< Back
SPEAKERS : LAURENT THEVENET, REGIONAL HEAD OF CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY, LE PUB SINGAPORE: “IT’S NOT ABOUT PLAYING WITH THE LATEST GADGETS.”
Laurent Thevenet is very busy at ADFEST. The Regional Head of Creative Technology - APAC & MEA, Le Pub Singapore is in the jury room for Digital & Social, Digital Craft and Mobile, and he is also co-hosting the session, “Culture & Technology: Two Worlds Converging Into One,” with Cyril Louis, ECD Asia Pacific, Le Pub Singapore. Their talk will discuss how technology and culture now live and work together, what that means for gaining audience attention and how brands can gain from the power of the merger.
You must have been one of the first creative technologists in advertising. How and why did you make the move from software/design engineer?
Laurent Thevenet: Possibly. It was not common in Asia when I started doing it in agencies in 2012. It is still not everywhere today even if people are less surprised to see us.
How I ended up in this space is the result of my path in life. I grew up doing arts and music on one side and geeking out with computers on the other side (and getting computer science degrees in the early 2000s). Somehow, I never connected the dots (bringing both sides together) until my late 20s when I came to Singapore in 2008. My wife and friends were not in the engineering space at all. They were in TV or design or music etc. Somehow this clash of disciplines naturally drove me to start mixing things together. It happened progressively up to the moment when I realised I had something different to offer to agencies. Then, I joined BBDO Singapore in 2012, officially starting in the creative industry.
I am glad though to have spent the first 10 years of my career doing traditional software engineering before making that switch. It gave me strong technical foundations and the ability to discuss not only how technology can augment ideas but also the complex technical implementation that may be required.
Advertising can be very many things these days. What does creative technology bring to the mix?
Laurent Thevenet: Well, I spent 2.5 years at BBDO first but 6.5 years at R/GA after that, before joining Publicis Groupe end of 2021. Advertising is just one part of what I do. I spent as much time with teams doing systematic work (experiences on web and mobile) as I do with teams delivering creative campaigns.
And technology is a common layer across both sides of that spectrum. The world is digital out there. I bring a reality check to the teams I work with to make sure everything we want to do can be done and as much as possible help augment their thinking through what the platforms they target can do. I strongly believe in a balance of idea and execution. Both go hand in hand. It's immature to think that ideas are everything. A great idea is equally worth a great execution. So, I try to help creatives deliver their ideas at the highest possible standard and this is what creative technology should be. It is not about playing with the latest gadgets. In my view, it is mainly about pushing the digital experiences to the edge of what's possible.
What do you feel are the most exciting new developments in creative technology for advertising?
Laurent Thevenet: AI is the talk of the town and it should have been even before last year to be honest. The technology is not new. It just got easier. I would suggest that everyone in our industry get their hands dirty with it but also try to use the most advanced algorithms out there, not only what ChatGPT or Midjourney provide. There is a bigger world of possibilities through the larger Stable Diffusion ecosystem, the various computer vision technologies or the emerging algorithms regularly popping up on platforms like Hugging Face. But AI is only helping our production process to either do things faster or create outputs that look different. I am a bit worried that too many creatives will start plastering "made with AI" all over case studies on work that could have also been done without it. When judging, I tend to pay strong attention to the technical references in boards or case study videos. I also test or reverse engineer the work to ensure it is done as it says.
In parallel to AI, if the Mobile World Congress or the CES are any indication for what's next, Augmented Reality is meant to go the next level soon enough. I anticipate we will start seeing better AR consumer devices that people would not mind wearing out there. This will create a new generation of experiences beyond our traditional screens. When this will happen is unclear, but this is coming.
There are also other developments which we are paying attention to and that are much more niche at the moment. But we are keeping it to ourselves for now as there are a few opportunities to do work that not many have done yet.
What do you see as the most important “ingredients” in a social campaign? A mobile campaign?
Laurent Thevenet: I feel like we are often just dropping content on social platforms without using much of the features these social platforms provide. For example, social commerce is a big deal on Instagram or TikTok and we should see more campaigns that drive to immediate conversion through the shopping features of these platforms.
There are also many technical opportunities around what the mobile systems can do which we don't really see much work using like widgets, rich notifications, mobile OS assistants, ARKit/ARCore, health data, connected home data etc. Consumers live in that mobile space and their screen is their life. We should not be afraid to go beyond just posting content on social platforms.
Of all your campaigns, which three are the most important to you and why? What did they achieve?
Laurent Thevenet: I am lucky to have done many but I would have these three:
World Under Water in 2014:
It just went around the world, far beyond our industry. We didn't anticipate that. It was an amazing feeling. We built the entire thing ourselves at the time.
Nike Rise Academy in 2016-2017:
Working on the Nike brand is quite special. The craft has to be good and the tech is often advanced. In China, it was used in three cities as a permanent system for Nike basketball coaches. We learnt so much about the WeChat ecosystem at the time. This is a product but Nike work often sits in between campaign and experience. It was the perfect combination of both worlds.
Zig in 2020-2021:
We created a new venture from scratch for ComfortDelGro in Singapore. The brand created was fun, the experience was different, the build was modern. We handled everything. I had a team of mostly 20 folks working on this. It's quite special but also very complex to launch a new ride hailing company to compete with the leaders out there. This was meant for millions of riders in Singapore so as fun as it looked on the surface, the underlying tech was very complex.
Follow us:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ADFESTOfficial
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adfest/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ADFESTOfficial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/adfestbuzz
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@adfestofficial
25 March, 2023
