Mobile internet and social networking sites will lead the world in 2010, says Wim Vermeulen, Director of Innovation at Ogilvy Group, Central and Eastern Europe, who has only one advice for Romanian marketing managers: “Don’t ignore the two. If you’re not yet ready to go digital, at least give it a try, it’s the only way to learn about this medium”.
With over 20-year experience in the media industry, Wim Vermeulen (photo), his career in the field took off in 1989 as junior media planner at Vanderkerckhove&Co. He then worked at Young&Rubicam for four years as account executive, and as account director for 3 years at Lowe Troost. During 1997-2000, he served as marketing manager/head of consultancy group at Net it Be/E-corporation, one of Belgium’s largest online companies.
After a sabbatical period, Vermeulen returned in 2002 as client service director at Ogilvy. In 2004, he took up the chief executive role at OgilvyInteractive. As of January 2007, he heads the digital division of Ogilvy Group Central & Eastern Europe.
Wall-Street: Has the financial crisis changed to any extent the meaning of innovation in the digital medium?
Wim Vermeulen: First of all, the media spend went down in every medium except online. There is a number of reasons for that and the first is price (in some countries, TV is much more expensive than other media). Advertisers needed to get their sales, and have been more attentive to the results of their campaigns, to details. If you see that your campaign doesn’t bring you the sales, you go somewhere else, right? And because the online is very countable, you get the ROI. And if you are a marketing manager and you want to spend €2 million, it’s time you go to your CEO and say «I am going to invest this money here, this is the ROI I am going to get out of it». It’s much more difficult in the traditional media to get tha
