When considering setbacks over the course of his career, J. Walter Thompson’s Non-Executive Chairman Bob Jeffrey thinks of losing accounts, which he always took “very personally and emotionally.”
In particular, he remembers when the agency lost most of its Microsoft business.
“That was very painful because I thought we had done great work, and there are times when you lose business and you can see why a client would do that, but this was a case where I thought it was completely unfair,” says Jeffrey in an interview with Beet.TV. At the end of last year, he stepped down as JWT’s worldwide CEO after 11 years in the job.
He adds, “My attitude was just replace the business and move on. What else can you do?”
In terms of where the industry is headed, Jeffrey thinks millennials are going to have a transformative impact on the ad business when they arrive en masse to roles on both the client and agency sides.
Due to their comfort with technology, “I think all those people are just inherently going to want to work differently,” he says.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.
Jeffrey was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.
