The Jim Hytner interview
Newsline’s new columnist, Dominic Mills, interviews Jim Hytner, worldwide CEO of Initiative.
It is early November and unusually, given his peripatetic lifestyle as the worldwide chief executive of Initiative Media, Jim Hytner is in London all week.
A constant traveller to all parts of his global empire, especially the east and west coasts of the US, his presence in Initiative’s London base in Clerkenwell is nothing to do with Hurricane Sandy’s devastation of New York but, he says, a coincidence of the way he had arranged his schedule.
A man of indefatigable energy, enthusiasm and optimism, Hytner is generous with his time and remarkably free and frank with his opinions.
We meet in his office in a trendy post-industrial style building just down the road from the Masonic temple on Clerkenwell Green. It is a relaxed, de-cluttered, space with – and this may surprise those who know of his lifelong passion for Manchester United – hardly any football memorabilia: just a scarf and a black-and-white picture of George Best holding aloft the European Cup.
As an interviewee, he is a joy. Point the camera and off he goes – cautioning only that if he adds the words “f**k bollocks” to an answer then it should be excised from the record. In fact, nothing is, not even his dismissal of Initiative’s positioning as the ‘performance-led communications agency’ as “rubbish”.
You get the feeling he would perform all day – we only stop after his PA urgently raps on the door. He just says what he thinks with a refreshing absence of corporate-speak, and if that is provocative, well…so be it.
Up for discussion are the big themes of the day: how digital is changing the agency business model, and how Initiative is charging ahead with a payment-by-results proposition even though, as he admits, it makes IPG’s Wall Street paymasters nervous and it won’t work for every client.
It is on this subject that Hytner drops an exclusive: Initiative’s work for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s re-election campaign next year is on a performance-related basis. And to get its bonus, Initiative doesn’t just have to get her re-elected: it has to beat her target share of the vote.
Next on his list is redefining the Initiative proposition into something that changes how the agency does business inside and outside. Hytner acknowledges that this is of paramount importance. But the one thing the new proposition won’t have is an end line. “When I was a client I wasn’t interested [in agency end lines],” he says.
While this remains a work in progress, Hytner says it will be based on the ‘Barefoot Running’ theme which Initiative used in its recent successful global strategy pitch to Unilever. The one game he won’t play (although cynics say it’s a game Initiative can’t play anyway), he says, is undercutting on price. “It’s the road to nowhere.”
If his views on Initiative’s positioning suggest that Hytner is not prepared to play the corporate clone, he is hugely positive about IPG’s media holding company, Mediabrands, which, he believes, can play an increasingly active role both in its own right and as a support to Initiative. “It could be more of a client-facing brand, as it did when we pitched to Unilever,” he says.
It is clear that Hytner’s energy and drive will play a big part in building up the Initiative brand. But so too will the experience he brings as a former client, most recently with Barclays. It is this knowledge – of what clients want, how they behave, and what they think of their media agencies – that may ultimately be his biggest contribution. “It’s simple,” he says. “Clients want someone who commits to their outcomes. They don’t always want to talk about media. It changes the way you look at a brief.”
Click here to watch all five video interviews.
Dominic Mills will be writing every Monday for Newsline.