• Reuters, Friday, June 23, 2006 11:30 AM

Maurice Saatchi, who along with his brother, Charles, created an advertising agency empire in the 1970s and 80s, believes marketers should be succinct in their advertising messages. In fact, he believes commercial messages should be boiled down to a single word. Speaking at the current advertising film festival in Cannes, France, Saatchi told an assemblage of the world's leading ad executives that they and their clients need to reduce their strategies to finding just one word to characterize a brand. "What I am describing here is a new business model for marketing, appropriate to the digital age," he said. "In this model, companies compete for global ownership of one word in the public mind." To help companies develop and implement what Saatchi calls "one word equity," his firm, M&C Saatchi, is launching a new business unit called The Word. "We have put together a series of programs that is going to help clients find the word, test the word and then spread the word," he said. Current examples of companies that have already expressed their essence in a single word include Google Inc. ("search") and Apple Computer Inc. ("innovation"). And Saatchi's own firm's word equity? Simplicity. "We've had a particular pleasure in avoiding waffle and vagueness, and trying to get to the point," he said. "It's a true characteristic of the company that it has had for many years a central belief of simplicity as virtue."

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