4A's: Industry Leaders Tout Innovation

DANA POINT, CALIF. Speaker after speaker at Tuesday's general session of the Leadership Conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies urged shops to embrace the digital revolution to help clients market their brands and rise to the considerable challenges created by the complex media landscape.Some speakers, such as incoming 4A's chairman Tom Carroll and TBWA's Lee Clow, emphasized the basics of creating smart, compelling brand messages, regardless of the medium, while others, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt and GroupM CEO Irwin Gotlieb, said speed, innovation and adaptability were crucial to reaching consumers today. Most, however, underscored the need for collaboration -- among disciplines, clients and media owners."Today we need to make more material, make it more quickly and in more rapidly changing formats," said Gotlieb. "We need to distribute it in more channels, measure infinitely greater and more timely data streams, negotiate with more partners for different kinds of inventory and support it all with an ever-growing arsenal of technology and talent. A failure in any part of the ecosystem will crash the entire process and . . . it's crucial that creative agencies and media agencies work in lockstep every step of the way."Gotlieb added that "we have to get on with it now -- not just because we will become significantly more valuable to our clients but because we will also help ourselves considerably. In the coming age, the scope of work will grow significantly and we will all have our hands full getting the work done, which is far more productive than engaging in strident turf battles."The appearance of a media agency honcho -- as well as Schmidt, architect Clive Wilkinson and Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios -- at the conference this morning illustrated the desire of Carroll and new 4A's president and CEO Nancy Hill to mix things up after years of [largely] agencies talking to agencies. "It's just, how do we get this conference to be more inspirational, more insightful?" Carroll said.Early response to the diversity and big names was largely positive, though attendance this year, estimated at 380, was up just slightly from last year's total of about 350.Schmidt, whose brief address focused on how quickly and how broadly consumers are adapting to Web-based technology, said the "real opportunity is in developing new forms of storytelling, new forms of narratives" that tap into that growing interest."The rate of innovation is actually increasing in the Internet. And there are these very, very large new opportunities and platforms before us that all of us together are going to be exploiting," he added.And while Clow said that the Internet has "got a long way to go because the ability to use [it] in terms of great storytelling is in its infancy," he also expects that it will become "more artful" and "more interesting" in time.

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4A's: Industry Leaders Tout Innovation

Andrew McMains

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Andrew McMains