Acknowledging the real value of an idea is crucial for advertising success

He’s not only a titan of communication in the MullenLowe global network and one of the most awarded creatives in the world, but also a world-class thought leader and cultural personality. Originally from Colombia, he received recognition on the world’s biggest stages, from the TED Talks platform to the Cannes Lions Festival. In 2017, he was interviewed by Lara Logan, an Emmy award-winning journalist, for the feature profile titled “The new Colombia,” a CBS News production, broadcast in the “60 minutes” series, which became one of the most successful pieces in the history of American television. BR sat down with Jose Miguel Sokoloff, Global President at MullenLowe Creative Council, and Sever Savanciuc, the CEO of Lowe Group in Romania, to talk about the group’s 30-year history on the local market and perspectives for the future, as well as creativity, future trends, and key lessons.

By Romanita Oprea

What are the major trends you expect to see in the industry in the future?

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: This is a question that comes up every every time. And the thing is that when it’s a trend in advertising, it no longer works because everybody starts doing it. But at least in creative terms, what I think is finally happening at a credible level is that what we used to know as traditional media is, for the first time, tangibly losing its power, particularly with the young people. But I don’t think it is an issue that has to do with the media. It is an issue that has to do with the content on other platforms, like TikTok for example. It is very free, very open, and very uncensored, if you like. And sometimes it’s a little bit pointless. And you don’t wonder, why would anyone even bother looking at this? It provides aform of entertainment that traditional media are not ready to embrace. So I think it is an issue of the quality of content. And the more traditional media get better at producing quality content, they will maintain their audiences. But right now, I think they’re falling behind in terms of the type of content they’re putting out there. It isn’t as free. It isn’t as uncensored, as crazy, and so on. I think that TikTok is very attractive and that it has shifted and completely changed the advertising landscape.

We have changed our philosophy from being always on to always there. And always there is different because it isn’t just existing wherever people are; it is being where people are and actually playing a role. So, to explain it a little bit more, the world has been fragmented into fandoms (the fans of cryptocurrencies, the fans of the Godfather movies). They are very specific fans and they’re very active. And if you manage to be in that conversation, it will get tremendously amplified. That is why gaming, for example, has become such a big platform—because gamers are not casual players; most of them are really big fans of their games. So, if you manage to be in that game without being disruptive, but being part of it, being part of the conversation—which is a word that I hate—you become part of that world. Even temporarily, fans will embrace you and talk about you and will create noise about your brand.

Therefore, I think moving from always on to always there is a big shift. And the other one, as I said before, is embracing the fandoms. You need to think differently about it and see that people are easier to reach. You just have to reach them on their terms, not yours.

Sever Savanciuc: Let’s look at it from two sides. One is the consumer. I really agree with this notion of almost a tribalisation or ultra segmentation of consumers in terms of their interests and the media where they exist. And we see that as well. The other key trend from my perspective is the short termism of the consumer’s interest and attention span and the media where they take place. Be it TikTok, which has a certain growth, in a certain direction of content, then Twitch, then back to the more traditional social media. I think in terms of the short termism and tribalisation of the consumer, as well as in terms of what 2024 will look like for brands, at least in Romania.

I think the macro context and the quite continuous fearmongering that’s been happening are going to determine a hard landing, with budget deficit constraints, inflation, and so on. We’re seeing this really translate into more functional and price–focused communication. The real challenge for brands will be to check that brief, tick that box, and communicate in that fashion without losing grasp of their brand identity and what they really are. It is about being accessible to the consumer, about a type of solidarity with the consumer in these hard times.

In your position of leading an agency in Romania, how do you tackle all of these issues and what do you focus most on?

Sever Savanciuc: What we really focus on is finding the consumers, and we bring quite a lot of data sources into this and focus on segmenting the consumers, understanding where they are, and creating strategies that treat them differently and sort of give them the content that moves them. This is what we do to focus on or to address both the tribalisation of consumers and the short termism of their interests.

