In a few years, the International Advertising Festival in Cannes may not even include a Cyber category, predicts Colleen DeCourcy, jury president of that competition at this year’s event.
“We’re going to be judging what I hope will be the last few years” of that competition, says the chief digital officer of TBWA Worldwide.
DeCourcy, 43, formerly chief experience officer at JWT, has been at the forefront of digital marketing since the first tech boom in the ’90s, when it mostly meant building Web sites. “The medium is becoming way more ubiquitous; you’re starting to notice it splitting off into areas of expertise. It’s been an incredible transition. I mean truly crazy,” she says.
The cyber world, she continues, now encompasses everything from product design and iTunes to traditional digital advertising campaigns that include microsites and social networking sites: “You’ve got environmental design, which I’m just spastic about right now, outdoor retail. … What is Cyber? If it’s a film, should that go in Film? [If] it went viral, should it be a Media submission?”
This year will mark the Toronto-born cd’s third straight year as a member of a Cannes jury. Last year, DeCourcy sat on the Titanium & Integrated jury, and the year before that on Cyber. As leader of the 24-member judging panel this week, she’ll ask the international group to consider ideas that go beyond digital campaign extensions.
“I’m really hoping that what we look for is something that goes beyond an imitation of offline,” says DeCourcy. “We’re looking at how advertising is using technology and for ideas that look at how people use technology.”
DeCourcy is effusive about her work and its potential to create meaningful change in the world around her. This passion has been driving her since her first agency job, in her native Toronto. It took a digital turn after her daughter Emma, now 14, was born and DeCourcy decided to immerse herself in technology.
Last summer, TBWA lured her away from JWT to develop and implement a digital strategy for the network. “She has an incredible vision about where the industry is going, where this whole digital thing is going,” says Tom Carroll, president and CEO of TBWA Worldwide. “It’s not as though she’s a digital fish out of water; she’s a digital fish that can swim in an agency.”
But DeCourcy, who prior to JWT was chief creative officer at Organic, says the last couple of years have been challenging. “In my quest to find the place that I thought would be the next iteration of something that was thrilling to me, [I’ve become the] new girl, and it’s hard. But I’m persistent. I think this one can stick,” she says.
One of the things that motivates her at TBWA, she says, is hearing the agency’s worldwide creative chief, Lee Clow, talk about digital work. “When he looks at something and tells me, ‘It feels like a machine when you touch it … and I don’t want it to be like that,’ that’s a piece of feedback that I’ll spend six months thinking about before I go to sleep,” she says. “When Lee stands up in front of a crowd of people and says, ‘I’m really underwhelmed by this medium,’ [I know] I’m not doing my job.”
DeCourcy, who caught the attention of the traditional agency world with her 2006 Dodge Charger “Unleash your freak” and Jeep “The Mudds” campaigns while at Organic, has spent her first nine months at TBWA flying around the world, visiting clients and assessing the network’s digital assets. She reports the network is “getting there. … It’s been a leap of faith for someone like myself to spend a year not being deeply associated with any work while I do a very corporate exercise on strategy and planning,” she says. “At times it’s been very difficult, but as I start to see the [results] — people who now know each other and are talking — it feels as gratifying as a great piece of work.
“If it doesn’t yield results,” she adds with a hearty laugh, “I’ll start to worry.”
BIOGRAPHY
Education: She studied journalism at the University of Western Ontario but dropped out after her second year. “It was kind of fun,” she says, “but I really wanted to get out and work.”
Career: Her first job was as a receptionist at Toronto retail agency Saffer Cravit & Freedman. After working as director of creative strategy at ICE Integrated Communications & Entertainment in Toronto and CCO of Spafax in London, DeCourcy joined Organic in 1999 and was named vp, CCO in 2005. Joined JWT in 2006 as chief experience officer. Named chief digital officer of TBWA Worldwide in 2007.
Inspiration: “To me advertising was always the fastest-revving lens on culture. It’s up to the industry if it continues to be that. I think I have ended up where I am because I continually want to keep giving it the option.”
