central holding company (rather than one of its subsidiary agencies) called Serviceplan Innovation. It has a specific mission: to find opportunities for boundary-pushing work that often pushes the limits of a traditional advertising brief.

“We took over the unit in 2015,” says Röppischer. “We didn’t even have a desk or somewhere to sit. It was a kind of startup within the company – very different to the market-facing units Serviceplan usually provides.” As for the work that group sniffs out, “We look for startups and meaningful projects that might not always have the money to pay an agency like ours, so sometimes we have individual arrangements with these companies. But they’re always companies with a good narrative to tell, which for awards shows is attractive… It’s also good for the talent who works here as a career boost.”

Good for awards indeed: the pair have netted 50 Cannes Lions, a D&AD Black Pencil, and a raft of other gongs – the ultimate proof of which is this number-one ranking, which tots up wins across major award shows over a 12-month period.

The team keeps things lean with a staff of only nine. Langgartner acknowledges that creatives of their stature could command a bigger crew, but says that it’s a right-sized team for creativity: “I hear a lot of from senior creatives that they then get caught up in managing. I don't like that. I like writing… I like being on the job and on doing the creative stuff.”

Röppischer says that this relationship between management and the work is one that creatives have to keep an eye on as they climb the greasy pole: “With a fancy title, the weight of your opinion gets a little bit heavier, and if you’re not aware of that, it’s not always in favor of the most creative output. You need to understand your own presence within in a team.”

‘We go right to the source code’

“We try not to have one-hit wonders,” Röppischer says; the team has built up an impressive global roster of clients that, though not all household names, provides open briefs for the possibility of genuine creative work across product and media – clients like Korean technology company Dot, work for whom has been reliably winning for Serviceplan.

Nimble startups are dream clients, Langgartner says, for marketers hungry for these kinds of briefs. “You can talk directly to the CEO and really influence them. What we do is not just traditional campaigns but product innovations and so on: disruptive stuff that goes deep into the structure or the business model, sometimes, of the company. So you sometimes need to talk to the CEO, directly, to convince them and then just execute it, rather than talking to the marketing department.”

And the diversity of work that pulls in is another draw: “Yes it’s nice to immerse yourself completely in this one client for a year or two. But we really like working on three or four different projects in completely different industries, with completely different directions at the same time”.

“We also go really deep into the execution,” Röppischer adds. “It’s never just a matter of, ‘here’s an idea’, then handing over to somebody with a big budget to take over. We go to factories; to the source code. We’re a hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves unit, and we do the work together with the collaborators.

That work includes a wide range of boundary-pushing creative, from the cheeky to the profound. In the former case, the pair look back fondly on ads for premium broadcaster Sky Sports, which aired snatches of Champions League games during ad breaks on free-to-watch channels. That was one of the Cannes Lions wins, and is an example of work greenlit directly by a CEO, they say, that might have been declared too complicated by a different approval process.

On the more profound end of the spectrum, the pair can point to work for environmental tech company Meter and non-profit organization Fukushima Saisei to produce a 350-page book made from decontaminated rice paper sourced at the site of Fukashima’s 2011 nuclear meltdown.

‘We don’t want to see our faces everywhere’

It would be facile to declare Röppischer and Langgartner’s team as one designed simply to win awards – though, Röppischer says, “it’s definitely part of the strategy”.

For a team focused on innovation, awards are something they have had to get used to. “I think with the time and experience we have now, we know exactly what awards are and what they’re not. We have, let’s say, a healthy relationship with it.”

The pair say they’re fastidious about sharing credit for the work – with credit lists of over 100 and their own names right at the bottom – and making sure that the awards mill doesn’t supplant the work as a focus of attention. It’s for that reason that they haven’t given an interview in a decade, despite all those award wins. “We always try to keep very low profiles,” Röppischer says. “We don’t want to see our faces everywhere… I don’t want to have an interview every week or put out my opinion on certain things every day. I like being in the engine room of what we do. It helps to keep a low profile. It helps that we are not competitive people. What we want with our work is to improve and have a body of work that makes sense.”

As Langgartner surmises, “It takes a lot of energy, the ‘ego game.’” And that endeavor – of avoiding the draws of ego in favor of the work – must surely be helped by working right next to the same person you’ve worked with since you were almost a child. “We share the same determination,” Langgartner goes on. “I think that’s what it is: the shared will to make really good stuff and not compromise the quality. We have different expertise and different ways to get there. We know how the other works, and we know when to also leave the other alone. It’s trust, but on a very emotional level; accepting the realities, but still having the feeling that it works better together than on your own.”