Interview – James Walker,Joint Managing Director, Advanced Techniques Group Worldwide
Advanced Techniques Group Worldwide was opened as an independent company, under the J. Walter Thompson umbrella, in March. Yet, the company has already conducted an immense amount of valuable research and has broken even on its first year’s cost provision.
It is no wonder then that James Walker, media development director of the research company, is so excited about the new group’s prospects. According to Walker, the secret of ATG’s rapid success is its uniqueness. ATG aims to bring together the latest proven research techniques and a worldwide research network to produce an unrivaled global service.
The unique nature of the business should, surely, attract clients from outside the JWT labyrinth of agencies, but ATG is concentrating on working within the network. Walker hopes that his ‘baby’ will be the diamond sparkling in the middle of the organisation, luring new clients into the JWT net.
ATG also aims to consolidate its parent company’s control over its clients’ needs, by-passing management consultancies, to offer a comprehensive in-house service.
Walker puts great emphasis on the need for each separate company within JWT to work together. Research groups, he feels, must not be treated as closed factories that spew out data, but should be consulted at each stage of the planning and creative process. Using Project Cosine as an example, Walker said: “It is just as vital for creative directors to be aware of the effect of colour and positioning of an advert in the press, as it is for media planners and buyers.” For further information on this project, see the transcript of Walker’s MRG conference speech James Walker – Does Size Matter…And Position, Colour And Content?.
The success of Cosine, inspired ATG to begin a similar study into television and Project Tangent was born. Tangent set out to discover the effect of advertising positioning in different markets and some interesting results emerged. “The study revealed wide variations between countries. An Italian audience’s response to an adverts positioning is completely different to a UK audience,” commented Walker, “the results make especially interesting reading in the light of the minutage debate which is currently engulfing the UK industry.”
With the ever increasing range of advertising possibilities, Walker was particularly enthusiastic about Project Zeus: “This is a completely new approach that looks at the amount of advertising exposure needed to trigger a purchase, while another study, Project Atlas, looks at the effectiveness of different media advertising within the same campaign.” Atlas might analyse, for instance, how a radio advert works alongside a press campaign for the same product. Each area of ATG’s research projects can also work together, to give clients a thorough overview of the effectiveness of their campaigns.
For the moment ATG is concentrating on mass media, Walker explained: “There is just not the public interest in new media to justify extensive research, if this changes this will, of course, be another area which we will begin to analyse.”
Advanced Techniques Group Worldwide is still in its infancy, but it has had a very promising start and, if it is possible, Walker is even more enthusiastic about ATG’s future than he is about its current success. Walker basically loves his job, but then he has been to about ten countries in as many weeks all in the name of business. Even Victor Meldrew couldn’t complain about that!