Jérôme de Chaunac
101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior
Jérôme de Chaunac, Fmr. Global Chief Creative Officer at Havas Sports & Entertainment, New York
Passionate about sports, de Chaunac joined Havas Sports France in 2003 as the Head of Marketing and New Business. He then moved up to become the Managing Director of Havas Sports & Entertainment France, where he focused on global clients and international development. In his role as the Global COO since 2007, he co-leads the expansion of the agency from two markets to a network of 35 offices in 20 countries, and works on driving strategic development, network oversight, commercial growth and partnerships. Since September 2014, de Chaunac has operated out of the Havas SE offices in New York.
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“Brands should really figure out their role in the audio space”
— JÉRÔME DE CHAUNAC, FMR. GLOBAL CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER AT HAVAS SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT, NEW YORK
Reese: Havas has recently started a new collaboration with Universal Music. Can you talk a little bit about that?
De Chaunac: It's a new approach to music in the context of branding and advertising. At Havas Sports & Entertainment, we drive consumer engagement for our clients. Our core business revolves around passions, whether they be music, football, cinema, or whatever else. People spend a lot of time and money on their passions and they like to share them and talk to their friends about them. That's why our goal is for brands to talk to the fan inside each one of us, not to the consumer. For a brand to be really successful, it needs to achieve advocacy through its fans. Among all the passions people can have, we found out that music really is the number one. It's the most universal of passions, as 90% of people are - at least somewhat - interested in music and a whole 63% are passionate or very passionate about it (according to our Fans.Passions.Brands study). Now, as part of the Havas network, we have the advantage that our majority shareholder, the Bolloré Group, also happens to be the number one shareholder of Vivendi, to which Universal Music belongs. Vincent Bollore's idea was not to merely gather shares but to make the companies work together. And that's exactly what we've done. We sat down together to find synergies and to identify growth opportunities on both sides. Music labels are looking for marketing opportunities - say if they're about to launch a record and are looking for a sponsor or a media platform for more exposure. Similarly, brands are constantly looking for an ambassador for their next product launch. The only problem is that it's all very short-term, and what we've learned from our involvement in sports is that it's the long-term partnerships that are much more valuable and meaningful for everyone involved. So the idea behind the Vivendi-Havas partnership is to bring the experts of brand communication together with the music experts and make them work together, with a long-term focus in mind."I think it’s wonderful that music can create such transcending experiences and tap into our memories so effectively"
Reese: So you want them to stick with the relationship.
De Chaunac: Think the FIFA World Cup. There's a full ecosystem in which a brand can own a space, where it can craft a story, build emotions over the years that connect the brand to its fans long-term. One of our biggest clients, Coca-Cola, is doing a great job at that. If you transfer that to the music business: Universal Music is massively important in terms of the number of established artists they have signed, but they also have a huge range of emerging artists, unknown artists, an entire catalogue of possibilities. We have a huge inventory of assets at our disposal that we can play around with and build a strategy for the brands that we represent.
Reese: And you also collect data, right?
De Chaunac: We've hired someone especially to focus on data, yes. The Havas-Universal alliance is based on a combination of capabilities: On the one side, we have Universal, their artists, and the huge amount of data that is being generated through their networks, ticket sales, merchandising, and so on. On the other side, we at Havas have a really good understanding of data - we can create algorithms that help to collect and manage data, analyze it, and use it to the benefit of our clients. It'll make it easier for us to target the customers that we're interested in, leverage the power of influencers that all those artists have, and thereby create more value for the brand, for the artists and for the fans.
Reese: I know that Coca-Cola has a minority share in Music Dealers. Why is that the case? How does that work?
