Vincent Digonnet is an industry veteran of 35 years. He is now the MullenLowe Group APAC CEO. In an interview, Digonnet shared with adobo key insights on the transformation and future of the advertising industry in the region and worldwide.
What are key transformational shifts you see affecting the advertising industry which will have the strongest impact this year?
The recognition at last that brands are no longer built through mass media advertising led by display and TV ads. Digital is no longer a channel nor an add on, but at the core of everything we do. Social commerce platforms are driving fundamental changes in the way brands are built and made relevant to today’s consumers, and our industry needs to integrate many more skillsets than in the past, and more importantly to get these people to work together harmoniously. We need to move at the intersection of media and entertainment. Content creation and influencer marketing will be central to building brands, and the advertising industry will need to recruit PR experts, channel planners, content creators, technologists, business analysts, UX and CX experts if it wants to remain relevant and add value to its clients.
We are going to move back to integrating skillsets into the same organization as opposed to breaking down practices into separate operations and brands. Tough times are ahead for all holding companies who have to manage a multitude of brands, operations, processes, cultures and egos, in a word where agility, distribution of talents and project management will have to be at the heart of organizations if they want to survive.
How are you and your network adapting to the changes in the business environment? What measures are your taking and how are you leading for your company and its people to tide and thrive?
MullenLowe Group has recognized all these changes and has already integrated all its practices under one organization and one P&L (MullenLowe, MullenLowe Profero, MullenLowe Mediahub, MullenLowe Open and MullenLowe salt). In order to respond to the conflicting need for both scale and agility, we are creating centers of excellence for each of our key skillsets: Sydney for Experience Design, Tokyo for Analytics and Data science, Chengdu for Technology build, Singapore for Creative, Manila for Social Media and Bangkok for Production.
We are creating a central database for all our team’s skillsets in APAC, with a search capability by centers of interest, vertical experience, category experience, thought leadership and so on. We are also creating Hyperbundling Casting Directors in each office, able to bring together distributed teams around specific projects without worrying about separate territories, brands and P&Ls, giving our local clients an unfair advantage by allowing them to access talents and skillsets beyond their boundaries, and beyond the actual size of our operation in that market. The hyperbundling strategy and the challenger mindset were invented in Boston, our flagship. The only added difficulty in APAC is that there is no market big enough to justify a 600-people operation, hence the creation of COEs, and the distributed skillsets across the region. We are fit for purpose, and as a result, this week MullenLowe Group made it into the A-list of AdAge.
What is the best thing that will happen to our industry this year?
Sieving of the weak. Agencies and networks will disappear this year, either because they will be collapsed into a bigger operational unit by their holding companies (destroying enormous shareholder value in the process) or because they will not be able to transform themselves to fit the new world in which we are operating. We are now in an industry which values analytical and problem-solving skills more than traditional creativity. As Michael Farmer puts it, “agencies require a consulting-like makeover in thinking, purpose and skills.”
Some networks and agencies will succeed in this transformation, and some won’t, and will disappear by the year end. The good news is that the landscape will be cleaner and easier to understand, and competition will be on level playing field. The difficulty is not in knowing what to do. I think absolutely everybody with the beginning of a vision about our industry does. The difficulty is in the implementation, in getting people and skillsets to work together when they never did, in building a new structure which is more horizontal, and a new culture which is both distributed and collaborative.
Never more than today, the motto which has been on my desk ever since I started managing operations, has been so actual: “Hire on attitude, train on skill”.
