Time and tide waits for no agency

What exactly is your role?

It is about looking at where the marketing communications business is today and where it will be say two, three years from now and recharting a course between the two. Obviously the primary objective is to provide a strategy that will grow the entire business as we move into the near future, and then the second and more difficult part is implementing the plan.

How will you do it?

Firstly you really need to understand the DNA of the company. Is the company culture simply on a piece of paper in reception or is it a living thing that everybody goes by? JWT like many companies within the WPP group conducts regular staff surveys and client surveys so that also provides valuable input. Understanding what are the existing strategies, processes, and as you're doing all of this remembering if this is what we're doing today, is it going to be relevant tomorrow?

Why haven't other agencies created a job like yours?

Not sure but if you look at the past three years in our industry, more change has gone on than in the last 26. When things are changing so fast and you're going from a comfortable environment to a radically complexed one, sometimes you're running fast to stand still and reacting to the demands of now and today rather than thinking about tomorrow.

I think the CSO role is the right thing to do. Our industry is a reflection of what goes on in the marketplace and what we have basically seen is a media environment where consumers have that much more choice than before, the word proliferation is really an understatement - it's more like an explosion. Consumers now live extremely busy lives and anywhere they go they are being touched as it were by some kind of medium of communication. That marketplace has changed and obviously technology has been a big driver of change whether you want to call it the internet or cheap mobile phones that can do everything. Clients move along with that change, and our industry is a little slower in responding.

How do we catch up with the marketplace then?

If you look at today and the near future you are going to have the big boys but you're also going to have a lot of medium to small sized specialist agencies which can take some of our business away so the days of your competitor being one big shark is over - it's more like 50 piranhas. How do you grow some of the specialised services we already have, and develop some of the new specialist areas? How do you develop a communications planning system that ties all of that so you get integrated communications? The two biggest challenges for the industry at the moment are communications planning and Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI).

What about evaluating success?

Don't wait for the three year plan to end and see if it's a success or not. We have to measure our performance on a regular and continuous basis because all plans are not perfect and you have to take into account happenings in the marketplace and make course corrections. The final judge of success or failure for me will be how our business has grown.

Where are the major investments for JWT and RMG Connect going to go?

Major investments will be going into India, China and probably markets such as Vietnam and Indonesia but that doesn't mean you stop spending here or cut your staff or anything like that. Plus Singapore is one of the five most digitally developed countries in the whole region and is of a nice size where you can experiment.

Favourite market to work in?

I am a bit torn - I was in Hong Kong for about 10 years and I absolutely love it, but I also grew up in Singapore in the 60s and 70s. I also had a fantastic time in India - so those three markets.

Good CSO attributes?

The ability and capacity to understand the environment which is our business, our client's business, consumers and media. You have to have a want to look at the future. The other thing is, I take Taekwondo and it has five tenets and one of those is perseverance and that is important because it comes into play after you've written the plan and try to implement the plan and stick with it. The easy part is writing the plan!