 which is going to be the future of the global network. Well, up next is going to be Mr. Peter Peterson, founder and creative by the network. We'll be discussing the future of global networks. Well, Mr. Peterson sets the creative ambition for the company. He's somebody who's worked a lifetime at Gray. He co-founded Uncle Gray in Denmark and served as the chief creative officer of Gray, Germany. Since 2010, he has been in New York as the global ECD, deputy world-wide chief creative officer and chairman of the global creative council. Under his leadership, the creative council also became the catalyst of creating a strong creative culture across the entire gray network. Well, ladies and gentlemen, in just the next few minutes, Mr. Peter Peterson, as you can rightly see, is going to be joining us on the screen. And Mr. Peterson has very graciously agreed if time allows to be a part of this wonderful E4M conclave. So, ladies and gentlemen, once again, a reminder that E4M conclave is going live on Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as on Twitter. Do share it across so that we can put the word across and keep hashtagging, hashtag E4M conclave. Well, thank you so much, Mr. Peterson, for joining us. Over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you for this opportunity. I wish I could be in your amazing country in person. I miss traveling in India. I have a lot of good friends and business colleagues there. So you would have to put up with this screen and the virtual me. It's only half as good as the real thing. So I hope you can forgive that. But I've been asked to talk about the future of the global network. And I'm in the middle of creating that, so to speak. I've launched a global network of creative agencies in the end of 2020 in October. And so I would like to take you through what we have done, but also give a couple of directions to how you as an agency or as a client working with agencies should actually watch out for what is the future facing networks or agencies, for that matter, that you should be looking out for. Because a lot of things are changing, as you know. So I will share my screen and give a short presentation. And hopefully you can jump in with the questions as you see fit. Keep the chat open. I'll keep an eye out for the chats. OK, my name is Pierre Peterson. Founder, creative of By The Network, new agency network launched in October. We are a global network of some of the best creative and non-traditional agencies in the world. So already there you can tell my focus is on the creative side. We see ourselves as focusing on the creative, but not in an advertising sense of the word, but more non-traditional. And the agencies that are part of this network all have a very big strength in creativity, but also in non-traditional media, technology, content production, all of these things that are the more future facing part of our industry. The biggest difference between us and, let's say, a WPP or an Omnicom is that this network is owned by independent agencies. Highly creative, carefully curated. And that makes a huge difference in the way we run things, as it is creatives that are actually owning this network. It's also a big change in philosophy that instead of the usual holding company structure where you're trying to build as much profit in the holding company as possible, our philosophy is actually the reverse. We want to keep as much of the profits and decision-making in the local agency as possible. And we are much more democratic. We also share our profits with the owners that are the agencies. And we collaborate as individual agencies around a higher purpose that brings us together instead of being brought together by a centralized business structure determined by money. So that is a very different approach to the way of working. We thought this would be a small network of a few people, but it turned out that we are growing really fast. We are now 500 creatives covering 40 nationalities working at 20 different agencies and in 25 different markets. So things are moving really fast for us. Latest member of BIDA Network is actually in India, Atom Group joined only last week as part of the network. And we already actually cheated a little bit. We worked together in a couple of months leading up to this and super successful collaboration with some interesting up and coming creative people with big experience from the Indian market. We already won together a very prestigious big global pitch with Atom that we are still celebrating. Just an overview of the network. So as you can tell, we are in all corners of the world and we are covering all modern creative aspects of our industry. So this is not about advertising. We have agencies focusing only on branding or design, building new concepts, companies that are focusing on music collaborations, content production, TV production and all sorts of things that are part of the modern palette for the market here. So instead of having this sort of, everybody is the same within the network. That's sort of the Starbucks philosophy of running a network where no matter what office you walk into, they all serve the same coffee, so to speak. We celebrate the difference between the agencies and are putting agencies together that are covering different skill sets in order to create something completely different than what you would expect. And that is a big part of how we work. We already work for a number of big prestigious clients around the world. And this is growing. We secured two big pieces of global business only last week. So that is, it's actually rapidly growing and being incredibly successful already. We come from a creative point of view. All the agencies in by the network is owned by creative people. So it's no secret. We live and breathe for doing better creative work. That is our philosophy. That's where we come from. That is not to say we don't acknowledge other parts like media, technology, digital, social, all of these things. We just said our focus is on the ideas, not so much on the implementing or the technology behind it. We would rather collaborate with