I wanted to end this series with the big picture in this final installment of my interview with the director of strategic planning from one of the world’s biggest marketing and CRM companies, BETC EuroRSCG.

Jerome Guilbert epitomizes class. For me, class captures a combination of intelligence, sensibility, and awareness. It includes the ability to be “in the moment.” A classy guy knows what’s important, looks for something to enjoy in everyone, and always has a selfless answer to the question, “Why do you think so-and-so is important?”

In the airy, fashion-forward conference room at the BETC headquarters in Paris, the definitely-class Guilbert and I swapped contacts and business ideas like old friends. Considering his astonishing résumé, he could easily have made the meeting into something more about him. Guilbert has worked at BBDO and L’Oréal. He is well educated, having received his executive MBA from the London Business School, and graduate and undergraduate degrees from Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (known throughout France as Sciences Po) and the Sorbonne. He’s given back to his alma mater Sciences Po by developing its first course on branding, which he taught for five years.

As strategic planning director at BETC (part of EuroRSCG, one of the top five marketing communications firms in the world), Guilbert has created award-winning and edgy campaigns: against tobacco, for public transportation, and on behalf of clients such as Air France, Coca Cola, Carrefour, Chanel and Orange.

With such a wide variety of clients, all with a high stake in winning market share, Guilbert’s role as strategic planner at BETC puts him face to face with C-Suite executives, talking about customers.

In my prior article, I wrote about how much of what an agency does is a black box to his clients. And yet, inside that black box is a wealth of information about the market, a company’s clients, and what can move that market. This is information that should come out of the black box and into a company’s product and service development, capital planning, IT systems (knowledge management, business intelligence and customer intelligence reporting) – and of course marketing. In short, the relationship between Guilbert’s strategic planning and a corporation’s strategic planning should be intimate, informed and goal-oriented.

“In effect, you have a freedom domain between what you know about your customer and what you want to do,” Guilbert said. Yet only when companies embrace agencies such as EuroRSCG will they be able to develop more realistic choices about how to move themselves into the markets that make sense for them.

Following is the final installment of my interview with Jerome Guilbert.

PKW: Look ahead five or ten years. How do you think EuroRSCG and your clients will think differently about customers? Where do you think the market will be for developing customer strategies?

JG: Look at the way things are today. There is a big difference between what is said and what is practiced. What you hear [from big agencies] is, “We offer thought leadership and we do integration.” And that is what clients want.

But when you look at the way these services are actually perceived and delivered, the truth comes out in a company’s behavior. They still want advertising. That’s what they think they’re ultimately buying from agencies.

And then they listen to diverse sources for building a brand strategy. That’s where the difficulty is.

Before, the unique source was the ad agency for this info. Now this information comes from a lot of different sources. For example, we’re seeing the emergence of new consultancies and specialized in designing brand strategies – and they’re doing it very successfully. But that’s all they do. They do not belong to an ad agency.

These consultancies, including media consultancies, may offer brand strategies, but – notice -- their deliverable is not related to the end work. There is a separate market for the creative deliverable as well.

PKW: So companies are starting to separate the brand strategy work from the creative work?

Yes, and unfortunately this puts a lot of pressure on companies providing the creative work. The brand consultancies can maintain a relationship with the client across many campaigns, but the creative team is assessed on the success of the campaigns. The very force the consultancies have against us is that they are not tied to the final product. They are assessed differently.

Production companies that just do creative without any strategy capability are doing more ad work, too. So the brand strategists can team up with production people.

PKW: What’s your ideal relationship with a client concerning customer data?

First, there would be total transparency concerning customer data. We would get it all.

And the agency should get into designing the business model and into R&D. Any fully efficient and integrated agency would work in the boardroom itself to drive innovation, from product design to choice of markets. We would help the client to design its capabilities, especially helping them identify and develop new capabilities.

There is something agencies, even at our level, rarely do, but we should. We absolutely should participate in training. For one of our big clients which depends on high quality, customer-facing service, we help them define ideal service. But we hand them the definition and they must take responsibility for staff training. It is rare that we deal with the consequences of that definition ourselves. We generally don’t develop the training.

And we could do that precisely because we have consumer expertise and branding expertise, so we can focus in the training on these things.

PKW: Jerome, it’s been a pleasure getting our view on the reality of how corporations develop client strategies, and what the market for strategic planning services will look like. Thank you.

JG: It’s been a pleasure for me, too.

[end interview]

A disturbing part of the Jerome Guilbert’s view of the future is that he predicts agencies will face a perception crisis: they will increasingly be viewed as delivering only creative products and campaigns, which are frequently measured by short-term revenue results.

The reality is often different. Certainly at the level Guilbert works, an agency is intimately aware of the implications of its client’s data – not only customer data, but the market information in general. They know the competition’s differentiation, positioning and market share. They work hard to understand the aspirational and practical benefits of the brands in a sector. And so, in an ideal world, this information would be leveraged inside an organization, across silos, to help align the organization around the customer.

The advent of media consultancies is not necessarily a positive development, in my view. The problem companies should solve is organizing and aligning around customer value – not just creating buzz in the media. And boutique media consultancies are no replacement for the organizational and strategic perspective that larger strategy firms – such as EuroRSCG – can provide.

The burden is on agencies to reinvent themselves. To some extent, they are the victims of their own media. They promote their campaigns as being memorable, or clever, or well executed – and these characteristics are important. But, as Guilbert well knows, companies want more than this, and so ad agencies should credibly position themselves as being able to do more. This credibility comes from proving that the agency creates measurable outcomes in addition to “campaign success”.

I think this also means that ad agencies will want to hire different kinds of people, train them differently, and retool their client interactions and communications. In short, this drive for market and branding strategies – in a new economy with new metrics – are creating a shift in expectations. The slick ad is less important than customer insight. And I think the successful ad agency in the future will build their relationships by constantly proving they provide customer insight. The slick ad is only a means to an end.

Of course, this has always been the case. But at no time in the past have customers been so smart, gotten information from so many new sources, and been so cynical about media. This means that an ad agency, and certainly ones at the level of EuroRSCG with consultative, technical and integration skills, will rise on their ability to help companies understand their customers and to credibly influence the open, Internet-enabled conversation.

For their part, companies must learn more from sophisticated companies like EuroRSCG. And they must reorganize themselves around what they learn. The lesson we’ve learned in CRM is that it isn’t just sales force or call center software. It’s an enterprise strategy. The same lesson will be learned about ad agencies. A great ad agency isn’t hired just for campaigns. It can help you develop deep customer insight – and adapt to your customers’ needs. Use that insight, or lose your customers.

Company: pkward.com