Fast and Furious: How to Keep Up with Change without Losing Our Humanity

As change accelerates, flexibility has never been more important. However, that can also mean instability for employees or suppliers, so we want to talk to brands, agencies and prod cos about how they’re geared up for fleet-footed change, and whether it’s possible to protect trust and relationships while racing ahead.

In the hot seat to answer this on the LBB & Friends Beach in Cannes Lions today were industry leaders Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and executive chairman at S4 Capital, Tyler Turnbull, global CEO at FCB, Devika 'Dev' Bulchandani, global CEO at Ogilvy, Jennifer English, Johnnie Walker global brand director at Diageo, and Jennifer Murillo, SVP chief marketing officer at Discover.

CEO and founder of LBB, Matt Cooper, led the discussion as moderator, exploring how marketers prepare for rapid change while striving to maintain trust and build client relationships. "How we look after our people," Matt put it.

The panel first outlined exactly what a day as a leader looks like for them. For Dev it's "whatever the crisis of the day is" – although some of those crises may sound trivial to people outside the industry (like her mother, she noted) from the shade of blue being wrong, to the potential of Ai taking all our jobs.

With so many changes and pressures exerting their effects on creative businesses, the panel explored together which ones they are making their biggest priorities right now. Jennifer English underlined the DE&I changes in the drinks business, which have transformed the makeup of the teams she’s working with for the better, as well as the mix of travel, office and home that delivers the best outcomes in today’s hybrid working environment. She ventured that Johnnie Walker is “kind of getting close to getting the mix right."

Sir Martin highlighted the geographical changes in the business, with new hubs emerging in various areas for particular expertise. Secondly, he emphasised that technology has shifted the needle on how things get done and what the workforce of the future will look like. And thirdly, he observed that people have changed, beyond the simple fact that flexible working is a norm now. "Their values are different. Their approach to life is different,” he said. “I find it much more difficult now to manage. What people say and what they do is very different. And I see a big distinction between what people say they believe and what they do."

Jennifer Murillo cited that change in people's priorities too, and admitted it is keeping leadership at Discover busy and focused.

Responding to the inevitable spectre of AI-driven efficiencies entering the conversation, Dev flagged that the focus on this kind of change often leads to "the plumbing taking over," rather than humanity – to the detriment of creative outcomes often. Tyler reinforced this, pointing to a "regression to the mean" as a result of that focus on the ‘plumbing’. “I think we've lost a bit of the magic and, I think, the power that our industry has always had."

This was of course contended by Sir Martin, who said "I think that's romantic." The S4C chief pointed to the kind of tech firms along the Croisette spending money on beaches, alluding to what that signifies. He suggested that the FCB CEO was looking with "rose-tinted spectacles back to the days of Don Draper."

Data and tech-driven creativity is, of course, something that Tyler was keen to defend too. “I grew up in the era of social and digital and data and I love it,” he said. “And I think what we tried to do from an FCB perspective is merge that great data into creativity. So I would challenge the romantic nature of all your comments Sir Martin, in that I think we need to remember where our value comes from. When I look at the narrative here this week, there's a lot of narrative around the creative agencies and what's going on with them – are we still relevant? But I look at tech, production and other aspects and I think they are going to be equally if not more disrupted by some of the technology that we're seeing and talking about right now.”

One thing that Sir Martin’s business has been betting on through its tech-driven creative endeavours is hyper-personalisation at scale, and of course, the advances in AI that we’re seeing now only increase that scale. That brought the panel to another key decision for business leaders at this pivotal moment – whether the time-based model of billing needs to change to an output basis. S4C would argue it does, Sir Martin said. Jennifer at Discover agrees – "I'm much more interested in outcome-based relationships," she said.

Part of the change coming is AI-driven, but Jennifer at Johnnie Walker added, "it's not all of the change." Rather, people’s changing values, such as greater demand for sustainability, are crucial to be aware of as a CMO wanting to “meet the future.” People want to work at companies that share their values.

