Interview with Leapfrog CEO Rob Bannochie PART 2 ✽

What are the expected changes in the advertising field future?

I'll go back to tell you a story of something that happened back in 1982 I was interviewed for one of the clients I was working with for writing a book, and they asked me for a quotation for the book and my idea would be that if I had an edit suite I would be able to go into that edit suite and have access to all of the material in a complete random form because previously everything was done in linear editing. So we didn't have computer, editing was all done on on a machine to machine basis very old fashioned with the old fashioned machines. I said I see that this is coming and I described an editing system and they took this and said thank you very much and it never happened. And then somebody a year later contacted me and asked me to go work on the first random access editing system which was the forerunner of what we see today on your computers which is Final Cut and all of these after effects programs it was the forerunner system back in the 80s, so I worked on the very first system that I know. So if you want my prediction of what is going to happen I'd say,

You've seen Blade Runner 2049 in its interactive billboards and things like that.

I believe that perhaps not here immediately but you will have the ability to really interact with products. Everything is going to change it's going to be a very interactive world. You'll be able to go into a supermarket and your trolley will probably go down the aisles and it will have some form of interactivity with things, the products you put into the trolley will interact giving feedback to your mobile phone.

You'll be able to look past billboards; they'll be able to put your image onto a billboard somehow. I believe this will be some form of personalized interactive advertising.

They already have some very thin interactive screens and you'll be able to buy something like a very thin interactive screen that will be similar to a newspaper or a tablet, it will be a very thin like a roll up screen, I believe that will be coming in the very near future and that will be take the place of a newspaper for example. So newspaper will have resurgence in the near future, in 10 to 15 years. You will probably be able to get by one of these screens and then you will subscribe to The New York Times or the BBC and you'll get your news on it. I believe that's one direction that will happen.

Television is dying; the on demand services I think will peter out.

I believe that just generically everything around us will become more interactive or there will be more interactivity that will enable you to get things done.

It's been proven for example the best place to advertise is in bathroom or elevators, it kills the awkwardness. If you put something in a public bathroom people will read it. It's whether we want or not to be associated with that culture or whatever, advertising will bombard us.

It will just become a totally interactive experience and probably it won't know who is who, it won't understand anything because you'll just be someone with money. I like to go away and sit in the garden without a mobile phone. But unfortunately the necessity now is you have to have your mobile phone with you and that will be the access for most of the advertising and advertising related things.

The CMX 600 non-linear video editing system 

If you could change one thing in the Egyptian marketing landscape, what would it be?

To create some form of establishment or some means of knowledgeable people really giving their ideas to create a new level of young advertising people who are well crafted in what they with a lot of practical experience. The problem is that a lot of companies are playing around with the same group of people not they're not taking in lots and lots of new people and then giving them a process out.

We like to take in lots of fresh graduates and we have a couple of universities that we were into like MSA and people from the German university and various ones like that.

We're not big on AUC and things like that. So we like to take people out of college and then tell them let's forget it, now forget about it! Forget about what we've learned, this is now the real world. Now you can have all of the grounding you want but welcome to the real world. And then they begin to see how things really work. So the advertising world needs to have some fully functioning pop up on the ground practical experience. We're getting interns in various things, we looking for that type of thing. But young people need to spend three or four years in a job before you get a good grounding from professional people.

There needs to be a specialist college or specialist school for people to progressing into advertising. For the main advertising companies or marketing companies they should be taking from these people that come from this environment with very very practical experience because it will lead to a much better level of advertising for the client.

Again we're not into creating awards. Awards are nice things to have, but if the client doesn't need awards he needs to be able to sell to be able to promote his product and get people to buy his product or service. And apart from that you know it's the same in the world allover but in Egypt there isn't a kick start to get it going but that needs to change dramatically, there needs to be some form of very good practical schooling. What is happening at the moment is all too theoretical and it's not practical in the market, and again the language. It's a problem, big big "Moseeba". People have forgotten the language.

Are fresh grads lacking the needed advertising knowledge?

They have a bunch of things that they've been told. They have no practical experience.

You can't teach somebody about how something is printed without actually going to a print house and experiencing the printing house and experiencing the process.

When people see a billboard they have no concept of how that billboard got there, It's just a billboard to them. They're told to do a project like a billboard, so they think they'll make a design and that's it, well they have no idea. I mean I've got seven seconds to see this.

You have to be able to walk before you can run; I think this is the best analogy for that one. So you have to be able to walk before you can run and everybody wants to run and they're running in a massive different ways which you can get some creativity out of it, but 99 percent of the time you don't. The simplest ideas win awards, the people here over think things, there's a lot of over thinking in this country.

What was the most fun Leapfrog had in creating a marketing campaign?

Everything is fun.

We have a client which has been coming back to us for a number of years and they decided to make a new brand of olive oil. Which is something that is a little bit left of field for our people because we don't work with many FMCG clients and I took two new people who have been with us for the last four months to six months and we had to come up with a concept for the olive oil was " Ziytouna " and we came up with a very nice operatic radio jingle which was something new. We came up with a very nice television commercial which is all beauty shots of food, and this is something that they hadn't experienced previously and they were extremely enthusiastic. This is good for me because it shows that people are very interested in doing things properly. We came up with a marketing strategy. We've gone into the packaging and all the truck branding, the in-store promotional material and the billboards.

So for a team of three people two of whom have never worked on an advertising thing we created a whole bunch of stuff that we will see in November whether or not the market believes in it and it will sell for the client. That's the way it is, Yeah.

The only thing we did not do is the oil itself, because the client trust us from a management level and I trust the people who have worked on the project with me, they were very young people, they are enthusiasm for me and for us is very good. They have experience in few things and they have taken that forward and the client is more than happy now with the interaction that they've given.

For me that's less brilliant.

It's probably the smallest things that give you the biggest amount of happiness or whatever.

You know we've done events for more than 5000 people, but at the end of it you're so exhausted you don't really know whether it's a fun thing to do or a good thing to do.

People get their kicks in different ways. As long as at the end of the day the client is happy and then it gives us a great relief. If we go to present for a project we like to believe that we can win it and we can win that project but we have a lot of competition in every step of the way. So we always have to be on the top of our game and be at our best, and try to come up with the ideas that will work for the client, very simply.

-Thank you.

 Alright "helw awy". Is that enough?

 -That's more than enough, I think I'll make a book out of that. Thank you very much for your time.

 No no it's great. Thank you very much for coming.