Beyond Advertising. Hays Catharine Findiesen

Lee, Mark, Gavi, and Barbara

      For

      Olivia and Lizzy

      And to our inspirational collaborators, colleagues, friends, and loved ones

      Acknowledgements

      This book represents a milestone in a years-long collaborative process, both between us as co-founders of the Wharton Future of Advertising (WFoA) Program, as well as with all those who have helped develop, participate in, and contribute to the projects, initiatives, and gatherings reflected in these pages.

      Focusing on the future of advertising was the brain child of Mark Morris, Joe Plummer, and Jerry, when they identified the revolution that was fomenting in the advertising world and the need to establish an independent, respected, academic endeavor to bring together forward-thinking practitioners, researchers, and academics to collectively chart the way forward. Since then, many individuals around the world have been inspired by our mission to become de facto members of the Wharton Future of Advertising Innovation Network – our co-authors. We are grateful for the opportunity to thank the many people and their organizations who have contributed and lent support of all kinds to make this profoundly collaborative book and initiative take shape.

      For the actual book and ebook, we thank Richard Narramore at Wiley, with the wonderful team of Tiffany Colon, Peter Knox, and Suganya Babu, who provided the support, encouragement, feedback, and patience we needed to marshal the manuscript through production and to market.

      We are grateful to those who took the time to provide early, honest and constructive feedback on the manuscript including Lisa Colantuono, Neal Davies, Vaasu Gavarasana, Tom Morton, George Musi, Joe Plummer, Jenny Rooney, Pierre Soued, and John Winsor.

      We especially thank each of our brave Advertising 202 °Contributors (listed in Appendix 2) who took the time to craft their unique visions of the future. We'd also like to offer a special thanks to a few individuals who reached deep into their personal professional networks to expand and enrich the project scope. Kamini Banga interviewed eight industry luminaries to capture and reflect their insights. Neal Davies and Denise McDevitt curated their Effie Award-winning community to find relevant examples for the book and for subsequent, interactive material we'll be offering. Matthew Godfrey enlisted Jun Lee to tap the Z Apprentices in Y & R and Wunderman's Global Talent Program to ensure we heard from the next generation. Gillian Graham enlisted thought leaders from Canada's Institute of Communications Agencies. Bob Greenberg personally invited all of the tech innovators whom he and Greg Harper selected for the inaugural Advertising Week Experience in 2012. Bruce Crawford and Thomas Harrison brought us innovators from across their network. John Philip Jones reached out to his star alumni from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Mark Morris, who had tapped his Bates alumni network to ensure executive representation from each continent to form the original membership of our Global Advisory Board, then made sure that each of them contributed their points of view for the 2020 Project.

      As much as this book has the content from the Advertising 2020 Project at its core, it is also very much informed and inspired by those who have been actively involved with furthering the mission of WFoA since its inception.

      We have been privileged to co-host roundtable sessions with top practitioners and academics from around the world to exchange and discuss their initiatives, research, and insights and offer feedback on the emerging models we developed as a result. For these sessions we have been fortunate to work with first-rate collaborators and their colleagues: Byron Sharp, Elke Seretis, Jenni Romaniuk, and Karen Nelson-Field at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute; Dan Feldstein and Mitchell Reichtgut at Jun Group; Rosemarie Ryan and Ty Montague at co-collective; Nick Primola and Bob Lidoce of the ANA; Bruce Rogers and Jenny Rooney at Forbes; Philip Thomas and Steve Latham and their teams at the Cannes Lions; Phil Cowdell while at Mindshare (and ever since); Rich Guest at Tribal Worldwide; Bob Kantor and the talented people throughout MDC Partners; Jae Goodman and Sylvia Friedel at CAA; Rishad Tobaccowala and Douglas Ryan at VivaKi and DigtasLBi; the late Bob Barocci, Gayle Fuguitt and the dedicated ARF staff; Nancy Hill and Mike Donahue at the 4A's; Randall Rothenberg and Susan Borst at the IAB; Peter Gatscha at the Austrian Trade Commission; Barbara Kahn and Denise Dahlhoff at Wharton's Baker Retail Center; Eric Bradlow and Pete Fader at the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative; and Vaasu Gavarasana, who while at Bates 141, personally convened a powerhouse group of those at the forefront of advertising, marketing, and media in India for a 2011 roundtable session in New Delhi.

      We have learned a tremendous amount through three major collaborations to bring research rigor to new practices just as they were emerging. Laurent Larguinat at Mars worked with us to understand more about the nuances of social media virality while the concept was still nascent in 2011. Vaasu Gavarasana, while at Yahoo! APAC, with leadership and research support from Yvonne Chang and Edwin Wong, led an effort to explore the topic of Native Advertising with agencies and client executives in Singapore in early 2013 when the term was just gaining traction. And in late 2014 we co-created a research project with Facebook to better understand personalization at scale. The core members of the team – Hamdan Azhar, Neha Bhargava, Gabrielle Gibbs, and Daniel Slotwiner – are collaborators of the highest caliber, as we work to understand not only the rigorous analytics, but the needed new collaborative alignment among clients, agencies, and platforms, to chart these uncharted waters.

      Thanks to the efforts of Karl Ulrich and Brandon Lodriguss, Wharton launched Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School on Sirius XM Channel 111 in January 2014, and we became early collaborators to form the Marketing Matters show on Wednesday evenings. This has become a wonderful opportunity to hold live, on-air conversations with three or four astute executives during each two-hour show and we are extremely grateful for the time each of them has taken to share their insights. We also want to give a special shout-out to Jenny Rooney, editor at Forbes CMO Network, for co-creating the CMO Spotlight show once a month. We are thankful to all of the coaching and support provided by the unflappable and ever-positive Michelle Stucker, our producer, and to each of the student research assistants who provide us with first-rate background information on the guests and the topics to keep the conversations meaningful.

      The foundation of our Program is the growing network of our active and generous Global Advisory Board members and other inspiring invited guests who have carved time out to participate in our annual meetings, to share with the WFoA and each other their successes, challenges, and insights over the years. At the very first session it became infinitely clear that it was valuable to both the Program and to the participants to take a step back, look ahead to the future, hear what others from across the ecosystem had to say about the most current approaches and findings as well as how to best prepare for the challenges and opportunities of the next 12 to 18 months, even while considering what we should be aiming for, and using our influence and resources to make happen, in 3–5 years.

      Wharton and Penn have a host of impressive alumni who are now finding one another in this community of innovators who are redefining the landscape. Thanks so much to those of you who have connected with us. We encourage you to continue to reach out, reconnect, and leverage this community to make a positive impact on the field and on the world.

      We also want to acknowledge the students and student organizations with whom we have partnered to create bridges and dialog between the WFoA Innovation Network Community and students across disciplines at Wharton, Penn and beyond, through the open, online courses we'll be creating. You make us all hopeful for the future. Be brave to strive for the triple wins for brands, people, and society in the work you do after graduation. We are just getting started and you are an essential driver for a better future.

      All of this would not have been possible without Al West. Through his support of Wharton's SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management, which he and Jerry founded in 1990 and where we have incubated the WFoA Program since 2008, Al has been our primary visionary and benefactor, continuing his investment is us and in our mission, year after year. Thank you, Al, for enabling what has become so widely and globally valued and appreciated.

      We are also grateful to our other early stage funders who individually believed enough in the importance of our mission to champion corporate gifts when they were, and in some cases still are, at these companies: Sanjay Govil at Infinite;