Ami Hasan, president Adce – The Art Directors Club of Europe, responds to youmark questions on market and creativity.
You said “marketers are lazy”, but what does it mean?
“The marketing landscape is changing faster than ever. And when digital disruption hits us with full force all marketers are in global competition with new companies with highly effective digital and customer-centric business models. Old companies will have to redesign their operations, turn old sourcing-to-consumer value chains upside down and most often merge their existing marcoms/sales/distribution/service/product function to one single customer experience function with just one boss and one budget. Most marketers are terribly late in this transformation and only too often the CMO is not educated enough to lead the new function. They still concentrate on MarComs only”.
How can creative agiencies educate marketers?
“In 5 years time, there will be very little need for MarComs only agencies, we will all have to learn new skill sets and cooperate with other professionals. Those who transform will be very knowledgeable of customer-centric thinking and fully capable of leading their clients to the new era where consumer experience equals brand. However, this will require very close cooperation between agencies, clients and other professionals like service designers”.
We were in Cannes. We sow less agencies more technology companies. Isn’t it?
“Actually we had less of both than last year. And you could call Google and Facebook media companies since that’s where their money comes from. Amazon, too, in a growing extent. There’s still a lot of hype around tech but storytelling and story-doing are not going away. They are the core of creative agencies”.
What is the next Adce focus?
“ADCE’s main goal is to promote the value of creativity and creative professionals. In my mind, that means we can no longer limit membership to MarCom professionals but welcome all creative people from other fields as well”.
Why the creativeness also in the data and AI era wins?
“Humans have changed very little in the last thousands of years. We adapt to change but we still have the same powerful emotions like love, joy, happiness, fear, inspiration and empathy as always. Creativity speaks to those emotions. You can target and personalize your socks off but that will not help you one bit if you cannot reach the recipient on an emotional level. We’ve all read headlines telling that ‘blockchain will revolutionize marketing communications’ and sure it will – like four-color printing did once – but only if the message is relevant and emotional”.
