2018 Grand Jury Perspective with Guillaume Martin

The AME Awards International Grand Jury represents some of the world’s most creative and strategic minds in advertising, marketing, and communications. AME recruits these award-winning international industry execs and tasks them with the job of selecting the World’s Best Advertising & Marketing Effectiveness.

With Juries representing 5 regions, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, Middle East & Africa, and North America, all AME’s entries are judged on cultural relevance. Following regional judging, all Gold-winning work from all regions goes through an additional round of judging with all entries reviewed by the full international Grand Jury to determine a Platinum Award for each of the five regions.

This week ‘s Grand Jury Perspective features 2018 AME jury member, Guillaume Martin, Head of Strategy, BETC, France. He joined BETC in 2014 as Head of Strategy, in charge prominent clients such as Canal, Peugeot, Evian and the French national lottery. He also leads the creative culture within the agency (training programmes, creative reviews, etc.).

Guillaume started his planning career at Ogilvy Paris in 2000, where he spent 6 years working on prominent international accounts such as Nestlé Waters, Ford, and IBM. He then joined DDB Paris, where he led strategic thinking on clients from various sectors, most of them won after new business pitches - with a strong focus on sports (Nike, French Football Federation, L’Equipe newspaper), food (Lipton, Fleury Michon) and public policy (French Navy recruitment).

In 2010, Guillaume became Head of Planning at BBDO working on all the agency’s clients (Pepsico, Eurostar, EDF, Total, etc.). During his tenure, he also implemented new thinking and briefing processes and hired the first engagement planners.

AME Awards: In your opinion, what is your favorite ad that embodies both creativity and effectiveness?

Guillaume Martin: Got Milk (client: California Milk Processor Board/agency: Goodby Silverstein Partners). It perfectly illustrates what strategy is all about - making choices. They chose to focus on people already drinking milk (which is not the most obvious decision when asked to boost milk sales) and built on a simple insight (the only time people think about this boring product is when they run out of it). Milk consumption increased. Even better: Household penetration increased. And « Got Milk » became much more than just a tagline: a part of pop culture.

AME Awards: In your opinion which brands have utilized technology in a unique way to attract the digital consumer and do breakthrough effective creative?

Guillaume Martin: Domino’s Pizza. They see themselves as a tech company that just happens to sell pizzas, with a constant focus on service. They developed a Live Pizza Tracker to track every stage of their order in real time. A GPS Driver Tracker to see where your pizza is during the delivery process. A text-emoji ordering system. A zero-click ordering app. A Domino’s delivery car, with a warming oven. A drone delivery service. And recently a partnership with IFTTT (a service that allows people to create connections between their digital devices) to let customers have, for example, their porch lights automatically turn on when their pizza is near. Domino’s share price growth has outpaced the most successful tech companies in the world since 2010 (Netflix, Tesla, Amazon…) and it cannot be a coincidence.

AME Awards: What creative trends are emerging and how will those trends affect creative?

Guillaume Martin: Voice technology is a fantastic playground for our industry - as shown by Burger King triggering Google Home devices to advertise the Whopper.

Brands need to get ready to voice search and also work seriously on their own “brand personality”- which has often been the laziest part of the brief (the good old “human, positive and optimistic” tone of voice).

AME Awards: Why did you agree to judge this year’s AME Awards?

Guillaume Martin: It’s a great opportunity to check once again that the most outstanding work can work. And we’re all driven by jealousy in this industry, aren’t we?