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In pursuit of the golden egg

Alain Heureux, CEO of IAB Europe, is creating a much needed innovation hub for the marketing and media industry

Being ‘disrupted’ can be a stressful experience if you happen to earn your bread in the industry being disrupted. Ask the advertising and marketing folks, who are trying to figure out to how (re)engage the digitally liberated consumer. But disruption is also about innovation. The right response is not to fight it; on the contrary, one should embrace the potential of the disruptive technology (the internet and all it implies) and use it to your advantage.  Look at what the music industry is finally doing.  But to stimulate innovation you need the right ecosystem. You need a system that brings people from various disciplines together, where ideas are shared, that in turn lead to new ideas, and where infrastructure and money is available to turn those ideas into projects and new business. Alain Heureux, boss of IAB Europe (the digital marketing trade association), is building such an ecosystem in Brussels, and it’s called the Egg. The point: to create golden eggs. 

Can you tell us a little about the Egg and how it came about?

“I’ve worked in the marketing sector for about 20 years now, first in traditional marketing and later in the interactive field, and mainly at a European level.  Looking back, it’s interesting to see that the sector has been grappling with the impact of the internet for at least two decades now.  These issues keep on coming back.  
 
In 2002 I was offered the chairmanship of IAB Belgium, the trade association for the interactive marketing industry.  I grasped that opportunity because I saw it as an opportunity to push our industry forward in these exciting times.  We scaled up the organisation, and I started visiting our sister IAB associations across Europe to see what they were doing.  Pretty quickly consensus emerged that we needed to set up a European trade association, which I was asked to head.  At that point I stepped out of my professional activities and dedicated myself full-time to the industry.  And that’s also when I started visiting other players in our ecosystem: the advertisers, the direct marketers, the newspapers, the traditional agencies, the creatives, etc—they all have their own associations.  
One of these associations was looking to set up a club, a real club with a clubhouse.   That prompted the idea to create something more ambitious: a physical space that would cover the entire industry, where the greater scale and the synergies between the various disciplines could be exploited.

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