But also important is the way we devise strategies. To focus on the more functional, on the short-termfocus of brands, to get loyalty from customers in these difficult times. We look at those customer segments that can really accept that message and where we can have an impact on the customer.

How do you both see creativity in 2024? What does creativity mean to you right now?

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: I don’t believe things are ever going to be easy again. I think we tend to look back and say, oh, things were easy or certain industries had it easy. I don’t know of a single industry that I would like to be in right now, because everything is going through a “crisis.” If you talk to a banker, they’ll say this is a crisis. If you talk to somebody who sells furniture, they’ll say it’s a crisis. There isn’t a single business that wouldn’t say we are going through a difficult time right now—and not only here in Romania, but everywhere in the world. And I think it is because there has been so much creativity, in terms of devising new and different ways of doing what we need to do. Every business is being disrupted by increasingly creative solutions. Taxis were disrupted by a much more creative solution, Uber. Hotels were disrupted by a much more creative solution, Airbnb. Books were disrupted by a creative solution that solves a lot of problems, ebooks—and so on.

I think creativity is about disruption and about creating different ways of doing things. And in our business we need to get used to it, we need to continue to accept the fact that we have to justify our existence by doing things that disrupt all of our competition, in a way that nobody expects.

We used to be the only disruptors at a certain point because industries went at a certain pace, and we just created brands that disrupted those industries. So certain brands grew enormously while others were left behind because we held the tools for disruption. Now we share them with everybody. Therefore, we have to be better at what we do and continue to move at that pace. To me, creativity is no longer limited to what we do, and neither is disruption. I think the playing field has been levelled and the biggest challenge in the future for our industry is to make sure that our ideas have value, because everybody tends to undervalue the price of an idea.

People talk about bestselling books, right? About the physical book. But really the great thing behind the book is THE IDEA. And that is what an author should get paid for, and not necessarily the amount of paper they move. I believe that we have to be much better at establishing our intellectual property and the value of our ideas, because this is a time when everybody has very valuable ideas, but that doesn’t mean ours are less so.

Do you think that the same idea applies for pitches that clients should pay for? This has been an endless discussion on the Romanian market.

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: That’s a discussion everywhere. I think the evolution of pitches has been the following: it started with “I am unhappy with the work I’m getting. I want to get better work” or “I am unhappy with the agency I have and want to see other agencies, to see if I can find somebody better.” And there was a time when pitching was paid for and it was rare. It wasn’t an everyday thing, because loyalty to clients and brands was very high. Then people discovered that every time they had a problem that was very difficult for them to solve, whether it was a marketing problem or the fact that their product was not moving as quickly as they wanted, they could get extraordinarily good thinking for free, because they could get 5 or 6 excellent planners from different structures, different ideas, and they could look at different ways of approaching the problem, and then they could make up their minds about what they should do. And then they picked an agency and a way of thinking.

And that to me is less pure. But agencies continued to pitch, then the clients thought maybe they didn’t have to pay for this because the agency, if considered a winner, would get the business. Therefore, agencies did it for free. What has happened is that every time the client had an issue or had to do something new, it asked people what to do. And this is how we are in this crazy world where we’re pitching for projects. We’re not even pitching for a brand. And that, in my opinion, is where it’s gone too far. We are giving away our thinking just to get the project, just to get something done and just to grow. Because we all have to promise growth. And the only way to grow is to get new business, so we consider it an investment.

But going back to my previous point, I think we’re not valuing our ideas enough. I am a big advocate for paid pitches, because that means that you have to justify to your bosses that you’re going to spend some money on finding a solution. And I think at some point, the bosses of the people that pitch all the time will start wondering whether they really need to pitch for every project. Does that person really know what they’re doing or are they taking instruction from somebody else? And why is it costing me so much money to pitch? I hope we will start charging for pitches again, but even I’m not sure we’re going to get there any time soon.

