On the occasion of the 2018 Cannes Creativity Festival, I sat down with Jason Harrison, President, Client Partner, Essence, part of GroupM, a global data and measurement-driven agency whose mission is to make advertising more valuable to the world. Essence clients include the likes of Target, NBCUniversal and Google, which happened to be named “Creative Marketer of the Year” at this year’s Cannes Lions.
Bruce Rogers: With the Cannes Creativity Festival as the backdrop for our meeting, your rise to the president at Essence is anything but conventional. Tell us about your journey to this key role running media strategy and planning for some of the world’s most iconic brands like Target and NBCUniversal.
Jason Harrison: I went to the University of Chicago for my undergraduate degree in public policy. I thought I wanted to be a congressman and have a career in government. But I got a job in media research at J. Walter Thompson, which I found fascinating. I found advertising fascinating. I then moved to Kantar Media working on the Competitive Media Reporting service as it was called back then. This got me into technology and data. Then I worked at Y&R in New York for a few years, New York and Chicago.
I then left advertising and worked at Ernst & Young as a staff consultant in the business intelligence practice. I loved it. And I did that for a few years. Then I moved back to Minneapolis, my hometown, and started working with a company called Digital River as a consultant. They were an early e-commerce platform for merchants. I did that for a few years and then went to Johnson & Johnson, moved out to New Jersey in their technology group, supporting marketing in 2002.
Rogers: That’s early for even thinking about MarTech.
Harrison: I was more like the IT guy for marketing, but it eventually became that. It was early days. They had an IT organization that didn’t understand how to work with and partner with their marketing organization. The group I was focused on was specifically advertising and my job was to be the tech guy for that group. Then I left and went to Universal McCann as their chief information officer.
I then went to GroupM as the CIO of Maxus, one of the GroupM agencies. In 2015, Kelly Clark - who ran Maxus at the time - gave me the opportunity to start an analytics business, and that’s when we launched Gain Theory. Gain Theory was launched out of a couple companies that existed within WPP. In 2016 we were lucky enough to begin doing some marketing effectiveness work for Target. Our work grew and in 2017 we became part of Essence. My role now is to lead the client relationship for Essence with Target for Essence.
Rogers: Tell us what you are seeing in terms of how agencies can better serve their clients these days.
Harrison: I think that both agencies and marketers could always do more to understand consumer behavior, consumer motivations, attitudes and emotions and how they’re likely to be impacted by advertising. We’ve been pretty good at what I see as the first wave of applying big data to marketing to provide more precision in understanding audience targeting.
But I think the untapped potential of all those data streams is around understanding with more depth how people are motivated, how they respond to communication, how they behave in the real world.
Rogers: There’s only so much you can squeeze out of optimization and it’s a requirement to be a good steward of your client’s dollars. But I couldn’t agree with you more that insights into consumers and what affects people emotionally is in short supply.
Harrison: I agree with that. How emotion drives behavior is very important for the idea of advertising. At Essence, we talk a lot about advertising experiences needing to be additive or needing to create value. You can define value in many ways. Relevance is one that we’re focused on. Our mission is to make advertising more valuable to the world. And we believe that. We believe in the utility of advertising in certain circumstances, its ability to inform, educate and be useful.
Rogers: What is your take on this year’s Cannes Lions?
Harrison: I didn’t attend last year, but people are telling me it feels smaller. What I find interesting about Cannes is that it’s as much a moment of like-minded people coming together and being in the same place. It’s super useful to be able to have conversations with really senior people who come to an event like Cannes.
Rogers: The CMOs I speak with tell me it’s about being inspired by the creative work on display here. My sense is a lot of the winning work is very emotion based, very cause-related and purpose-driven.
Harrison: If you look at the award-winning work from advertisers here, it is very much relevant to the time. And I think that’s part of what resonates with people.
Rogers: What does the future look like for Essence?
Harrison: We’re very focused on this idea of relevance. I think there’s a lot of thought about the role that media agencies play in the creative process. We talked about the need for creative messaging to evolve to the next frontier of really good storytelling that’s based on stories that are constructed in real time or messages constructed in real time based on data signals. That capability exists. At Essence, we’re really good at that and we do that on behalf of clients like Google. We have a heritage of working with advertisers that are serious about leveraging their own data and what they know about their customers.
As an agency, I think we’re sitting at the center of a lot of conversations about what it means to be an agile marketer, and what really is modern marketing and how can we play a role in helping brands understand that. And I think the things we’ve talked about are all part of that.
I’m excited to be part of an agency that prioritizes that because I think that’s unique in the ad agency business. The opportunity to bring media together with creative, again, is very real for us. We have a creative group inside Essence that is a growing practice. The longer I’m in this industry and in my role now, having been a tech guy, an effectiveness guy, the more I see the need for creative and media to be tightly interwoven together.
Rogers: Thank you.