experts on that going forward. So just an example, because I think as a creative you have to show your work. Here's an example that just gives you a feeling of what kind of work that we're doing in the network. This is from small agency in New York for diesel. So this of course represents the kind of work that we are looking for, work that is part of culture and is impacting discussions and shareable with clients that are brave enough to do non-traditional work. Just to sort of, that is enough about us actually, but to talk about why we did this and how did we come up with a completely different kind of network. I think a lot of us that are now part of by the network came from big holding company owned agency networks. I was one of them and in the sum up of my bio, it's pretty clear that I have spent almost a lifetime at Gray, one of the WPP agencies as a creative leader, both locally, regionally but also in recent years as the global creative chairman of Gray. And we've all seen how the industry has changed. And this was before pandemic. This was a gradual change from what I would say was very, very focused on the products. There was a certain pride around the creative product that we were producing and everybody was clear that our existence depended on that onto a different kind of mentality that was now running the big holding companies. And I gave a speech in Canada a couple of years ago at Ken Lyons, where I basically said this that the agency model as we all knew it is that and this was two years before the pandemic. This has just become even more true as the pandemic has hit the world, that the way we think about what an agency is and how we work with our clients is practically outdated in so many ways. And it's going to affect our ability to survive as an industry, how we are going to change that because change is inevitable and whether we are changing as a consequence of the pandemic, change is going to be necessary for the creative industry to survive and for global creative networks to exist in the future that actually are offering creativity and are not just sort of an appendix to a consultancy agency or a technology company or a media company because that is unfortunately the trend for our industry. I think one of the problems that I have seen is that the big networks have all turned corporate and walking around in big agencies. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon sight. This was of course at the time when people could still go to the office now it's a little bit different but these sort of old fashioned ways of working that doesn't really belong in a creative world where people should collaborate in an inspiring atmosphere and exchange ideas. You shouldn't really have small cubicles where people were sort of isolated with their computers but unfortunately, and I think if you have walked around the halls of big agencies this is a sight that you see way, way too often. We had floors at grade that actually literally looked like this and I was almost ashamed to build to bring clients to those floors because they would basically say are you creative or not? What kind of company is this? But this happened and had a huge impact on everything that we're doing in the creative industry. One of the consequences is that the best creatives have now gone independent. Some have been pushed out by the changes made by agencies during the pandemic but this was a trend that was happening even before. Some of the best creatives simply had this, they had enough basically and started their own agencies as one of the most creative people I know told me this is a real quote. I had this feeling of giving my best to an agency that didn't really appreciate the creativity that I brought to the table. And that feeling leads to the best creatives turning independent either with boutique agencies like we have seen with God in the Americas with Anselmo Ramos leading that or uncommon in London with Nils Leonhard but there has been a number of these independent agencies and also a lot of good creatives have now gone more or less freelance and it's available in a completely different way than before. Of course, you take notice when people like Greg Khan is pushed out from BBDO. Greg Khan is now a successful leader of an independent agency called Miss Chief and is an example, just an example of what is actually happening in our industry. Accessing the best creatives doesn't necessarily happen through the big agency networks as it did before. At the same time, clients are abandoning the old retainer and agency of record model and are now looking for a different, more project-based way of working or are turning at the same time more in-house. And this paves the way for what I would say is a golden age for a new breed of creative agencies including a new breed of global networks like by the network as an example. It's simple fertile ground. We are welcomed with open arms by the clients that to a certain extent have had enough of the old ways of working, the rigid ways of the old systems and are looking for a much more agile, flexible, transparent way of working that the independents are offering. And so I think we're going to see that in every market in the world, a much more focus on independent agencies that are closer to the core product of creativity and where you can access the best and most experienced people. And I'm not talking about small boutique offices that are doing the flower shop on the corner, that kind of agency, or the tattoo shop down the street. We're talking about independent agencies that are now winning big global pieces of business that in a normal world would have gone to the big old fashioned networks. So this is a massive structural change that are going to affect the industry. I think the pandemic accelerated this inevitable structural change in the creative industry and to use, Matuszol is also, he's an old friend and colleague of mine from WPP. He's a very dramatic person. He puts it very bluntly where he says there's going to be as a consequence of coronavirus, a Da Vincian call of the ad industry. And now from the seat where he