Sever Savanciuc: I think it links together wonderfully. It’s a buyer’s market, because the shift of bargaining power happens when brand innovation becomes more and more linked to product innovation. Now in my view, the product and the innovation that happens on a product level defines a company’s level of innovation more than the brand does, in many industries—especially newer industries. And I think what’s interesting about Romania is that even though we’re a mature market in many respects and many sectors, there are still some very underdeveloped sectors. Take life insurance, for example, which is certainly still a buyer’s market in that you’re seeing many unpaid pitches, but at the same time a sector where any good idea is one that grows not only the buyer, the company itself, but also the sector overall. And I think that’s the place where agencies have a bit more power in setting their terms.

Jose, you’ve won lots of awards and you are considered to be one of the most creative people in the world. How does it feel to hold that position and how hard do you believe it is to still be creative and innovate today?

I don’t think I’m very creative. I think I have very good teams and very good people around me all the time. I am only as good as the people that work with me. I am standing literally on the shoulders of giants. My grandfathers used to say that it takes a lot of dead bodies to stand as high as you would get standing on the shoulders of a friend. And I seriously believe that the reason I have been on the receiving end of so many awards is because I have always had a big team of very good people who are creating these amazing ideas.

I don’t think I could write a good headline to save my life, but from what I understand my strength is that I can write easily, and I can decide very easily what needs to be done. So that gives my creatives the freedom to think beyond that, because they know that I have their backs. They know that if they are dedicated to coming up with those crazy, innovative ideas and nothing works, they don’t have to worry, because I can write the ad that passes the test. And that has been the way I work.

Now, the other part of my participation is protecting an idea. What I can do very efficiently is sit down with a client, have conversations, try to talk them out of damaging ideas and to keep the idea pure and protected from its from its birth to its maturity.

What are the main factors that generate awards and impact in a campaign, in your opinion?

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: Let me go backwards. I think what generates awards is the fact that people who are sitting in the jury and see that work wonder why they didn’t think of that themselves, because it seems so obvious and so clear. That’s what gets awards. What gets effectiveness? Being relevant to the brand. I believe that we are tempted to tell stories and then add the brand at the end. And I think the only way to be effective is to tell a story that could not happen without the brand. And that makes a gigantic difference. If you remove the brand, then that particular story could not have happened.

So you believe that those factors have always existed in advertising. Are there no other factors that have evolved over time or that are more effective right now?

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: Media placement has always been a very important factor, and that has varied throughout time. So, if you look at the history of media, when radio was born, everyone said the press was going to die, but it didn’t. And when television came, radio was supposed to die. Movies didn’t die, television didn’t die, radio didn’t die. But it made agencies think differently and think beyond the media they were already using. Now that we have more types of media, it still doesn’t mean that the old media are going to die. It’s just that we have to think about it more. So, effectiveness has to do with media placement and with being relevant. The same basic principles still apply. They have just been taken to a completely different level.

What is inducing real change right now?

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: The one real change that is happening as we speak in our industry is artificial intelligence. That is a gigantic change, because it will affect you and probably has already. It changes the way we produce. We have the tools to actually make anything we want, anything we can dream of in a very short period of time and for a very low cost. It doesn’t mean that was not the case before. There is a capacity to generate these ideas and turn them into reality and it is going to change the industry and make a lot of jobs disappear. But at the same time, it’s going to create a lot of new jobs. You may no longer need somebody to draw or to create an image. But you need somebody to type into the computer the image that you want. You probably already know this, but this is a thing called “prompt engineering.” It’s already a career.

The other thing that’s transformative about AI is the fact that it can be used to go through data much more quickly than we can. It can seek out trends, it can tell us what’s going on. It can provide us with insights very quickly, which is very interesting. Another thing is that it can be predictive. As time goes by, it will be more precisely predictive. That I think is very scary, because at some point clients will want to test their stuff with AI, for the AI to tell them whether they should or shouldn’t do it. At which point I would much rather work for AI than work for the client and eliminate that intermediary. If they’re not going to make any decisions, then I might as well work with AI directly, right?

What’s your perspective on AI and technology in Romania? Do you see it as scary or as a good thing?

