Thoughts from 3.57 degrees of separation

My first challenge was being separated from the conference itself, with a client meeting in Andover intervening in a resolutely non-global not-very-digital way to put the first half of the day out of reach.

I arrived just in time to miss lunch and instead in its place was entertained by Graham Fink preparing to bring China to life by giving the conference organisers a series of sharp instructions for how to make the lights the right colour, the stage the right shape and the general art direction more respectful of ‘the work’.  This seemed to be both sound advice and an exemplification of one of marketing’s biggest challenges – being seen as more than just ‘the work’ and instead providing a business-aware customer-led North Star for business more broadly.

Graham was excellent though, painting a picture of the way a modern ad-man operates in an alien environment, drawing conclusions such as ‘it’s very big’ (it really is) and ‘crazy shit happens’, showing the currency of communications ideas is now firmly integrated and beyond the TV ad alone (the invention of the first, Chinese, monkey sent into space many years ago, apparently returning to Earth at a big new retail park that needed some publicity and being interviewed in Chinese, getting all over social media and not a PG Tips teabag in sight).

His conclusion about why he’s there? In the Roman Empire you needed to be in Rome, for the previous generation it was New York, now if you want to be front and centre globally, Shanghai is the place.

We heard from another Chinese-based European next, the CEO of Vitasoy, a soy milk and tea brand owner who, broadly, seemed to do much the same as brand owners everywhere but on a bigger scale, and fuelled by a belief that in the absence of dairy as an easy food category, the soy bean could feed the Chinese nation.  Roberto Guidetti, the person in question, had also arrived in China with a good story behind him, being curious to see what was going on beyond Rome (admittedly now 2,000 years beyond its best), and swapping a global P&G position with a colleague in Taiwan.

The third speaker was Parag Khanna, a TED-schooled thoroughbred who steered us articulately through a story at complete odds with the isolationist lurch the West has taken in the latter part of 2016.  He painted a picture of our world now seen through a lens of connection, taking in infrastructure (transport, energy and communications, the skeleton, vascular system and nervous system of our living culture), cities (more important than countries, with great ones being melting pots of overlapping cultures – London, NY, LA, Hong Kong and Singapore all more than 35% foreign born populations), and the way economies are evolving (from fixed to flexible in everything – career, education, home, car, relationships and more – meaning connectivity becomes a crucial currency to get it all to work).

He concluded that there is a new moral compass emerging with the individuals at the heart of this new world feeling like global citizens first, caring about the true sustainability of society and connecting by impulse.  If right then you’d take a very different direction from a more superficial analysis of the times we’re living through right now.

And then, with another client conversation looming, I heard from Martin Glenn.  His words, summing up his aims through his closing tenure as President, were strong and a counterpoint to where I’d come in.  Marketing’s role is to bring the external world into an organisation and then to help the organisation change it.  The industry and the Society should have the ambition to create more marketing CEOs and these will be people who make money, run P&Ls, have edge and who lead people. We need to use The Marketing Society to help us get this done.

Get out of our comfort zone he said.  Get out of wearing all-black might be a first step for marketing presenters, I mused, as I returned to the cold reality of Waterloo on a wet Thursday and a somewhat more tactical, definitely uncomfortable, view of life.