THE EFFIE STAGE PROGRAMME IS NOW COMPLETE, FEATURING INTERNATIONAL FIGURES AND DOMESTIC LEADERS

What lies behind marketing communications that really work? This year’s Effie Stage will provide the answer by examining effectiveness from several angles. It will begin with creativity and the ability to keep pace with rapid change, move on to brand strategy and the new AI-driven reality in which brands must operate, and conclude with the very foundation of effective communication – the relationship between clients and agencies.

Effie Stage, which forms part of Forum Media – the largest Czech industry conference – and is co-organised by the Association of Communication Agencies (AKA), will once again take place at the O2 Universum in Prague this year. The full-day conference programme begins on 10 November at 9.00 am, with the Effie Stage hall opening at 10.30 am. Tickets for Effie Stage are also available separately this year via the organiser’s website.

The Effie Stage programme will feature more than twenty guests, including three international speakers, representatives from research and communications agencies, as well as leading figures from client organisations.

As in the previous year, Effie Stage will once again be the venue where AKA officially announces the shortlists for this year’s Effies Awards and presents the special ADC creativity award, which is selected from the shortlisted entries by a jury comprising creatives from the Art Directors Club.

Effective until further notice

The Effie Stage programme will be opened by Catalin Dobre (Co-CEO and Chief Creative Officer at McCann Worldgroup Romania and Regional Creative Director at McCann CEE), whose talk will focus on brands’ ability to remain relevant. “The problem you were tackling yesterday is suddenly no longer a problem today,” says Dobre, who will discuss how to stay sufficiently in tune with cultural reality, recognise change in good time and develop the idea itself in line with that change. He has plenty of experience in this regard: for his work on brands such as Mastercard, Vodafone and IKEA, he has won more than 40 Cannes Lions, including a Grand Prix and a Titanium Lion, and in 2023 he was inducted into the Golden Drum Hall of Fame.

Benoit Wiesser, a global strategist at Ogilvy, will analyse what is changing in terms of effectiveness and what, conversely, remains constant. His ‘new 60/40 approach to effectiveness’ will combine principles that have proven their worth across markets and various marketing eras with what AI, a decentralised communications landscape and growing social pressures are bringing to marketers’ work today.

An interesting dynamic will then be introduced by a subsequent ‘fireside chat’ with Jakub Hodbodě, who leads WPP’s global digital strategy for Mondelēz International.

Benoit Wiesser has long been dedicated to marketing effectiveness. As Ogilvy’s regional head of strategy for Asia and the Pacific, he played a part in securing seven consecutive APAC Effie Network of the Year awards, earning him the nickname “Effie papa”. Today, as Senior Partner and Effectiveness & Strategic Excellence Lead at Ogilvy Worldwide, he helps teams across WPP with strategy and effectiveness, increasingly in the context of AI.

Brands and the AI dimension

Věra Šídlová and Michaela Štenglová from Kantar will guide the audience into the new reality of AI. Their presentation,“AI visibility is not enough: how to build a brand in the age of artificial intelligence”, is based on new data from Kantar and the fact that AI is already having a significant impact on the way people discover and choose brands. According to a global Kantar study, 82 per cent of adults have used an AI assistant in the last six months.

However, simply being visible as a brand to this new AI audience is certainly not enough. What the AI says about you is also important. This is because a high share of the responses provided does not automatically mean that AI models are speaking positively about the brand. Experts from Kantar will therefore demonstrate why, in addition to view counts, it is also important to monitor the sentiment of the responses and their sources.

Three recipes for gold

The afternoon session will begin with three case studies, this time in a slightly more fast-paced format. Plzeňský Prazdroj with VCCP, Budějovický Budvar with Ogilvy, and SK Slavia Prague with Zaraguz will each have ten minutes to highlight the key points of their winning Effie campaigns: the problem they tackled, the strategy they built around it, and the results that ultimately convinced the jury.

Following their presentations, the guests will be ‘grilled’ for five minutes by strategist Tereza Košťálková from VML, who will try to elicit details not found in the entries. And because three Gold Effie winners will be sharing the same stage, the audience will have the final say, choosing the presentation that impressed them the most.

It all starts with the relationship

The final thematic block – the relationship between the agency and the client – will once again be opened by Věra Sedlová with a short presentation. Under the title‘What is the cost of change?’, she will examine what happens to a brand after a change of agency. Is change a path to new energy and better ideas, or does it result in the loss of something that has been built up over years? She will offer an answer based on data from Kantar and Saïd Business School, supplemented by an analysis from Effie Europe, which tracks the link between the duration of the client-agency partnership and the success of their work at the Effie Awards.

The topic of the length and quality of business relationships will be followed by an online keynote from another international speaker: Brian Kessman, author of the study ‘Redesigning the Agency Value Model’ and founder of Lodestar Agency Consulting, has long been exploring how the way agencies are remunerated affects their work. His central thesis is straightforward: an agency paid by the hour manages its staff’s workload, whilst an agency paid for impact focuses on results.

On the Effie Stage, however, he will not merely present a general overview of various business models. He will present the results of a diagnostic assessment, which AKA member agencies also undertook with him, and will show where Czech agencies sit on the map of four business models and what each model means for their work and their clients. He will then expand on these insights in a conversation with Ján Los, CEO of Marketup, who has also spent many years on the client side and headed up marketing at L’Oréal.

Before the closing debate, Lucie Vlčková from ResSolution will present the Opportunity Index – the results of the latest wave of research examining how agencies’ offerings align with what clients actually want.

The Effie Stage will then conclude with an insight into the relationship between agencies and clients, straight from those who shape it every day. Confirmed guests include Tomáš Varga, CEO of Publicis Groupe, and Marek Dvořák, Marketing Director of the Dr. Max chain. Their debate will revisit the questions that will run through the programme throughout the day: what enables agencies and clients to do a good job today, what complicates their collaboration, and what remains unchanged in their relationship even under the pressure of AI, new technologies and growing demands for results.

Source: aka.cz