Friday, September 28, 2007

Digital CEOs take over creative discussion

I hadn't really looked at who the panelists were before walking into Stuart Elliott's CEO Summit on creative yesterday, so I found it notable that it had such a major focus on digital—and that the digitally literate seemed to have the most to say. (BTW, this panel was billed as "sold out" also, but there were plenty of seats in the room.) OK, go ahead and accuse me of putting the business in nice, neat silos, but from the digital side were Tribal DDB's Matt Freeman, Bob Greenberg from R/GA, Organic CEO Mark Kingdon, and—as what might be described as the bridge over troubled waters—Steve Hayden from Ogilvy. Then there was Y&R's Hamish McClellan, Deutsch's Linda Sawyer and Grey's Steve Hardwick. Surprise!—nothing was resolved concerning the ongoing debate about how to adjust to what's going on today, so I decided to just do a rundown here of the best sound bites:

Hayden: "[Google] is a very distinctive culture where they have an algorithm for everything. They probably have an algorithm for paper usage in the public restroom."

Elliott: "[The ad execs] who are impeding the progress [of the industry] are the same people who think 'Mad Men' is a documentary."

Hardwick/Elliott: Upon hearing Hardwick say that Grey wants to be "a tradigital agency," Elliott commented, "It's two, two, two agencies in one!"

Kingdon: "If you were starting over from scratch you wouldn't structure [agencies] the way they are today."

Hayden: "The Internet is vast, brutal and cruel and clients have to toughen up."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cathy,
I am curious.
In the annals of digitalia, has any CMO, CFO, CEO, CIO expressed disillusionment with "new media" or been cashiered or resigned because of excessive use of "the web" in fashioning media plans?
I.e., the reigning assumption is that no one spends enough on "alternate media," but is there anyone who has been alleged to have spent too much?

Catharine P. Taylor said...

Hi there,

No one comes to mind but I'm sure it has happened--though I'm guessing it was more likely to have happened back in about 2000 when the bubble burst because everyone had grown so sour on online advertising.

If anyone can name the name of someone who did get fired for spending too much money in dot-com land, let us know.

Cathy