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.
