Five questions with Toby Jenner, Wavemaker’s global CEO

Jenner reflects on the last 12 months as CEO of a global media agency, explains why Wavemaker has taken to provoking its clients, and addresses concerns that AI is here to replace planners

As a global agency CEO, how have the past 12 months been for you?

As with all businesses around the world, Wavemaker has felt the effect of the global pandemic and the resulting lockdowns. While it’s been a year to forget in many ways, I do want to remember and recognise how we pulled together as a team, a team of 7,000, and worked tirelessly for each other and our clients.

We supported our teams through a number of initiatives which I hope helped them both personally as well as professionally, including:

• Additional holidays to give our people time to recharge
• Access to our employee assistance programme and mental health first aiders
• Remote working wellbeing guides
• Extra support and resources for working parents
• Virtual workouts, yoga, sleep improvement and mindfulness courses

Professionally, we completely rewired the agency, launching a new global agency proposition – “Positively Provoking” growth for our clients and our people.

We built a global operating system accessed across all our markets and housing our modular planning product, Provocative Planning. We re-structured our global leadership team across clients, countries and capabilities to create a stronger sense of consistency and connectivity across our 88 markets.

We also formed three regional ‘Challenger’ ExCos, appointed from rising stars across Wavemaker, to inject increased diversity into our thinking, as well as reverse mentoring our leaders.

Thanks to the agility of the business and the energy of our new positioning, we’ve been able to mitigate the worst effects of the crisis, serve our clients, protect our talent and maintain our financial health.

We retained and expanded our remit on every one of our top 20 global partnerships and led the world in new business success, delivering $2 billion in new billings and among others welcomed Novo Nordisk, Philips, Pernod Ricard, Prada, Perfetti van Melle, MGA Entertainment and ViacomCBS as Wavemaker clients.

Wavemaker has just rolled out a new AI media planning platform, Maximize – what is the benefit of using AI to produce media plans? How do clients benefit from this new approach to planning campaigns?

The challenges facing marketers have grown significantly, with audiences becoming ever more fragmented and budgets ever more squeezed. At the same time, in the face of increased competition or unforeseen disruptions due to the global pandemic, marketing strategies have needed to evolve more quickly and consistently.

The AI built into Maximize, our end-to-end planning platform, helps us to solve the complexity of media planning across many fragmented audiences to optimise a return on our clients’ media investments.

There’s been a lot of coverage about machine learning (AI) replacing people or more specifically planners. Let’s be clear that what we are doing is reducing/removing the mundane, so we can focus our talent on transformative thinking to give our clients a competitive advantage in their growth ambitions.

It helps our clients and ensures our teams are more motivated by doing more interesting work day to day.

When Wavemaker rebranded in March last year, you promised to take a “provocative, even fearless attitude” towards growth and change – even “uncomfortable change”. Over the last 12 months (and following the onset of a global pandemic), has Wavemaker managed to uphold that attitude?

We launched Positive Provocation days before the first global lockdown. I think it would have been easy to pull back on the roll-out under those circumstances, but we believed in it, and ultimately it has proven to be the right offer for this new era.

The powerful attitude of Positive Provocation is the beating heart of our business, and it has driven a renewed energy in our work.

We have taken the opportunity offered by this extraordinary year and our proposition to challenge our clients to take more risks, embrace emerging technology and really get to the heart of what they stand for, all ultimately to drive growth.

And it’s delivering. We believe it’s been fundamental to our recent new business success, but it has also strengthened our existing client relationships, and we are delivering growth for brands across the world.

As an example, in the US, we provoked DoorDash, the food delivery service, to invest in its brand purpose, moving funds from their performance budgets. The result has been an unprecedented market share growth for DoorDash, which is now expanding into new territories.

Positive Provocation is not just for clients and new business. It is woven into every fibre of us, from the way we recruit and develop talent, to our ceaseless commitment to a vibrant culture where diverse opinions thrive. The launch of a Challenger ExCo is a great example of Positive Provocation in action.

What will be the biggest opportunity for advertisers in media this year?

The impact of the pandemic has forced the industry to quickly reflect on the significant change in consumers ecommerce purchase behaviour. However, the real opportunity is yes, scaling ecommerce, but doing so while maintaining profitability.

This comes from having a diversity of channels: pureplays, e-retail, DTC and increasingly social commerce.

The brands that can work across retail and media with a shared KPI and skillset will be the ones that win, and we are increasingly working with a more varied set of stakeholders, so that ecommerce growth is sustainable and profitable.

Brands largely brushed this aside when ecommerce growth was in the low single digits, but in one year ecommerce has become the largest source of growth and is set to become many times larger. You cannot ignore the commercial realities, so let’s not win the battle to lose the war.

If you could change one thing about the media industry on a global scale, what would it be?

The pace of change in diversity and inclusion is too slow. If I could make a change overnight, then I’d like to see us fully representing the communities we market to and serve.

That one change would give the entire industry a huge power-up in creativity, provocation and effectiveness.