MIAMI — Kathleen Brookbanks knows the future is mobile – she just has to hire for it.
The chief operating officer of Omnicom’s two-year-old agency Hearts & Science says the future of advertising depends on finding the right people.
“Being that we’re in a world where we have to figure out mobile, I think I would go as far as saying, advertising is at risk of being as successful in growing brands if we don’t figure out mobile for the future,” Brookbanks says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Right now as an industry, we don’t know how to be persuasive in mobile.”
Hearts & Science was founded to service Proctor & Gamble, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, but recently has expanded to add new business, Brookbanks says.
But, both as it expands and as it looks to do mobile right, the company has been in a quest to add the right new staff.
“We have to hire 800 people in our first year,” Brookbanks adds. “We’ve now opened nine offices in North America, up to 16 globally.
“I think that probably the hardest thing to do right now is have great talent, honestly – harder than all the data and the technology. It was hard in the beginning to find those people.
“What we’ve done is brought in a chief experience officer – a whole new thing. This person does marketing, but they are also the chief of culture. HR reports to them, but this is truly a very senior person who is all about taking the vision of the company and merging that with the culture we want to have. Easier to do when you’re building something from the ground up than when you inherit something, but still really hard work, still really hard work.”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
