INSPIRATION & INNOVATION
My life in advertising Alan Rutherford
The Falklands War seems an unlikely starting point for a career in media. But if it hadn’t been for that, the new IAA president Alan Rutherford tells Josh Colley he may well have trodden a very different path
“I once tried to join the Royal Air Force,” Rutherford says. “But intake stopped due to the Falklands War.” Instead, he chanced upon Ogilvy & Mather managing director Michael Baulk, who persuaded him to join the media industry and so began a media career spanning almost 30 years. During his time with Ogilvy in
“Essentially,
I would have been running the Barbie agency – and that just wasn’t me”
the 1980s, Rutherford helped set up Ogilvy Media, which rolled out across Europe in the early 1990s. “It became a substantial operation. We worked on centralised media accounts for Guinness and Bugatti and became a powerhouse for media in the UK.” However, as he points out, media changes fast. “I’m a character that expands out every two or three years,” he says. “But at times I should have
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Q&A
• MISSED OPPORTUNITY... In the early 1990s, I was on the verge of setting up a media agency with Mark Dickinson. We even had a client – a big beer brand – but we failed to go through with it. • YOUR BIGGEST MISTAKE? There are always mistakes that you’ve got to learn from, but not winning the Smith-Kleinam Beachum centralised media
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business with Unilever was the biggest disappointment. • WHAT HAVE YOU ENJOYED THE MOST? The people I’ve worked with make for a really vibrant, lively bunch. • HOW DO YOU WANT YOUR CAREER TO BE REMEMBERED? Doing the right thing the right way. • YOUR TIP FOR THE FUTURE? Learn about all communication
channels; they won’t be separated in future. There’s a big difference between understanding technology and understanding its impact. • WHAT’S THE MOST VALUABLE SKILL FOR THOSE IN MEDIA? Taking a broad communications perspective, building a network around you, and doing due diligence around every career move you make. ○
made choices but didn’t.” In 1993, he nearly relocated to the US to run Ogilvy’s west coast division, which held three major accounts: Mattel, Compaq and Microsoft. “Just as I was about to go, they won IBM’s global account so had to resign Microsoft and Compaq. Essentially, I would have been running the Barbie agency – that just wasn’t me.” A move to FMCG company Unilever in 1998 saw him experiencing the other
side of the agency-brand relationship. He spent the next eight years rising to the role of global head of media, which brought the challenge of Project 40, the largest internal agency review ever conducted. “We looked at how we managed our media assignments across Europe and Asia as the company moved from being multi-local to global.” After leaving Unilever in 2006, his desire to explore digital saw him appointed as chief executive for Publicis Groupe’s Digitas. He departed after three years despite the company’s reach growing to 20 countries. “It had an ambition but that changed because the senior management moved into Vivaki.” Today, Rutherford is president of the
International Advertising Association (IAA), acts as non-executive chairman for agency Volume Group, and chairs a media auditing service designed to offer financial transparency. “My aim is to do a combination of things,” he says. His latest idea came to him while
watching football on TV at the weekend. It will see IAA countries rolling out a mentoring scheme that will facilitate the movement of young professionals between markets. “It will create a global movement,” he says. “It will involve someone being mentored in India and swapping with someone in the US.” ○
The
Cream scours the globe for the latest business innovations in media
Bubbly, micro-blogging built for mobile
Bubbly is a voice- blogging social service built for mobile phones that operates in a similar way to Twitter. Users press a button to record a message (a ‘bubble’) and send it directly to their followers’ phones. It allows users to deliver the emotion and elaboration not possible in text.
Launched by Bubble Motion in early 2010, users can send a message for free, but Bubble Motion takes a cut of the airtime used to listen to it. In the first four weeks of launch in India the service gained 500,000 users. There are plans to expand it to Japan, Europe, the Middle East and Brazil.
Q&A with Thomas Clayton, Chief executive, Bubble Motion
Where did the idea come from? You know when you have a lot of calls to make, but you don’t want to get stuck on the phone? Sometimes, you just want to tell them something. That is how we came up with BubbleTalk.
How do you define innovation? It usually involves challenging the conventional way of thinking and exploring new permutations of ideas. It’s almost like a chemistry experiment.
What’s next for Bubble Motion? It’s early, but Bubbly is catching on. There are nearly 500 million mobile phone subscribers in India compared to 50 million on the internet and they want to be socially connected too, so we think we’re on to something.
challengers
Do you know an outstanding innovator? Send suggestions to
editor@creamglobal.com
M&M Q2 2010 59
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