sits now with his new company, S4Papital and what he's doing there, he's become a very sort of very open-minded critic of what has been going on in the industry that he actually helped build himself. But I think to a certain degree he's right. Certainly the agency that I used to work for until recently, I left Gray this summer, only to read very shortly after that the brand will be retired under the WPP sort of umbrella as it's merged under the AKQA group. So I think, and it was pretty clear also from hearing what Mark Reed had to say that there has been a lot of consolidations, a lot of offices that are no longer there and of an agency networks that have either been merged or has ceased to exist. And I think we have only seen the top of the iceberg on that, so we have to imagine a world with a lot of big name agencies, also networks that will be no longer in the market in a very near future. So this is a big deal and this is a big structural change as our industry is going through like a historic phase in its evolution. And then this is as inevitable as anything, and new technologies are already enabling new ways of working. And I predict that even in the near future, technologies of various kinds will fundamentally change our creative industry almost to become unrecognizable. This is about the way we work. This is where we've seen remote working as being facilitated by technologies like the meeting we are having now is a good example of that. We wouldn't have thought about it like that before the pandemic, but it's now possible. And we're going to see a lot more solutions on enabling remote work and accessing people across the world in different ways. Just like we have seen fiber have revolutionized the way freelancers can be accessed digitally, remotely from all over the world. And we're going to see very similar things happening in our industry. So imagine kind of an Uber kind of takeover of the industry where the old agencies are the old taxi companies. I think that gives you a pretty clear perspective of the challenges that we're going to see. This might be driven by the old holding companies. I would think they have plans for that, but also expect to see new players enter the industry with completely different approaches to how people can find each other, work with each other, deliver solutions. We've already seen this in gaming and film production and other sort of fringe areas to our industry. So this will happen. So it's time to rewrite the rule books of being a creative global network. So I prepared a few rules for the global networks of the future. So hopefully Mark is still on the line so he can take notes. So my rule number one is never let anything or anyone get in the way of great work. Sounds pretty simple, but this is happening every day in agencies around the world. So just one thing that we have to remind ourselves, and I think Mark covered this, the need for creativity is the only sustainable reason for agencies to exist in the first place. And if we lose just an inch of our vitality on the core, which is our creativity, we are sort of losing ground to an ever-increasing and stronger technology-based industry, media industry, and not least consultancy industry that is not really putting creative at the center, but will swallowed our industry given half the chance. So this will be a consequence if we are not good enough at delivering the core product. So we have to break down the rigid processes and because there are too many, we have complicated things unnecessarily. These can be structural problems, these can be processes that are simply just outdated in a way because they give us too slow a reaction time when it comes to putting out output. Unfortunately, it can take a year in some cases for big brands to hit the market with a new campaign. And it should be in a matter of weeks or a few months. So we have to dramatically cut down on the process that gets us there. And we also have to look critically at the middlemen that are managing creativity. These people can be both on the client side, but we have them in the industry as well that are not really contributing much to the creative product but are just sitting in between clients and the creative and are managing this. And I use managing here as a negative thing because what we should be focusing on is unleashing creativity and everything we do versus sort of holding back on things by managing it. So that is a philosophy that I have and something I think will determine whether your agency or your network will be future facing or not. So there's a lot of things to change in the way we work. Sorry for showing cash like this, but I think we are too well-behaved in our industry. We have been very polite. I think we need to be much more willing to change things. And I look at other industries where you have an Elon Musk changing everything by being anything than well-behaved. I mean, again, we should be the industry of the eccentric and the interesting people and not being the sort of well-behaved, boring business people. That is not our job as a creative industry. We should be challenging the world we live in. We should be opinionated about it and seek to change stuff around us. And that means that we don't follow the rules all the time. So don't be afraid to stand out with your opinions, your work or doing stuff that puts you at the center of attention. There's simply not enough creative people that are speaking out about stuff. I think we have lost the generation of creatives that have sort of tried to fit in instead of standing out. And at the end of it, standing out is part of, or should be part of the DNA of any creative person. Just look at the people that created our industry, the Hegates and the ogre views of the world. These people did not hold back on opinions. And I think when I look out in the industry right now, I lack this mentality of wanting to change stuff and have opinions about what we're doing. So this sounds a little crazy a little maybe, but work with brave clients that have brave strategies. And I think we have a little bit of a tendency in our industry to sort