LONDON: Leading FMCG brands should be sharing their marketing successes in order to push the industry forward, a leading industry figure has argued.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Changing Advertising Summit in London, Bonin Bough, vice-president of global media and consumer engagement at snack foods giant Mondelez, called for those brands which had achieved big successes to share what they had learned.
He observed that when he had worked agency side "I realised that clients are too stupid to buy good work". That was one of the reasons he had swapped sides.
"Clients doing this stuff well and seeing big numbers have an obligation to push this industry forward," he said. "That is why we are always sharing our work," he told The Drum.
Bough was also exercised by data and the fact that many brands lacked strategies and ownership, ceding these to agencies. "The fact that holistically as an industry most clients don't have a real, long-term data strategy keeps me awake [at] night," he said.
With media likely to be mostly traded on a programmatic basis in the future, he saw a pressing need for clients to "become smart data players".
Data was also an issue in his remarks to the summit, as he pointed to a future dominated by the "internet of things" and studies suggesting that all grocery products would be digitally connected within the next seven years.
Businesses that sell millions of products every month, he suggested, would "have to become some of the world's largest technology companies", Marketing reported.
"We don't have the type of people that Cisco has. We don't think like Google. We don't operate like Facebook," said Bough, adding that organisations such as his were faced with the need to build a new type of culture "that will be necessary to win in a world of mobility". Mondelez itself plans to allocate 10% of its media spend to mobile.
Bough also disclosed that Mondelez was to launch a "wearable" experiment.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Changing Advertising Summit in London, Bonin Bough, vice-president of global media and consumer engagement at snack foods giant Mondelez, called for those brands which had achieved big successes to share what they had learned.
He observed that when he had worked agency side "I realised that clients are too stupid to buy good work". That was one of the reasons he had swapped sides.
"Clients doing this stuff well and seeing big numbers have an obligation to push this industry forward," he said. "That is why we are always sharing our work," he told The Drum.
Bough was also exercised by data and the fact that many brands lacked strategies and ownership, ceding these to agencies. "The fact that holistically as an industry most clients don't have a real, long-term data strategy keeps me awake [at] night," he said.
With media likely to be mostly traded on a programmatic basis in the future, he saw a pressing need for clients to "become smart data players".
Data was also an issue in his remarks to the summit, as he pointed to a future dominated by the "internet of things" and studies suggesting that all grocery products would be digitally connected within the next seven years.
Businesses that sell millions of products every month, he suggested, would "have to become some of the world's largest technology companies", Marketing reported.
"We don't have the type of people that Cisco has. We don't think like Google. We don't operate like Facebook," said Bough, adding that organisations such as his were faced with the need to build a new type of culture "that will be necessary to win in a world of mobility". Mondelez itself plans to allocate 10% of its media spend to mobile.
Bough also disclosed that Mondelez was to launch a "wearable" experiment.
Data soured from Marketing, The Drum; additional content by Warc staff