Sever Savanciuc: I think this is one of those subjects that is borderless, frankly. It’s tough to give a purely Romanian perspective that’s different than that of Jose Miguel, with the mention that I think some generative AI still has to catch up from a language perspective and add a larger variety of languages. My personal view is that the hype around the disintermediation of the agency as a result of AI is not something that is going to happen or that represents a real risk. I think what might happen is that the value chain will shift to different players. It may be tech companies, the ones that can really harness the AI to generate value, taking more of the value chain. But I think agencies will have to look at their own resource base and reorient it towards prompt engineering and towards higher value–adding work around ideation.

Here is where I can talk more about Lowe Group Romania’s perspective around partnerships and strategic investments into the players harnessing that tech. Some of them are very big, some of them are not. You can partner up with them and create stories and link these value chains together.

Arthur C Clarke, the author, said that we tend to overestimate technologies in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. So, we may be overestimating what AI can do right now, while in the long term it will probably end up doing what we thought it would, and much more.

What are the awards you’ve won that are closest to your heart, and why?

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: I think the closest one to my heart is the first award I ever won. Because I didn’t think I was doing advertising to win an award. I thought I was doing advertising to have fun. I just wanted to do something different. When I started my career in advertising, I was hired by Leo Burnett to do the job that nobody wanted to do. The reason I was given “the worst job in the agency” was because the people that were hiring me thought that I was not serious about advertising because I had studied engineering and I had an MBA in business. So, I had kind of done everything. And frankly, I really wasn’t serious, because I thought advertising was just something that was going to be very good for my career in business.

Back then the newspapers and the magazines were full of ads and my job was to list all the clients of the agency and the publications they were featured in, so I had to look at all those magazines and all those newspapers and cut out all the ads of our products and those of the competition. I also had to write a little analysis. What happened to me was that every time there was a good ad, when there was something well written, well directed, it felt like a breath of fresh air. My heart exploded with joy because the rest of the time I was surrounded with horrendous work. And I started to notice that those ads I liked tended to come from certain places. They weren’t randomly generated. They were either for certain brands or from certain agencies. And I wanted to do that kind of advertising, not the other one. And that’s when I decided to become a creative. The reason I was doing what I was doing was because I wanted to create and give a little joy to the world, if I could.

And all of a sudden, I found myself collecting awards at the local shows, while nobody else in the agency was getting awards. And I thought I must be doing something right. So, those awards were probably themost significant for me. But I don’t even have them. I had this philosophy—and I still have it but I should have had a little bit more foresight—since people used to keep awards and I wanted to be different, to say I don’t give a damn about awards because they are for the past and I’m focused on the future. So, I don’t have these awards, but I wish I did. I wish I had those first ones, the first Lion. The only one I have is the first Black Pencil.

What is your perception about the Romanian marcomm industry and what advice would you have for the people working in it?

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: I don’t know very much about it. I have seen work from Romania over the years. I’ve seen it develop at an enormous speed, from being very naïve, very new to the world of advertising,and very literal to becoming more and more creative. I think you are blessed with a history of moving image. You have a history of doing good cinema and having a credible cinema industry and a large and important television industry at some point in your life.

You have a history of craft that is amazing and visible and that comes through in the quality of the work. I like seeing the maturation of the industry, seeing the craft. I think the industry probably needs to have more self-belief, it needs to be full of “yes, we have everything we need to succeed.” I’m very optimistic about what I’m seeing. I think the experience that you guys provided me of sitting down with clients and talking about them and seeing their eyes light up with work and their genuine interest in doing better work shows me that there is a hunger on this market that probably doesn’t exist in other places in the world. So, I think you’re very well placed to make the next leap. You need to believe that what you’re selling is actually world class. And maybe a Grand Prix will do that. You’ve already had one Grand Prix with ROM, but nothing happened after that. You need to get another one, a modern one. I think the industry will take off.

What about the Romanian office of MullenLowe in particular? What is your assessment and what do you wish for them in 2024?

