Today’s guest is Remy, he is an author of several books and one of the biggest advertisement players in Switzerland. Tell us what is the job of an agency?

The job of an agency is to make advertisement concepts and to find the right channels for them, to look how advertisement is deployed, to make analytics and to be efficient. It’s all about helping our client sell their products.

But nowadays, the client doesn’t understand anymore how to reach the consumers, so we create concepts  to help them with that. 

Why would you say that the clients don’t understand it anymore?

Because the consumers changed. Today the consumer is in the chair and decides how, when and about what he wants to be informed and motivated. It’s not the marketing person anymore who decides what the consumer wants to hear and how the message gets to him.

Why did it change?

Technology plays a big role in these changes. Today it’s what we have in our pockets, what is on our screen. And that’s why we manage our time and the information we look at. It’s a big problem for marketing, they know exactly that it’s difficult to reach a consumer and that’s why we do our job and help them to find the right channels.

When a client comes to you with a product, how do you turn that product into a concept?

That’s a good question, I wrote a book about motivation, because consumers have totally changed their behaviour. They don’t care about advertisement anymore. So it’s important to get their attention, and to motivate them to give us a click or to look at our commercial. When it comes to storytelling, you have to know what motivates people to use the product. If there isn’t any direct link, you have to create one. 

There are 4 motivations: making a deal, being part of a group, being entertained, and showing what you can do. If I tap into one of these motivation and combine that with the benefits of the product, then I really reach your attention. And that’s how we build the concept. Then we create a beautiful story out of it. As you know, with all the electronic channels, storytelling on video is the best format.

Can you give us a practical example of one client that came with a product and you had to introduce does four elements to them?

I have a campaign running which is my magic road trip. Another one is “Feel Limitless” for Valser. With Valser water, we asked the question: do you want to feel limited or limitless? We tell the story why the water is coming out of the mountain, because the water is stronger than the mountain. Now if you have the strengths of that water, the question is: what will you do with it, do you want to feel limitless or limited? Then you have to take the decision, and when you took it, we got the content.

The most important thing is to try to motivate people to interact with us, because today, our attention span on a communication piece is a few seconds. We want to extend it, so that you think about the brand and the product, and you start to like it. We try to create an emotional bond between you and the product.

And then the next time you go to a kiosk and you choose a water, you get reminded of that connections.

Yes, because it means more to you than the other one, and that’s the goal of advertisement.

There is definitely a change in air, agencies are getting smaller, a lot of clients are trying to save money by eliminating the middleman. Where do you still see the value of an agency in today’s modern world?

If you look at the business model some years ago, an agency was making money by producing stuff. Today i think it’s okay that they restart making money by having great ideas. We are creating stories and the content plan, we help the clients choosing the channels wisely, and we check how effective the whole stuff is. It’s about a whole communication strategy with all channels included. We look at the data and we see what happens. We learn thanks to the data, how the consumer behaves and from there we go to the next step, and refine our strategy.

Why would you say the age of the big agency network is over?

The big agency network were made to deploy a client’s advertisement strategy and to produce all over the world. Now clients are hubbing themselves. You are probably in two marketing organisations, and need two advertisement organisations somewhere, probably in Paris, Milan, or wherever the big markets are. So the whole thing is shrinking. The small countries like Switzerland are left out, because we are not such an important market. There are big markets such as Germany, France and Italy. That’s why the age of big networks are shrinking very heavily.

And that is all because of the internet?

It’s because of the internet, but also about the money. It costs a lot of money to supply such a big network. The internet helps them to reorganise and reshape their marketing organisations and the deployments of advertisements.

Obviously, the money comes from the clients and they are not willing to spend that much money anymore, right?

Clients don’t need to spend that much money anymore. With all the channels they have, electronically you can do it centrally from one place.

With people’s short attention span and with more content being consumed than ever before in many different ways. Where do you see the best way of spending your advertising dollars, what works and what doesn’t anymore?

There are thousands of right ways to spend the money. Today, content doesn’t care about the medium or the channel anymore. It doesn’t matter if you look at it on a mobile phone or on the big screen. It’s about the content, to choose the right channel no matter where.

Today we have two big channels which are engines. This is the internet and television. Because if I want to build up reach very fast, its social media in combination with television or other classical mediums. And if I want to get in contact with the people, I need all the social media channels, especially Facebook and Instagram. 

Remy, what or who inspires you?

I was in a crisis six or seven years ago, because I really didn’t like advertising anymore. If you watch television with your family, or a big Hollywood film, you have 90 minutes of content and 60 minutes of advertisement, and it’s disgusting. You are ashamed to be an advertiser and that’s not a good business.

I was thinking of how to change it. I went to the Berlin school MBA to learn about which problems other people in my industry had. I discovered that they have exactly the same problem and want to reinvent advertising. This was my big inspiration.

It was hard, I had a day job and at night I was studying. You have to put yourself in question to reinvent yourself every 7 years and it was time for me.

As young people out there need inspiration, how could you inspire a recipe to success?

Our industry is interesting because the question must be how can the old brands be inspire the young people? Because they change the world, they work with technology, they grew up with technology, and the big brands are heavily struggling to adapt. 

And your Xaver come from there. You don’t have a classical education in film making, you come from trying, making, and developing your own style and language. This is very important today, we have to look at the young people and how they develop themselves, because technology is democracy and anybody can have his chance with democracy.

You are a guru in your field and you have done this for a long time. What drives you each morning to get out of bed, and say that you are going to make amazing work again?

Exactly that, for me it’s the new way to work. The new thing we developed are like fresh air and it’s getting up in the morning, and thinking: let’s invent advertisement again!

Interviewed by Xaver Walser

Check out The Art of Motivation by Remy Fabrikant.