Brand labs: Why start-ups are the new corporate rocket fuel

By AdNews | 16 May 2014
 

"Start-ups have ideas and no money. Corporates have money and no ideas." So says Joseph Jaffe, founder of 'brand matchmaker' Evol8tion. Love is in the air.

Traditionally risk-averse Australian marketers are having a crack at the start-up game. Mondelez, Coke, Unilever, Telstra and others are shelling out big bucks for nimble thinking.

Grab a copy of today's AdNews, in print and on iPad, to find out why start-up culture is going mainstream.

Bonin Bough, vice president of global media and consumer engagement at Mondelez, says embedding marketing staff within start-ups proves transformational.

"The people who have been part of the [Mobile Futures] program fundamentally change as marketers," he says. "I've never seen anything like the level of culture and thought change that I've seen delivered by this program."

Marc Mathieu, Unilever's global SVP of marketing, says it's a win-win situation. "The world of start-ups is important to us because first of all they are the creative entrepreneurs of today," he says.

"It's easier to work with them by partnering than to bring them inside big corporations. You get all the benefits of their agility, risk taking and vision. They have everything and nothing to lose."

Also in this issue, former Virgin Media UK commercial director Mark Brandon has a warning for the networks: the tech giants like Google, Facebook, Adap.tv, TubeMogul and Amazon are coming to eat your lunch.

“Broadcasters have urgent and profound challenges,” he says. “If anybody thinks that they are safe in their cozy worlds, they're wrong. The major digital players, the Googles, the Facebooks, they will come in and take anyone out whenever they can.”

Australian TV broadcasters face carnage if they don't automate their trading systems and shift their focus from selling spots in fixed schedules to selling audiences dynamically placed on whatever screen a viewer segment may be.

Elsewhere, Reckitt Benckiser's Paolo Zotti talks up “living experiences”, Switch Digital's Lee Stephens blurs the line between digital agency, online publisher and audience aggregator, and David Morgan gets a lesson in word-of-mouth marketing from his doctor.

Plus: John Steedman, Peter Zavecz, Nick Smith, Matt Stanton, Gaye Murray, Gaston Legorburu, Ben Coulson, Scott Nowell, Michael Knox, Marco Eychenne, Bridget Jung, Nancy Hartley, Andrew Thompson and Jeff Cooper.

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