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: I only wish them success. It’s an agency that has spirit and soul. There are many agencies that don’t have those. This one has a soul. You can feel the energy. I’ll leave this trip with a very optimistic view about the future of this group.

Sever, what would you say have been the most important moments for the agency over these last 30 years?

The industry as a whole is sensational in Romania because it was born out of nothing, in the early 90s. And I think what’s even more sensational for Lowe Group, also for MullenLowe and its predecessor names is that it has been a pioneer at every step of the way. It was one of the first agencies in the country, one of the first media shops. And every skill that was built along the way pioneered a segment and sort of created a segment. And this building of markets and demand and the realisation of the need for certain skills is what now inspires me to build even further.

If I were to name some challenging times, I’d say the fact we came out of covid as strong as we did, especially since we were among the hardest hit in the industry—seeing the same energy and the same drive within the people in our agency was amazing. Seeing the group come out of that, building new competencies such as Path or the data intelligence unit, rebuilding our experiential unit, was really great. The DNA of all these achievements is the dedication to pioneering. And then, you know, when times get tough, there’s a dedication towards reconstruction and being a phoenix under the city.

What are your most important goals for the coming years?

Sever Savanciuc: I think the most important thing for us is to have courage coupled with the confidence that we can really generate impact in the success of brands and in our partnerships with these brands. To be truly confident that we can build those partnerships and build those brands. From there, our guiding principles will be reflected in products across all agencies, in building our digital skills in media and technology, in integration and technology building. Non-competition competencies and experiential.

You asked Jose Miguel about the Romanian industry; I think what’s sometimes lacking is also discouraged on the client side. It’s that second edge of the of the sword called short termism that I mentioned earlier. I think it’s also just due to the structural elements of our economy today. Someone once told me—and it’s a very gross exaggeration—that Romania no longer has CEOs of local branches of large multinational corporations, and instead they have country managers, even if the title on the door says CEO. And this kind of delocalisation of decision making, at the corporate level, goes into less courage downstream in the organisation. I think this culture of lack of courage in organisations is something that reflects into marketing strategies, into creative work. And we’re ready to be courageous and develop brands. But I think the industry as a whole would benefit from more courage, from innovation and growth.

But doesn’t that also bring up a direction of growth where Romanian agencies could work for regional clients or even create campaigns that start from Romania and then go global?

Sever Savanciuc: We’d love to see more of that. The history so far has been top down rather than bottom up. But taking it to a more macro level again, I recently saw a chart about GDP per capita projections in the region, and we’re seven to ten years away from going above Greece, above Hungary, if current trends continue. So I think Romania’s influence in the region will once again trickle down into the influence of Romanian country managers or CEOs in regional structures and into the country’s influence in regional marketing strategies. We’re already seeing some companies that have Romanian offices coordinating marketing regionally. I think we should see more of that and become regional players as agencies, as an industry.

How else would you say that you differentiate yourself on the market in terms of the general positioning of the group?

Sever Savanciuc: Our differentiation factor and our main focus is the product. Across all skillsets, we look at what we can do better, at what else we can bring. That’s really the beauty of our group. It’s more than Lowe doing creative work; it’s bringing in expertise from media, from data, from PR. I think this focus on product and integration of competencies that aren’t necessarily within the box of the agency, but still at our fingertips, is what really makes us stand out.

Jose Miguel, what was the most important advice you received at the beginning of your career, that you believe is still valid today and that you’d give to the teams in Romania?

Jose Miguel Sokoloff: If I walk into a room and I say, hello, my name is Jose Miguel Sokoloff and I am very funny and I sit down, people will probably think I’m an idiot, right? If I walk into a room and say a couple of funny things, some people will think I’m funny. In our business, to say something is not the same thing as to communicate. And our business is to communicate, not to say stuff. Clients love to say things and they feel safe after they have said them. But that does not mean that they’re communicating. And if you want to be effective in what you do, you need to concentrate on communicating and not merely saying things.