Adding to this, she spoke about the changes that Diageo has made in its parental leave policy in recent years. Over 700 men took paternity leave last year in Diageo, which Jennifer applauded as an “absolutely extraordinary leap in feminism.” She also spoke about the impact that menopause policy has had on her company, which was a topic both panel and audience were repeatedly keen to explore (mostly because, it seems not enough standards have been set in the industry).

Dev agreed that “life change is as important to this discussion as business volatility," although she also bemoaned the "corporate jargon of humanity" which often comes up and is a barrier to real progress being made for the people in a business. Empathy is more difficult than it seems, she suggested, noting that words like that can be thrown around without any real humanity entering the conversation.

Sir Martin looked to Nvidia as an example of a company that illuminates how business will work in an AI-driven future: flatter, less hierarchical, with a more cooperative structure. “And if I look at the way that the holding companies are structured, that gets blown up.”

Tyler agreed that “things need to change”, but extolled the virtues of small teams working closely with brands – even within big holding companies. “Clients will always want that. But those teams have to be enabled by great technology, great platforms, and great data.”

Jennifer at Discover agreed, adding that “in that world that we're leading into, the ability to be a super connector among people, among information, within these teams, is so critically important,” adding that she’s seeing brands and agencies "working as a unit in a way I haven't seen before in my career."

Dev also has noticed the flattening of structures that Sir Martin observes in Nvidia, but also noted that "the nature of leadership is changing." And that rather than the brand, many staff look to a specific human leader. 

"Everything's up for grabs,” said Jennifer at Johnnie Walker, throwing out a slogan that some of her colleagues held closely during the huge volatility of the pandemic: "Keep it real and give people hope."

That could be the overall tone setting for Cannes Lions this year. Jennifer at Discover noted that on AI, "last year there was more apprehension." This year, people are talking about ways they’re working to implement the benefits of AI in a much more positive way. Finding uses to make sure humans have access to the vast amount of information they need.

But AI is driving efficiencies and those efficiencies will have tangible impacts on the shape of the industry. Sir Martin spoke about how the visualisation and copywriting parts of agencies will take a hit, as he sees it: “I hate to deliver this message in the sun in Cannes. There will be less employment in visualisation and copywriting – fewer people.” He added that jobs will be lost in hyper-personalisation at scale too, as well as media buying. On top of that, change will come in general efficiency gains and the democratisation of knowledge. “Those are the five areas that we see change,” he said.

The use cases are not here, although they are imminent. "We need one or two or three very big cases and then organisations being turned upside down in order to implement them," summed up Sir Martin.

Dev at Ogivly agreed that “low value work is going to get automated and should get much more automated." And, she noted, nobody gets excited about resizing a banner, so tech is creating more high-value work for people. That, she stressed, is not just clients doing more brand building, but more profound change.

Jennifer at Johnnie Walker is happy about that. "As one of the bill payers," she sees that her brand leaves a lot behind that there isn't a budget to make. So, she’s "excited that some of the dull things - resizing a banner - can be automated, reduced in cost, so we can spend that money getting through to creative breakthroughs.”

One change which the industry often hears about is that clients are more short term than ever – a characterisation that the two clients on the panel didn’t recognise, even if consumers do feel like they have become more short term. While there is “still a lot of room for loyalty,” said Jennifer at Discover, Jennifer at Johnnie Walker noted that people are living in the moment more due to the volatile world around us.

Trust between agencies and brands is “getting tougher,” observed Dev, with clients moving away from and switching agencies faster. But relationships like Dove or IBM are very long-term and trusting, so as ever, the exceptions prove the rule. Most clients want that relationship with their agencies, she added, but relationships can't be based on feel and lack of transparency. It takes work to build them. And it’s only three or four people per team that make the difference to those relationships, noted Tyler from FCB’s perspective. 

Jennifer at Johnnie Walker observed that all clients have more agencies in different disciplines, now, so the relationships are less exclusive ones. But all of them need to be built on the same values. "It's how you show up every day,” added Jennifer at Discover – the cumulation of all the moments is the relationship. It’s the humanity they’re made of that drives businesses through volatile times.