Andrea Cook Joins JAM CRM as Agency Rebrands from JAM Direct
Andrea Cook, the founder of FCB/SIX and Performance Art, has joined North American CRM agency JAM CRM.
North American CRM agency JAM Direct has announced its rebrand to JAM CRM in a bid to reinforce its expertise in data, technology, creativity and AI. Spearheading this transformation is Andrea Cook, the founder of IPG agencies FCB/SIX and Performance Art, two of advertising’s global leaders in the use of creative data, who has joined as CEO for the US and Canada. Andrea announced her departure from IPG, where her final role was global innovation officer and North American business leader at McCann, three months ago.
In a press release announcing the news, Andrea spoke of the CRM industry’s reputation of being “complex, confusing and costly” and how it has long been plagued by over-promise and under-deliver solutions. “The rapid growth in AI integration and mounting customer expectations across all categories and brands has made this even worse.”
That said, speaking with LBB, Andrea says this is not the experience reflected in her interactions so far with the JAM CRM team. “They're doing the promise of CRM, it's very advanced,” says Andrea. “I keep saying that I feel like I paddled out into the Pacific and came upon this advanced civilisation on some kind of CRM Island - there is nothing but perfection here. Every client is over the moon, the work is bar none the best in class I've ever seen, including the companies that I've built. So it's just a gift to have come upon them at this time, when I think the world is out of time to get this CRM thing right.”
When it comes to observing the advertising industry, Andrea enjoys using a metaphor involving a coin. On one side you have the brand, which needs a purpose to be nurtured, a consistent visual ID, equity and memory. “But the other side is customer experience,” she says. “And it doesn't matter how many fantastic TV commercials you have if you fall down in the customer experience angle of things.”
When Andrea started FCB/SIX, she says that the business was about how the future is going to be individual and the opportunities around personalisation - a term hot on the tongue of many agency leaders right now. “People thought I was nuts!” she remembers. “And then with Performance Art, it was more about cementing that just because the work is nerdy doesn't mean it has to be ugly, and the coming together of performance and creative art. I think now we're in this place where CRM will reign king.”
As a means of reigning king themselves, Andrea is keen to highlight JAM CRM’s technological capabilities, and suggests that it is as much a technology company as it is an agency. Led by Brad Bettinson, vice president of enterprise solutions, the business has more than 50 in-house, custom-built tools and AI automations that it has created purely in service of doing better work for clients, making the process smoother, ensuring they have proper quality assurance and more.
“We have a whole innovation and tech solutions aspect to our business,” she says. An example is an add-on to an AI product that lives within a major platform that allows brands and agencies to do personalisation and offer product recommendations. But because the platform is built for the entire world and every single category within it, it can default to generic recommendations versus hyper-personalised ones.
“We have a retail client called Petco in the US. Imagine you have a ferret who's eight and old, a kitten that has diabetes, and a dog who's got allergies. We couldn't use that platform to communicate to that customer because it couldn't handle it,” says Andrea. So, the team at JAM CRM built a layer to sit on top of the AI product to make sure that doesn't happen. “If the default triggers, it goes into our AI automation, and it gets sorted,” she adds. “That's just one. It's really amazing to have what is essentially a technology company and an AI company as part of the offering. The creative is important, but it doesn't matter if you're not getting all the rest of it right.”
Related to that, one of JAM CRM’s guiding principles is that ‘being invisible is underrated’. “When your CRM is doing its thing right, it's intuitive and you hardly know it's there,” says Andrea. “It's building equity and loyalty, ease and value, in ways that are unobvious to you. If you're feeling it, chances are something is off on that CRM.”
Andrea discusses the annoyance of being targeted by a product after actually purchasing it as an example of a noisy CRM not doing its work quietly in the shadows as intended. What’s more, she weighs up the difference between ‘helping moments’ and ‘selling moments’, and how CRM as a practice often gets thought of as only transactional - that there has to be a sale or a click that happens at the end of it. But that’s not necessarily true.
She mentions a recent interaction with an airline as a great example of a non-transactional ‘helping moment’. An extremely loyal customer of one airline for many years, Andrea had to recently use an alternative due to unavailability on her usual carrier. “This other airline sent me a text message about three hours before my flight, saying, “It's raining in New York. Pack your umbrella.” I couldn't believe how much of my loyalty shifted in that moment. When it's running and automated, there's no work at all for anyone to execute that thing. But they had to have some thinking and connection of data and different APIs and probably some algorithms in there to figure things out.”
Those adjacent things around customer experience are where brands need to start to focus way more,” suggests Andrea. “But it's hard. A generalist isn't going to have the data knowhow or the Salesforce expertise, in order to connect the dots on that kind of stuff, and I think that's where the industry fails.”
When it comes to her plans for JAM CRM, Andrea says that she’s both leaning into her career experience but also in the process unlearning some of the lessons she picked up during her 20 years of predominantly holding company background. “Lots of them are great, but there are certainly things that are different in an independent environment,” says Andrea, “and so I'm busy trying to unlearn some stuff, truthfully.
“But also this place has gone about what they've done with such a high degree of humbleness. The humbleness is amazing, but with it comes opportunity. How do we take accountability for making sure that we're advancing the industry? If you were to pick up the phone and call any of our clients, they would gush effusively about the quality of the work, and I'm not even sure the clients appreciate how different it is from what other agencies are doing out there, because it is so smart and so advanced. So, it's a dutiful thing.
“I feel really humbled and honoured to be able to stand out in front of it and just tell the stories of JAM. The relaunch is about that - giving this team the space to be able to share their intelligence and give our clients’ stories the air that they deserve.”
