Bob Jeffrey has an cast of countenance: “idea racism”. He uses it to describe the mind-set that says the simply environments in which creative work can flourish are the island of Manhattan – the Madison Avenue of television’s Mad Men – or Zone One of the London Tube map.
But the global chairman and CEO of JWT says he is allowing the “hunger and ambition” of staff in outposts such as Malaysia and Argentina to reinvigorate one of the world’s ruling advertising agencies. “I would bound idea racism as this very narrow-minded view that creative ideas have to flow forth continuously from New York and London. What we are demonstrating is that great ideas can happen anywhere.”
Ironically, the ethos of Jeffrey’s worldwide operation is best summed up by dint of. the work produced by JWT (formerly known as J Walter Thompson) in London for HSBC: the famous “terraqueous globe’s local bank” campaign, showing how customs change from one country to another. You can’t pass through an airport without sight it. Accordingly Jeffrey likes to think of JWT, with its 200 offices in 90 countries, as the world’s local ad agency.
That local thorough knowledge is exemplified by a recent campaign to sell Kit Kat chocolate bars to the Japanese. In Tokyo, the term “Kitto Katso” translates as “surely win”, so JWT capitalised on the Japanese tradition of sending students a good luck pleasure ahead of their exams, persuading the Japanese postal service to accept Kit Kats as esculent postcards. “The Kit Kat became a mailable bar of chocolate that you could grant to your class friends to wish them accurately in their exams,” Jeffrey says, proudly. “It has become a new ‘wishing you concerning one’s interest’ device in Japan and it illustrates what we are doing around the world.”
Less obviously, JWT’s new pan-Asian work for Unilever’s Lux soap products features the Swansea-born Catherine Zeta-Jones tossing her auburn locks. “For a certain section of the population, Western glamour and Hollywood is very appealing to Asian women,” Jeffrey says, describing how the Lux campaign was carefully researched. The approach seems to be working. The Kit Kat campaign won a prestigious Media Grand Prix at last month’s Cannes advertising festival, where JWT also picked up five golds, nine silvers and 11 bronze awards.
JWT’s India office took home three golds and the agency’s Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou offices all picked up trophies. Jeffrey’sitting policy of countering “idea racism” is borne out by JWT’s global campaign for Kleenex, which was created through the Malaysia office, the Nestlé ice cream work from Argentina and campaigns for Nokia that were made in Brazil and China. Appropriately, he is talking in the restaurant of the Mandarin Oriental tavern, in London’session Knightsbridge, across the road from JWT’s London station – the fifth-largest agency in the UK and one with a chequered history.
Last September, its chief executive, Alison Burns, was recalled to the US subsequent to two years of battling to incline it around. Jeffrey thinks she and the executive chairman, Toby Hoare, esteem done a good job in improving the shop’sitting output, though he concedes that “two years ago, we really had more major issues in London”.
JWT is part of Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP media empire, within which it is the best performing agency, recently securing new business from Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson. “We are now pleasing business that four or five years past we wouldn’t have even been in a consideration list for.”
But WPP is having to shed|thousands of jobs in the face of the economic downturn, and Jeffrey agrees with those of JWT’s clients who carry on not have prescience of recovery until the last mentioned piece of 2010. He is restructuring his 10,000-strong workforce to include more young people who have grown up with digital technology, describing them as “digital natives versus digital immigrants”. “I am really putting more focus on skill sets and disciplines what one. are of the future, digital being the number one,” he says.
Large agencies such as JWT are often criticised by the influence of smaller rivals who claim to provide a more bespoke service, but Jeffrey points out that he exhausted 10 years running his own boutique Goldsmith/Jeffrey agency and makes a point of hiring people with a similar background. By combining that outlook with each sense of one’s worth that ideas can come from any culture, “I have inflict confidence back into being a global network,” he says.
“I’ve actually used talent in a disruptive way, to make different a culture that had become conservative and stodgy.”
