In a recent interview with the BBC Jones CEO of Havas, one of the biggest global advertising agencies gave gold to BBH's don't fly campaign for British Airways as it understood the audience. The commonality that the advertising medal winners have is an awareness to be open, to share and be collaborative.
Losers are brands and agencies that use an enforce and command model, like Visa, whose sponsors rights and privileges have gone too far in only allowing visa payments to be made in the Olympic stadium. The line 'We're proud to only accept Visa' is out-of-touch as it serves to annoy people.
The sponsor MacDonald’s had the privilege of being the only Olympic retailer (out of 800) to sell chips. Jones asserts that in the world of new media, you can still censor venues however it is very hard to 'lock down' social media, which he describes as 'much more powerful than the Olympic movement'.
The exclusivity rights the games give to sponsors have created a problem for the movement, as brands could be damaged by such sponsorship deals. Social responsibility is important to the world and business today, people want brands to stand for more than just profit - they want to know the purpose behind the profit.
'Is the whole relevance of global advertising dead? Are you a burning platform?' Jones replied that the advertising industry is more relevant than ever as the industry has shifted from a TV advertising industry to a digital and social media industry.
'When you can kill a brand in an afternoon by leaving a comment on a blog how do you have a cat in hells chance of keeping up with that?' Jones explained that as long as advertisers evolve we can. If we don't we will go the way of the dinosaurs. Clients know the rules of the TV advertising world; they don't know the rules of the game for the social media world. How you operate in that space and how brands can be socially responsible is what matters. New media is intrinsically linked to social responsibility and being able to deliver in this space is to be successful [achieve gold].
Can you bill a million pounds for running a twitter account or running a very well done blog? It's different to TV advertising isn't it? Yes it's a completely different model and every six months something new appears. Jones then describes the recent purchase of Victor and Spoils and contends that although this new approach to creativity could damage our legacy business - this is much smaller than our competitors.
For Jones only socially aware agencies with entrepreneurial agility will be Olympian medallists.
