#AdForumSummit: Tech and consumers rule — IPG

by Johanna McDowell (@jomcdowell) This seventh virtual session of the AdForum Worldwide Summit 2020 on Tuesday 7 July was directed by Philippe Krakowsky, IPG group COO, whom we’ve met with many times at AdForum over the past 11 years. Right-hand man to Michael Roth, IPG group CEO, Krakowsky has been a key driver of change at Interpublic Group of Companies.

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Ahead of the session, the agency group sent us some content to review and to ensure that we’d be able to view the video material; it doesn’t always translate well over Zoom. Good idea!

Tech and consumers rule

IPG consists of many agencies in different disciplines but this presentation was about the group layers that support the various agencies. Those agencies include: FCB, Mullen Lowe, McCann, UM Brands and Weber Shandwick, among many agency brands within the group.

IPG told us that the conversations with clients in the last few months have changed: there’s an acceleration of everything in tech.

Key market priorities

Enterprise data strategy
Clients are taking control of first-party data
There’s is an audience-led approach
Spend less, making fewer better assets
Customer experience (CX) is key — be with the consumer at every step

Vision

IPG’s vision is to reframe marketing as a more-valuable service by building technology that puts data to work intelligently, creatively, responsibly.

A case study for “Go back to Africa — displace the hate” was shown to us.

IPG, as an ideas organisation, is moving towards becoming a business-solutions company with four new services underpinning all of the agencies in the group. These four layers include:

IPG Production: 2 000+ people globally
Hedy: 800 people — platform experts
Kinesso: 1 400 experts in data and tech
Acxiom: 2 100 + data and solutions experts

It’s with this formidable team that IPG as a group goes to market, as understanding people has the become the backbone of any marketing engine. We learned more about the data layers in particular:

Acxiom was an acquisition by the group and provides an understanding of more than 2.3bn people globally
Kinesso is a marketing intelligence engine — a data connector and a data transformer

IPG is using these platforms in every pitch in the group — and with great success.

Another case study was Microsoft Xbox, which won at Cannes Lions with a Grand Prix for best use of creative and data.

Long relationships

We observed that Acxiom is so powerful that the agency will be enabled to have long relationships with clients as the agency will be deeply involved with those clients’ businesses. While IPG agreed that this might be true, it was clear that it wouldn’t force clients to only use its tech stack and would be happy to accommodate client martech service providers along with its own platforms.

We also commented that IPG has created new revenue streams for the group, applied open architecture to martech, and had some great case studies with Xbox and Mini. It was a highly detailed session, with some excellent discussion later in the presentation.

Our final session will be with Accenture Interactive, today, Wednesday 8 July.