of blame the clients for everything. No, our clients are not really looking for creativity in our market. It's a little bit too conservative so forth. But I think we have a job as creatives to enable our clients to become the best clients in the world. And I think it's possible by working in a different way, much more face to face, getting our hands dirty as creatives, understanding the business issues of our clients, getting deeper into the industries that they are part of and the challenges that they are facing. I think we have had an arrogant approach to selling our work to our clients, almost expecting them to just turn up at our doorstep and buy it on face value because we say so. But I think we're going to have to work in a much more collaborative way where we as a creative industry collaborate or co-pilot with our clients. And if I look at the most interesting work that is coming out in the world right now, and of course you have to mention brands like Burger King, Fernando Machado, the CMO of that brand is definitely a huge part of the creative process and will be considering himself as part of delivering great ideas and facilitating great ideas that didn't come overnight. That was an evolution paved by a lot of good creative people that worked with Fernando over the years. Basically taught him to be the best client in the world. I think this is an obligation we have as creatives to give that ability to our clients instead of sort of keeping creativity as a weird black box that you can only buy at our place. So be generous about that. We have to break the rules of corporate thinking. I don't think any agency exists if we try to copy the ways and the feel of our clients. I think a lot of clients that are caught up in much more corporate environments are looking for agencies as a way to compensate for that. And they're not really looking for agencies that look and feel the same way as the place they come from. So let's break with those old fashioned rules of corporate thinking. And it's pretty apparent if you work in our industry that over the past 10 years, the CFOs have been driving most agencies. In fact, the most likely candidate for a CEO in an agency is somebody that used to run the finance or close to that or at least have that business background versus having a creative background. But we have to break with that. Right now we have very CFO driven and everything we're doing and we should be idea driven. We are part of the idea world. And this is a little bit like if you compare us to Apple when Apple lost sight of their creativity when jobs were no longer there. They lost everything. And only when they turned back to that focus that was at the core of what that brand was about, they created the most valuable brand in the world. It's a little bit the same. We are like Apple or Walt Disney or those kinds of companies. You cannot be a CFO driving things. You need to have the background in the product to fully understand and drive an agency network in my opinion. So put creativity at the center and created people at the top. We've done that. Our entire network is based on creative people that are running things. There is a tendency to think that you can't trust a creative with money. I think it's a big mistake. I think creative people will easily understand how to make the right decisions. And they will make the right decisions from the point of view of creativity which is at the core of what we're doing or should be doing as an agency. So this is the only way. Let's start to see more creative people run the big networks. Just ask yourself how many restaurants you would walk into to meet the business manager. You want to talk to the chef. You want to talk to the people that are creating the food that you want to enjoy. That is why you walk in there, not to talk to the business manager. But we are showing the business manager a little bit too much. Just after this, do a quick search of agencies or agency networks and look at the lineup of the people they present. Most of the time, yeah, there's a couple of creatives but most of the time they're showing anything but creative people. And I think it's a big mistake. If I was a client, I would look at who's running the agency that I'm working with. Is this run by a creative person that understands the product that I'm buying or is this run by a business person that is just looking for the profit part of it? I think it's a big mistake to walk into a restaurant that is driven by business people. This is a provocation. I think a lot of people say creativity equals advertising in our industry, but in fact, it's not. In fact, I would say if it looks, speaks or feels like advertising, it probably won't work. And that means that you have to do anything but advertising, of course, sometimes you have to do a TV commercial if that is the right thing to do, but you can't start there. You have to think beyond all of that and look at how the consumer is actually using communication, which is much more engraved into culture and technology and our mobile phones and all the stuff that is going on around us. And that's where we need to be communicating and that's where we need to be creative, not from TV out, which is sort of the feeling you get when you walk into the old fashioned agency still. And you would say, I heard, you know, how Mark Whits said that now half of the media spend is digital and I still don't think that has been fully reflected in the presentations that we give our clients as agencies. We still lead in with the good old ideas on TV commercials and stuff like that. And I think it's a mistake. I can just, just as an example of the kind of work. Again, this is a creative talking, so I can show you work. This is an example of a piece of creative work that we just launched from our agency in Sweden called FAM. It already won the EuroBest Grand Prix. So have a look, this is the kind of thing that is non-traditional advertising, but it's going to shape the future of creativity. I think it's important this kind of work and it's the kind of thinking that doesn't look or feel like advertising, but can