"We are here to promote brands."

Michael Maedel is the president of JWT, one of the largest advertising and communications companies in the world. An economist by training, Maedel is a member of the board of the J. Walter Thompson Company, New York, and a member of the office of the chief executive. Before joining JWT, Michael worked for Young & Rubicam for some 13 years. In Kathmandu on an official trip, he spoke to myrepublica.com in an exclusive interview.

Excerpts:

Myrepublica.com: Can you tell us something about the JWT?

Michael Maedel: JWT is one of the largest brand communication companies in the world. It delivers brand communication service rather than serving as an advertising agency because the range of service we offer goes well beyond advertisements. Along with advertising in traditional media, we are very active in digital space and we are actively engaged in a lot of brand activation. The activities that we deliver are producing good results for our corporate clients.

Myrepublica.com: What are the major activities of JWT in South Asia?

Maedel: In terms of our activities, South Asia is not different from other regions of the world because we work with a lot of multi-national clients globally. We are working with them on their brands. To define brand positioning, we work to execute brand ideas in whatever the communication channel is appropriate to address the clients´ need.

Myrepublica.com: Can you highlight some financial activities of your company?

Maedel: We are the company with annual revenue of over one billion dollars and we have maintained our presence in over 90 countries with about 200 offices. We employ of 10,000 people and about 3,000 alone work with us in the Asia Pacific region. We started our business almost 150 years ago and we are the first agency that expanded internationally. We have a long history and tradition of operating outside the US and that is what we have been doing quite successfully.

Myrepublica.com: What are the major activities that your company is engaged in Nepal?

Maedel: We have a very wide range of activities because being in a small market you have to be very open to varied activities like advertisement, doing PR and we are very much involved in the whole range of social media. As a globally renowned company, we think we should engage in the areas where we have our strength of ideas to address the issues that are important to society. We are doing a lot of activation works and are actively engaged in sales promotion. So to sum up, we are doing whatever is needed to promote the brand and build brand experience for consumers.

Myrepublica.com: How has been the overall performance of your company in Nepal?

Maedel: We are the only multinational agency which has been consistently operating here for the last 10-15 years. We think it is a testimony of our commitment to professionalism. We are not the type of company that goes into market when things are bright and pull out when things turn bleak. We are very committed to our task. At a time when the whole world is suffering from financial recession, I think things are going pretty good here.

Myrepublica.com: How do you view the crisis seen in the US newspaper industry where renowned papers are closing down?

Maedel: A lot of newspapers in the US are in trouble. The most important thing that influences the ways of consuming media is technology. The introduction of digital media has changed things a lot and now an event becomes an old story within the next 24 hours. Against this background, yes, there has been shift of advertisements from traditional media like newspapers to other channels, resulting in the decline in their revenues. The best way to cope with the challenge is to invest more on innovation and I think it will enable newspaper industry face such challenges. Some of the established newspapers have already showed successful examples of being innovative by embracing technologies based on internet and mobile phones.

Myrepublica.com: What are the major challenges of media industry globally?

Maedel: I think in our industry we have some challenges that go beyond the financial recession. But I don´t mean to say that recession didn´t have any impact on this industry. We saw our clients scaling down their activities and putting project on hold, resulting in decline in revenue for media industry. But the real challenge is coming from the change in media landscape. The shift in investment from traditional media has resulted in the emergence of new competitors like Google that has a huge access to data and have a close relationship with their consumers.

Myrepublica.com: What are you strengths and future area of expansion of your activities in Nepal?

Maedel: Our activities in Nepal are growing in an encouraging way as we have a balanced team of professionals here and we are also well positioned to deal with whatever tasks our clients give us. We have an interesting list of clients that we are dealing with here. We will go forward with the whole range of brand activation. We believe that the new technology will grow and the relatively low level of mobile penetration and broadband internet connections will expand in days to come as Nepal has a huge youth population. This will unveil a new area of expansion of our activities here.

prem@myrepublica.com