FOCUS: YEAR-END REVIEWS - A low profile pays off

JWT Asia Pacific has had a very good year. Our revenues and profits bounced back - significantly beyond pre-crisis levels. A combination of work that's working, increased spending by clients and the efficiencies we drove into the network during the crisis. "But your profile's been low", I keep hearing people in the industry saying. Well, that's been deliberate. We felt that during the hard times many of our clients were experiencing we should be putting all of our efforts into providing solutions for their brands rather than hyping our own. We believe that an agency's clients should be more famous than it is. Some of our competitors, who reacted to the hard times by seeking profile for themselves at any cost (in the desperate hope of attracting new business), have clearly done themselves real damage. A difficult market environment brings the attention of clients back to the fundamental - quality thinking. Our most important achievement in 2000 has been the investment we've put back into our product quality. Most critically, our creative product. We undertook a regionwide initiative to focus the entire network on excellence in our ideas. We have changed creative directors and/or managers in about 70 per cent of our offices. By the end of the year we will have senior strategic planning staff in every office. We'll have completed some key acquisitions in places where we've been under-represented and established a regionwide digital network - digital@ jwt. Most of our offices will have introduced real capability in below-the-line disciplines - direct marketing and sales promotion in particular. All in all, we think we have in place a dynamic, diversified organisation that's going to prove those who say JWT is "traditional" and "conservative" all wrong. And we'll do it through the work that we do for clients, rather than the money a PR company makes from us, or the scams we pull to win awards.

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