De Chaunac: Coca-Cola maintains strong partnerships with institutions like the Fifa World Cup or the IOC, partnerships with a long-term focus. And Coca-Cola also has a lot of partnerships in the world of entertainment, which have been more one-off - gaming, music, cinema - but they're interested in creating more value in that field in the long run. That's why they invested in Music Dealers - through which they now have access to a library of close to 20,000 artists from around the world that they can tap into at any time. Music Dealers use an algorithm to help identify what it is exactly they need. With a few keywords from a brief, they can enter their criteria into a search engine, and end up with a list of potential artists they can approach and work with directly. Either they take something the artist has already done, or they ask them to work precisely on the brief. That's also how Coca-Cola ended up creating their mnemonic - da, da, da, da, da (hums) - which is now part of their audio DNA.
Reese: Part of my thesis is based on the correlation between brand value and discipline within the audio space. The top, most valuable global brands are very consistent and disciplined in how they're communicating their brand at every consumer audio touchpoint. Coca-Cola is one of those companies, together with McDonald's, Intel, and Telekom. One of the main questions of this book is: Why don't more brands pay attention to their audio identity?
De Chaunac: I agree that the power of audio is undervalued One of the main reasons for that is that agencies as well as brands, still operate within silos. They usually think campaign-centric. which is a short-term approach to music. And if you consider the amount of consumer audio touch points a brand has out there - retail environments, ad campaigns, bespoke content. events. and so on - there's often no connection between all those touch points and the brand itself. That really is a pity. It could be different. I just relocated to New York and I was looking for a new hairdresser. I found a French hairdresser chain, and when I went to the salon. they had similar French music playlists to what you can find in France, which I found really clever. It's the kind of thing that brands are not necessarily doing now. It's about engagement. the big thing that we're strong believers in. Music creates a lot of emotion, 1t engages people. I'm personally not sure if music is stronger, in terms of emotions, than a movie or even a picture.
But the main difference for me is that music is everywhere. Music is in the air. It can touch everyone in a different way, and you don't have to read a paper, or look at a photo. I think that's one of the beauties of music. It's an invisible feeling of "1 hear something."
Reese: A lot of brands are mute. They disappear once you look away. But not Coca-Cola: They follow a comprehensive audio strategy beyond one simple audio logo. There needs to be a strategic process, research and measurement, to really define a brand's audio identity. Do you guys at Havas think that strategically?
De Chaunac: We're not there yet. although we're closer to it than we were about a year ago, and we're also closer than many other groups are. A lot of brands understand the power of sound. of audio, of music. but what it really means is not clear - they'll go to their creative agency, who will say, let's create a piece of music. But that's not enough. That's not how you use music and audio in your brand strategy. You're not thinking of the connection with the client. with their brand. However. it's quite rare - as far as we're concerned at Havas - to have a brand come to us and say, forget about my product, forget about my TY spot. I want to talk audio.
Reese: I talk to a lot of CMOs. Most of them know their brand can't afford to sound arbitrary. They know they have to do something, but they don't know how to get there. And I think you at Havas are on the right path, but you might have to course-correct a little bit.
De Chaunac: The way agencies are organized today is not the best way, to your point. But at Havas, with our "village spirit", we have a clear advantage. We bring our teams together in the same space, and we foster collaboration. It'll take some time, but the Vivendi partnership will get us there - with music, and content 1n general, which is at the core of what our brands need. It'll probably take a few months - hopefully not much longer than that.
Reese: Strategy informs execution. Not the other way around.
De Chaunac: Exactly. Music is about emotion, as we said. Of course, you can have emotion through a short piece of music that is created and becomes something like the Coke anthem - something people will get used to. But if Coke were only doing that. it wouldn't work. What they've done in regards to music - from the K'naan anthem to what they did at the London Olympics - goes far beyond that. It's about creating music. but it's also about creating content. a story behind it. made up of smaller stories, that feed the strategy. For a brand, it's not about sticking to one single type of artist or music. It's about taking the full potential of sounds and music and making it available for their customers and clients. Brands should really figure out their role in the audio space. It's an interesting development.
Note: The interview took place in Cannes on the 24th of June 2015.
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