Nine passes left to attend the Digiday Publishing Summit
Baba Shetty has seen the media world through many lenses. Over the course of his career, he’s served on the agency, brand and publisher side. Now the chief strategy and media officer at DigitasLBi, Shetty believes agencies need to understand what the lives of their clients are really like.
“It’s easy to say they don’t get it,” he said at the Digiday Agency Summit in Palm Springs, Calif. “Clients are incredibly smart, experienced people who understand how decisions get made. It’s how do you get a group of people to say yes, we’re going to go that way.”
At BMW, where Shetty worked from 1993-2000, he saw a shift from an iconic positioning to embracing innovation, first with product placement in the Bond movie franchise and culminating in the breakthrough BMW Films effort.
“The culture changed to innovation,” Shetty said. “The key is this idea of skating to the next thing, to where the puck is going to be rather than where it is.”
Of course, not all clients are BMW, and often leadership at brands isn’t interested (or compensated) to embrace overhauling legacy processes and practices.
“Change is tough,” Shetty said. “Organizations have a way of building up muscle memory and inertia.”
Watch a four-minute clip of Shetty’s talk below.
How to Improve Client Operating Culture from Digiday on Vimeo.
More in Marketing
‘Consumers are dying to get out of their houses’: How Cinemark’s CMO is getting people back to the movies
A look at how consumer demand looks in the movie industry and what other retailers can learn from Cinemark’s loyalty and membership programs.
Platform and agency execs recommended must-reads to unwind during busy periods
Senior execs from the likes of TikTok, Snap, OMD USA, Publicis London and more let us in on their favorite page-turners to unwind.
In Graphic Detail: AI adoption increases, but U.S. consumers are still wary
Digiday has charted the rise of generative AI, big tech’s investment into AI as well as agencies’ top use cases and consumer sentiment.