Until very recently, Nicole Yershon was director of innovative solutions at Ogilvy Labs at Ogilvy Group UK.  Beginning 23 years ago, Nicole’s career in advertising took her to two of London’s most renowned and creative agencies; Simons Palmer and GGT. In 2000, with a brief from the chairman to “bring the agency into the 21st century”, Nicole joined Ogilvy London where she worked as the director of innovative solutions. Her first four years with Ogilvy saw her overhaul the agency’s broadcast and video-editing capabilities; taking them from analog to digital, with the creation of RedWorks Broadcast. In 2005, Nicole’s drive for innovation grew to encompass the agency’s new media projects and campaigns; encouraging Adventure Ecology to flood Second Life to raise awareness of global warming, Fanta to develop a mosquito-sound mobile application for kids and IBM to be one of the first to advertise on digital escalator panels. Consolidated in 2007 into the Ogilvy Digital Innovation Lab (part of a worldwide network), the agency’s innovation activities have seen Nicole build partnerships between industries and across media channels to fuel unprecedented creative campaigns, and educate, both within the agency and beyond, speaking at global conferences and building clients Labs of their own. We caught up with Nicole to ask her a thing or two about technology, advertising, creativity and the future. 

What are the biggest challenges you face in the ad industry today? What are the biggest challenges your customers face? What gives?

Looking around at the advertising industry, I’d say the biggest challenge is trying to be innovative and instigate new ways of working and new business models – while still catering to the existing models. Balancing both is proving difficult for most industries and sectors. Every large agency should ask itself: Are we agile? Do we understand the ever-changing landscape of technology? And are we brave enough to try things people don’t dare do? The best companies thrive on what people fear most: change.

For customers, the biggest challenge they face is keeping brands relevant.  There is an enormous pressure on big brands across the world, both in emerging markets, and at home.  There’s a recent article in the Economist that highlights the problem of smaller rivals assaulting the world’s biggest brands. How do we keep our brand useful and speak to our customers in all areas of their lives, across all platforms and all marketing disciplines?

But we shouldn’t beat ourselves up, too much. The ad industry has changed considerably in the last 10 years – we don’t have to cope with just doing TV or the press, posters, radio. Now we’re in a time of rapid, continuous disruption – from mobile web to augmented reality, virtual reality, gesture recognition, streaming, AI, the Internet of Things, and so many other technological changes.  We will continue to test and learn – as traditional methods of communicating slow down and evolve into alternative formats that hit all touch points of people’s lives.

Ask yourself – Is my business committed to experimentation, collaboration, small teams?   The challenges aren’t going away. How do we, as an industry, as individuals,  keeping on moving forward and not looking back?

You’ve famously said “we don’t know what we don’t know” – what do you do to find out what you don’t know?

I go to places where I know no one and nothing – always out of my comfort zone. And this is something we help our clients with.  You can’t hang around in the advertising industry and learn what’s new.  You have to take yourself to new places to be open to learning. How does a company open itself to alternative ways of thinking?

Most importantly – I try to continuously build new relationships and partnerships. I try to understand my strengths and weaknesses – the strength is understanding in a short space of time enough to be dangerous to take back that information. If anyone needs to know more, then at least now I have the contacts that know way more than me!  Hence the black book – everyone should have a black book for ideas and their sources. It’s been 16 years of amazing people met along this journey.

To what extent are decisions made on data and analytics? Is there still room for creativity?

Start by asking “what if?”

There is always room for creativity.  Surround yourself with curious people – put yourself in an environment that stimulates conversation. Start at the bar.  Where do people gather to discuss ideas? Where are the watering holes for innovation? Go there with no agenda and no fear.

The word is serendipity.  When you hang out with people who know more than you, you’ll be inspired. Anything, quite literally, can happen. Big or small data, creativity is more important than ever.

How do you balance the story of your brand with the realities of today’s hypercompetitive markets? How does a short-term, quarterly focus hurt advertising?

A quarterly focus always hurts innovation. Because innovation is usually viewed as an R&D function, as a cost center, its not viewed as critical.  It doesn’t by itself  bringing money in.

So the innovator must also become an intrapreneur.  There are always senior leaders out there that get it and understand the value and function of innovation.  And there are others whose only concern is the line item on a spread sheet for that month. This sort of myopia exists across all businesses – there’s no point fighting it.  So the intrapreneur has to find alternative ways around this type of short-term thinking.  How do we take this innovation and apply it to our customers’ problems?  How can we change the conversation?  How do we create new value that did not exist before?

How do you work on customer trust? Who is responsible for creating and shaping the customer experience in the company? How should they approach their work?

It’s everyone’s responsibility across all disciplines and touch points to see themselves as the customer. We are all people, no different from the customer.

Always put yourself in that head space of “why should I care or why should I buy this?”

David Ogilvy used to famously say: “The customer is not a moron – she is your wife.”

We all know what we should do.  And sometimes it takes a bit of courage to stand up for the customer.  If you look at the most successful companies, they are customer-obsessed.

What are some ways you use to motivate your team and ensure they are focused and engaged?

There are always other ways to inspire and motivate your team that go beyond monetary rewards.  Perhaps they only want to work a 3 day week and do something different on the other 2 days, perhaps a job swop.  In the lab we used to run emotional intelligence testing – to find out what motivated everyone and we all had different strengths that supported each other. We knew we were not perfect individuals. It was a fearless, non-hierarchical structure that allowed us all to roll our sleeves up and get stuck in and show our vulnerability if things were difficult.

You’ve discovered 6 R’s for Innovation – can you share these with our readers?

We measure our work by what we call the six Rs of innovation success: revenue; reputation; recruitment; retention; relationships; and responsibility. I’ll cover each one briefly.