"I don't want to participate in anything that bores me".

Werbewoche.ch: Nicolas Hostettler. Since a few weeks, you are Managing Director - or conservatively speaking: Managing Director - of Sir Mary. The position was created for you; previously, you worked at the agency as Strategy Director and member of the Executive Board. What tipped the scales for the promotion?

Nicolas Hostettler: Good question (laughs). Until now, as you rightly said, I was in charge of our strategy team - that was a very exciting task, combining more traditional advertising and digital topics. But because I'm also a member of the management team, I've also been able to exchange ideas with my colleagues on an ongoing basis: What does the agency need? How can we optimize our processes? And a few months ago, it became clear to us that there now had to be someone who could take over the day-to-day management of the agency. After all, we've grown a lot ...

If I am informed correctly, Sir Mary currently has 40 employees.

It even goes up to 45, and that of course needs different structures and different processes than five years ago, shortly after the founding. We don't want to get into the typical processes of large agencies, we don't want to establish a bureaucracy. In my opinion, our special spirit is still the main reason why customers come to us - but we have to optimize our organizational framework. And that's what I'm responsible for now.

Does that go together? Scaling, structured process management - and still a "spirit" of the beginning?

The good thing is that I am very lazy (laughs). My mother always told me, "Nicolas, it's insane what a minimalist you are!" It sounds strange, but I really believe that the combination of minimalism and ambition is just right for my new role. On the one hand, I don't want to be a part of anything, don't want to create anything that bores me. On the other hand, I don't feel the need to create complex processes at all, but always want to keep everything as "lean" as possible - so that we remain faster than most of our competitors.

Do you want Sir Mary to grow even further - or are you keen to maintain the status quo?

We don't have to keep growing at any price; scaling as an end in itself has never been our strategy. Nor, by the way, when we launched five years ago: We never set a target and said, "So, by the end of 2022, we have to have more than 40 people on the team!"

... but the agency has grown organically, with your budgets.

Yes. If you want to make really good stuff that you can be proud of afterwards and that really works, then today you need many different specialists working closely together. And if more and more exciting brands want to work with you, then the team grows quite automatically. Our approach is also hard to implement in a small team.

Can you elaborate on that?

We are active in different fields that belong together for us today. We are a creative and media agency and follow the credo "digital first" in everything we do. Sounds simple, but it's incredibly complex to implement. "Preservation" is the completely wrong word to describe our approach. Fortunately, we are constantly changing in order to guarantee the best and most up-to-date offer for our customers.

"Ageism" is in order neither one way nor the other, yet one can hardly avoid addressing your age: at 31, you are already Managing Director of a medium-sized company. Do you sometimes wonder yourself how quickly that has happened?

I am incredibly grateful for my career path. I think my greatest good fortune was that I knew very early on what I wanted to do. And with my first job, I found the people who believed in me and with whom I still enjoy working today. That's the best gift you can get. But yes, I understand the question and it was even rather uncomfortable for me for a while! I became a partner at Sir Mary when I was just under 25; even before that I was handling very large accounts. Sometimes before pitches or important meetings I would get a queasy feeling, "What if someone questions your competence based on your age?" Today, the next generation uses "being young" as a USP. For me, it's simply not an exciting topic, except when I tease my business partners about our age difference (laughs).

What kind of atmosphere should prevail in your agency - with your involvement as Managing Director - to enable excellent work?

An atmosphere of courage. We want to be as "encouraging" a workplace as possible. That means being empowered in your own ideas; daring to speak up, daring to rebel against the status quo and try new things. At the end of the day, we're service providers, sure, and that makes us to some degree other-directed. But within that alienation, we want to establish as much self-determination as possible. This is already evident in the change in our spatial structures: In the beginning, we virtually all worked at one long table; there was a lot of friction, a lot of energy, everything was insanely close together. Today, people can work from wherever they want. As long as they feel they can deliver the best work there.

What milestones in the past five years at Sir Mary do you look back on with particular fondness?

I will never forget our early days. I remember well that we didn't even have an office yet and in the kitchen of Flo [Florian Beck, Co-Founder and Chief Creative of Sir Mary, ed.] sat when the first call came - it was Samsung with the request to challenge the name for the then new Samsung Hall. Disclaimer: It has remained with exactly this name (laughs). Then our first major campaign for Sharoo, for which we were able to recruit Stephan Remmler from Trio ... there I was standing on the set and thinking: "Crass, this is all really happening". One manifestation of how far we've already come since then was the result in this year's advertising agency rankings. First place in the digital and consulting categories, a razor-thin second in the overall ranking. That made me very proud.

We are living in enormously challenging times - crisis, war, recession and inflation are also affecting our country. How do you think the communications industry in Switzerland will develop in the coming years?

At the moment, everyone would like to have a crystal ball - me too. But we all can't predict what's going to happen. Of course, if the economy as a whole takes a turn for the worse, that will have an impact on the communications industry. That's why it's safe to assume that our business won't get any easier. But I see plenty of cause for optimism for Sir Mary. Our claim "We decomplex digital." is still highly topical. The entire world has become enormously complex, and the challenges have multiplied. Our mission remains the same: we must find new solutions for dealing with complexity, different demands, and even contradictions in day-to-day business. And we have to do this at the content level, where we have to translate difficult topics for the target group into implementations that are as simple as they are ingenious. But also on a process level, where creative excellence has to work faster, cheaper and more tailored. So we'll probably even have more work to do.

Let's formulate the look into the future as a vision: When we meet again for an interview in five years, what will we talk about then?

By then, a lot will have happened. You will ask me: "What is the human being still doing? What does the machine do? And wouldn't an AI make a better managing director?" (laughs) In general, we will talk a lot about artificial intelligence: I just showed the adschool student:in the results of different versions of an AI tool for image creation - and of course asked: "How much time do you think passed between the development of version 1 and version 4 of the tool?" The qualitative differences of the images are enormous, so the average guess was a period of several years. In truth, however, it has been only months! It is hard to imagine what will actually happen in five years, when you see the development of the last weeks and months. People will not become obsolete, but they will get a lot of machine help. Which, by the way, we will also need in order to master the complex challenges even better and faster.

What about your wishes?

My wish for the agency is that we will talk about many fascinating works, that you will ask me about our secret, why both employees and clients have been working with us for so long and that I will still be able to give the same answer: it is because of the Sir Mary Spirit.

* Nicolas Hostettler studied media science and combines various communication disciplines in his career: Digital consulting, creation and media. At the age of just under 25, he became a partner and head of strategy at Sir Mary and played a key role in building up the agency. Since summer 2022, he has led the agency as Managing Director.