In an era of transparency, you can have innovation without branding, but you cannot have branding without innovation.
Marketing is an investment, not a cost.
If you ask what keeps me up at night, it's the pressure in the system forcing us to do all sorts of things. Content, data and technology are forcing us to think about business in a very different way.
Think through whom you are trying to reach. Tailor what you do and how you do it to appeal to those communities.
Somebody who is unique - and this will get me into trouble - by definition cannot be replaced.
In our business, except in media buying, there are few economies of scale. Client perception of creative agencies is that the bigger they are, the worse they are.
You must not only focus on the consumer, but also on what it does to you internally - getting people aligned to the strategic mission of the company - what it does to the suppliers, governments, all your stakeholders.
We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.
I interviewed Kim Kardashian recently and had a conversation with her mother. A lot of people have various thoughts about Kim Kardashian, her mother and her sisters, but it is an incredibly well thought through concept and branding. Each of the daughters appeals to a different segment of the market.
If you run a country and want to put it on the global map you don't have so many choices. You can get the Olympics, the World Cup or a Formula One race. And the first two are only every four years - and you have them only once.
In the old days, you could segment happily. You could put out one message to one segment of the audience, and one to another. That has now gone. You say something to one community and instantly, literally at a click, it's available to everybody. What it means is that if you're trying to craft a message, it's very difficult.
That is again a romantic notion: the hero. I think people enjoy a much more levelled playing field where you have the ability for many people to become heroes.
You have to see it on a broader level. But you also have to activate it properly.
Technology will have moved on to an unimaginable level in ten years.
I believe that Virtual Reality will hit it big time. I know that some of my colleagues disagree, but I believe in it.
The challenges some European economies have are such that it makes it very difficult for them. You have to go where the growth is.
The fast growing markets - the BRICS and Next Eleven - are the key. The next billion consumers are not going to come from the US or Western Europe - they are coming from Asia, Latin America and Africa. Formula One follows our strategy: fast growing markets, data, and digital. All those three things Formula One has. And it involves a stunning array of companies. Now that doesn't mean there can't be more.
I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper.
The arguments of waste are heavily overdone, because what you do is to accelerate the infrastructure that you have to build anyway, like airports and roads, and in this case it happens much faster. So speaking of a roadmap, without being specific, I would still go for Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East - that's what our clients are really interested in.
That might be the old model: to get a fixed fee. You have to start to think about other models and how they can generate interest - what it can do for a brand in the future - and about the fact that revenue can also be generated in many other ways... Just look at the one and a half million people at the free Rolling Stones concert in Cuba. And Cuba is not Central Park! So just use your imagination as to what kind of revenue can be made.
It is always easy to criticize, as Bernie Ecclestone is somebody with extreme opinions.
The technology is already incredible and will improve massively in the next few years. Think about what you could do.
Bernie [Ecclestone] has not been shy to say one or two controversial things. The last person in the UK who described his product as being crap in public was one Gerald Ratner - and he was gone immediately. But not Bernie! What it tells you is that the demand for live sporting rights, the demand for global or regional events, is so powerful that you brush aside some things because there aren't so many of these events.
When I think back to 2005, the fast growth markets - what we call the fast growth markets - were probably ten percent of our business. They are now 31 percent.
If you pay 50 million for something, you probably pay another 50 to 100 million to activate it. And the more you spend, the better you do. There is no point in just buying rights.