give brands a huge advantage at the sort of moment of truth when you have to decide between brand A or brand B and use the insight of how more and more consumers are using carbon footprint as a determining factor, not just price of the product and quality and stuff like that. This, again, I think creativity has been associated with the ability to win a few awards. I think the agencies should stop chasing awards with fake work. I think our job is now to, after the pandemic, I think also the award shows have to rethink their role in our industry. I think it's been maybe a very healthy year of not having as much award shows and can was canceled, gave them a chance to rethink the whole thing and also for us to rethink what is the role of these award shows. I think the best way forward is to do our best work for our biggest clients and then win the awards with that work instead of doing specific work only for the award shows. Truly for a network like by the network, we are absolutely not interested in chasing awards with dedicated award work. We will only submit work to the award shows that actually came out of a collaboration with our clients. And I think that should be the future for the networks as well. It will add more credibility if we do it like that in my opinion. This is for the leaders in the big networks, get out from the boardroom, down from the high horses and build a network of human beings which also means that you have to be a human being yourself. I think we've seen a little bit too many middle-aged men in dark suits running the creative industry from a fancy corner office in a fancy building on a very expensive atlas in a very expensive city. I think those days are over. I think we need to see much more diversity in leadership. As I said, I would call for more creative people running things, give it more color, give it more diversity on sexuality, on gender and geography. And why on earth is it necessary to run big networks out of London or New York? I think it's possible to do it from anywhere in the world. Certainly, we've decided not to have in the network an old-fashioned headquarter. We are born during the pandemic, so we can run this network from anywhere because we are connected via technology. But right now, I'm speaking from Copenhagen in Denmark, which is sort of suited in the middle of time zones, much better than New York, actually. So it's doable, and I think we have to see this much more. Final two, build a network of talented people with a shared passion to do great work. Don't underestimate the value of culture. I think we have a little bit too little of it in the big networks. It's more about money. I think we should have much more shared passion, much more shared culture. It's going to be one of the biggest challenges for the networks in the future to really build that sort of shared passion to kick ass and then break down all these borders and silos that still exist, although the lines are getting much more blurred and start working together. I saw this, I'm from Denmark, where we have this sort of very democratic, very Nordic approach, very collaborative approach to life. My ideal network looks a little bit like this. It's a place where we all gather around the bonfire, tell each other stories, can work as friends, and share a good time together, because that is where good ideas happen. They happen at the bonfire when people that like each other and wants to work with each other come together and exchange minds and ideas. And it's not more formal than that. That is actually what we should strive for. Human beings, creative, talented people that are sharing and collaborating and making great work for our clients in a way that is gratifying, not just for our clients' business, but also gratifying for us as creatives. And that, I think, is the only sustainable approach to what we are doing as an agency instead of making it too complicated. And I also think this is the kind of network or agency that will attract the most creative people on the planet, because we have all of us a huge challenge of attracting talent and keeping that talent, so that we can keep evolving our creative industry. I think we are losing out to much more interesting companies that are offering more stuff like this at the heart of what they're doing. If you are a young person, most creative person, with an open mind set and wants to make a difference in the world with your creativity, you have to look at each industry. And I don't think that person is seeing our industry, the creative industry, as necessarily the most attractive place to work right now. So that is a job we all have to do, make this industry a place that attracts the best minds of the world, the most creative people of the world, because our future success is going to depend on that. And even our survival as an industry will depend on that. So sum it up. If you stick to the old rules, you probably won't change anything, which gives me sort of the last piece of advice. Think like a rule breaker. Be inspired by other rule breakers in other industries and change things. You're probably not going to do it without haters reacting or whatever, but you won't change anything if you stick to the old rules. And I think the pandemic sort of put a line in the sand saying, OK, anything that worked before the pandemic will probably not work after the pandemic. So this is our chance to rethink the rulebook and build something completely different. So you can have a chat. Look at our website, see a little bit more about what we're doing and who we are. BuytheNetwork.com or you can call me or write me. I'm always open to work together with anyone that has good ideas or challenges that they think fit with what we're doing at the network. Thank you. Thank you so much, Javier Pedersen, for joining us. And what an insightful presentation that was. I'm sure a lot of our viewers and everyone who's attending it live would have really benefited out of this. So thank you so much, Mr. Pedersen, for joining us live today. We've sent all the way from Denmark. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Bye.