Friday the 9th, the last day of AdForum's summit, was a treat. The morning kicked off with a buffet-style breakfast at the Thompson and a talk from Global CEO,Havas Worldwide and Euro RSCG Worldwide David Jones.
Instead of rendering search consultants comatose about why Havas is a special network that gets the social media/digital thing, he talked mostly about a project of particular importance to himself and his agency: Tck Tck Tck, a mostly-crowdsourced effort to raise awareness about climate change.
Not to say he didn't discuss Havas-related issues at all; he said the holding company is working on turning Arnold into a global micro-network. It is also in relatively little debt compared to its competitors: a mere $40 million, give or take.
As for the topic most salient: Tck Tck Tck began as a way to encourage governments to throw their weight behind the Copenhagen Summit in December and sign a deal that moves business forward while protecting the environment. Over two million people worldwide have registered, and the British government recently voiced support. A number of musicians key figures (including Kofi Annan) and artists have also donated talent to the message. Check out their music video, Beds are Burning.
One consultant, Dan Hestbaek of Copenhagen, asked what Havas' big investment is in this. Why pour energy into something that isn't going to serve the bottom line?
Jones says Tck Tck Tck cost almost nothing; almost all resources have been donated. What's more, it represents what he thinks will become the guiding conviction of tomorrow's companies: putting social responsibility at the heart of business strategy.
"Profit for its sake, and capitalism for its sake, will actually become unstuck, unwind and not work," he said.
He also told us about One Young World, a kind of Davos for young people. Companies can sponsor the attendance and participation of "decision makers of tomorrow," born on or after 1984, for €3000.
At morning's end, we filed out with good feelings, full stomachs and Tck Tck Tck dog tags. At the door we were also invited to pick up copies of Good for Business, which preaches the gospel of socially responsible corporate activity.
After that we headed to the Schematic office and sat for a closed-door teleconference with Sir Martin Sorrell.
Hervé de Clerck synopsized much of the hour-long talk in a short interview afterward. Tidbits:
- The industry's moving in a in a positive direction financially, but we shouldn't get too confident. We've destroyed jobs -- and half a billion dollars have been spent on severance.
- American holding companies don't see growth or the value of reaching outside their borders in the same way their counterparts elsewhere do. An agency born in Europe has a market of maybe 60 million people that speak the same language. To grow, it's incentivized to leave its borders and get to know markets in other countries. American shops enjoy an audience of 300 million English speakers that share roughly the same culture -- from conception.
For the aforementioned reason, Sorrell said most WPP competitors focus too heavily on the US. Havas and Publicis, in contrast, understand the importance of other markets. For its part, WPP boasts 135,000 employees in 106 countries, including a regional strategic team in China of 11,000 people; it has similar outposts in India, Singapore and South Africa.
After that we got to check out some of the neat things Schematic is doing with mobile and interactive interfaces.
If you attended Cannes this year, you probably took note of the interactive touchscreen map that let people glean session data and track their whereabouts and those of others via RFID chips in their nametags. They're also working on touchscreens for Target, where moms can check out the content of video games before buying them for their kids.
Schematic operates under the premise that the internet has provided us with too much data and analytics and too little context -- which makes all those numbers useless to ordinary people unwilling to sit and ferret meaning out of it. Toward that end it created the BrandZ 100 app for iPhone, which lets marketers keep track of the top brands of 2009 in interesting ways. It divides data by continent and also provides updates on the current value of each company it follows.
