Youri Guerassimov is CCO and CEO at Marcel, Paris. Marcel made headlines last year with their campaign for Orange titles ‘WoMen’s Football’. The ad won 14 D&AD Pencils and 10 Cannes Lions. Guerassimov is also the only person in the world to have been awarded 4 D&AD Black Pencils.
At Goafest this year, he addressed the audience showing us, through brilliant campaigns, how being experimental and making bold decisions in advertising is actually less risky than ‘playing it safe’. Because staying neutral means risking invisibility.
His thick French accent might have been a little difficult to understand but he let his campaigns do the talking. And his message was clear as day–fear is temporary, regret is forever.
I was lucky to catch him later that day for 10 minutes.
Edited excerpts from the conversation…
For small agencies, where would you advise them to allocate their resources most importantly?
I think we should put money on talent who can find great ideas. Creative agencies are all about ideas. And then, you need to have talent in every department of an agency, which is very difficult now because an agency needs to have a full range of skills.
Ten or 20 years ago, it may have been easier because you just needed some creatives, a copywriter and a director to do some TV, outdoor, print and radio campaigns.
Today, you need people who know how to deal with influencers, social networks—and every social network is different; you can’t have the same campaigns on different platforms.
It's a very tough time because clients are requesting more and more expertise, but we (the agency) don’t get more and more money.
What are the things you look for when hiring young creative talent?
It's all about the portfolio. Regardless of whether they are studying or not, they have to bring ideas. I don't hire someone thinking that maybe they will have some good ideas.
I need to feel, even in the earliest days, that he or she has a creative mindset. And when I say creative, I mean being able to find unusual, interesting, entertaining and emotional ways to communicate.
There are a lot of tools at our disposal today, would you say specialisation is more important or diversification?
Advertising is like a decathlon. You need to score points in every discipline.
If a person has skills in one discipline, they should push it to the extreme limit. But at the same time, work on the whole range of disciplines.
What makes advertising cross boundaries?
Some ideas are clearly big ones. They are not based on specific insights of one country, but on some general truth. For example, the “Thank You, Mom” commercial P&G made for the Olympics. The P&G group has a lot of different brands used by mothers.
They wanted to spread the message that the great sportsmen at the Olympics were there because of their mothers. What do sportsmen do? They get their clothes dirty. And who washes their clothes? Not the young sportsman, but their mothers. And that is kind of a human truth.
From your time in India, what is an insight you've gathered that is very close to the Indian audience and advertiser?
I think Indian people, as French people, love to be entertained. But in Indian advertising, you definitely have a better use of celebrities and some very cool ideas using celebrities. I love that.
