5 Minutes with... Sven Huberts

Sven> There were two moments when I was young that inspired me to work for an agency. 

The first was finding out that people who work in agencies are fun people who live through the eye of culture. As a teen, I would always spend one or two months working in a factory abroad during the summer break. Learn a language, earn some coin and get exposed to different cultures. I remember taking a train to Zurich to see a music festival and I found some like-minded people who worked at an agency. So that stuck with me for some reason. Agency people are cool. 

The other moment was when I was about 20 and had joined a Soho-based UK retail media business. I’ll never forget how ‘Tony’, a stocky-Northerner and ex SAS commando, sat me down in his office and gave me a piece of paper to write down the things I wanted to do in life and business. He said he would be back in ‘a couple of hours to discuss’. I sat there in his office, scared shitless about what I should write. That was the first lesson in goal setting he gave me. Write down the goals important to you so you can go crush them.

That retail business evolved into selling a nationwide network of instore trolley and floor poster advertising. We could sell to the media agencies and could see the creative being delivered by the creative agencies. I remember walking into BBDO, McCann and Mother and being mesmerised by the energy flowing through those places. It was like I was a kid in a candy store and vividly recall that being the moment where I knew that this was the place I wanted to end up working. 

Sven> After working for a digital brand advocacy shop for about four years, I tried setting up a small studio for them in London. After a year we couldn’t scale the offering, and what became clear to me then was the irrefutable proof that we were moving to a mobile-first world. The space was thriving with new investments, but it was largely dominated by mobile ad and technology businesses. 

Leading up to founding Marvellous in Amsterdam, mobile experiences were largely delivered by technology, data, and poor design. So there was an opportunity for an agency proposition to fill the void with a fresh perspective. One that was idea-led and driven by both brand creativity and craft. We were united by a ferocious, young, energetic culture and driven by a single goal of producing the best work out there.  

Looking around, there was one clear leader in the space and that was Marvellous in London. So, after conversations with Aegis, Jon and Paul the owners, I co-founded Marvellous in Amsterdam. With studios in London, Amsterdam, Paris, and New York, we were constantly breaking things, defying the boundaries of what was possible and challenging one another to learn new things. Our aim was to help solve the next big client challenge thrown at us so the agency culture was like a family, where everyone worked hard. It led to some industry defining work for adidas, Vodafone, Guinness, and many other brands. 

When we won at Cannes we didn’t go but would pool the investment into a central pot to celebrate and party as one team. Nobody felt left behind. It was a special rebellion we had going on there.

Sven> For me it was a mixture of people, culture, international business and the mystique of dentsu that attracted me to the network. It meant continuing to learn from smart and experienced people combined with the potential to work in other parts of the world.

After Marvellous was acquired, we integrated and unified all our digital capabilities under Isobar. We had so much momentum and we wanted to continue to innovate within a bigger frame. Our one P&L model was revolutionary for a holding company at the time and meant there was almost no competition within our business for pitches and investment making it easier to integrate. It was really motivating because whilst I worked from an agency in Amsterdam, it felt great to be part of something.

We want to build something integrated and innovative, and to this day there is no-one in the marketplace that rivals dentsu’s ability to use innovation to scale and transcend marketing, and create culture. 

Sven> Incoming open door. Some really talented and genuine people and a shared belief system to do good (work) has kept me here. When I first joined dentsu, we were always pushing, redefining, disrupting what it meant to be culturally relevant in “digital”.

dentsu's bold vision has made a lot of entrepreneurial minds stick around as they were able to grow, connect and build things with scale and innovation behind them. I’ve really felt at home in that crowd and can call many of them family.

I have found that being exposed to other regions, cultures and challenges is priceless from both a personal and professional perspective. It is part of why Dentsu Creative resonates with me because we are a modern creative agency with deep expertise in brand building, through entertainment, content and culture. 

Sven> Ha! You’ve made me realise what an old git I’m starting to become!

But over the last 22 years, I would call out the multi-year relationship we had with Vodafone. From when mobile was still in its infancy, this is a partnership that is based around an industry challenge, where we have helped to develop the industry of mobile marketing and helped fuel and grow the ecosystem together. We’ve done that through the lens of work. Creating virtual tag games in a park with Android, creating the first live connected entertainment experience with the voice to b2c and b2b utility and much more.

There’s a lot of love and more than a decade of work and history for adidas, the three stripes brand. Innovation manifests in many forms, in message and function, we were always pushing, redefining, disrupting what it means to be culturally relevant in ‘digital’ for them. What we have delivered for them spanned the full digital spectrum from instore to campaign: from e-commerce to digital products, digital transformation to innovation it was all there.

Another which speaks to how important agility can be, was gaining the trust of the Philips client and working with US / Amsterdam teams delivering an AR-enabled digital service in just two and a half weeks. It was a huge achievement to deliver innovation sprints through to prototyping for Philips, focussed on how we can use AR and voice to add value during the bathroom routine, bringing innovation back to something tangible.

Sven> There’s a lot of experience / parity everywhere because of how people are embracing the complexity of the new world we are in. 

It’s really hard to master technology and data. But what I’m seeing and hearing from brands is that finding differentiation is even harder. And in a world where digital, culture and experience are inseparable, creativity has never played a more integral role.

Not only are we (DENTSU CREATIVE) able to understand how to help deliver experiences driven by ideas that create culture, change society and invent the future, but we also enable them thanks to the deep technical and data expertise within CXM.

I get excited seeing how we bring those worlds closer together. Our approach allows us to embrace the dynamism and the fragmentation of the market. The unknown aspects of the market. It connects clients directly with cutting-edge expertise and propositions at the intersection of creativity, design, data, technology, innovation and entertainment. Our strength really is to rapidly connect – and reconnect – these worlds in terms of production and process.

Sure, there are always more tools you would want to have in the toolbox, but I really believe our scale across experience and CXM and the capabilities we have horizontally across dentsu in EMEA is unique to the industry.

Sven> Yesterday’s agency is not tomorrow’s agency. I think everyone of us can be really proud about how we’ve rallied together to launch DENTSU CREATIVE. This is no easy feat. We’ve launched a new creative network with capabilities across brand, production, entertainment, earned and experience in 13 markets in EMEA in less than 12 months. Transformation of that scale and speed is hard, but to see us deliver a strong performance in FY22 across the board, both in terms of growth and the proof of a more competitive creative product, demonstrates the momentum every one of us has contributed to.

For experience I’m most proud about how we’ve come together as a leadership team, set the vision and are working as a connected practice around our product across markets. 

We’ve integrated brand creativity across our innovation and experience work, connected brand identity to design systems within a new service pillar, successfully launched over 39 new brands, we’ve invested in building product and communities around AI, web3 and virtual experience and are delivering proof of that with reputation driving work in winning at Cannes in digital craft and new realities and with our recent Eurobest Grand Prix win.

 

Sven> You can say I’ve spent a career helping brands apply technology to either navigate change or create change. The rise of generative AI is incredible and opens a myriad of different possibilities, and we’re seeing transformation happening to the creative industry itself. So together with a few others we’re looking at how to apply these and take the next step towards leveraging the potential of these new technologies. I believe that the onset of AI has reaffirmed the role that humanity plays in creativity, and we will learn about how to apply these new technologies in the most interesting ways to create new things, rather than relying on these technologies to create new things independently of us.