Meet: Thomas Jorion, 18 Havas Los Angeles
Cities are the new key playground to focus on for the coming months and years
“Brands have a massive opportunity to create sustainable playful experiences reinventing physical spaces through new digital standards.”
Where do you come from and how did you end up working at 18?
I used to cover the media industry for a few European investment banks, from Havas to JCDecaux through Vivendi. I had a specific curiosity for advertising agencies, the massive shifts impacting their business, but above all their capacity to always reinvent themselves with the underlying market trends.
In 2013, I joined Havas and became a founding member of 18, with the ambition to apply my industry analysis skills to Havas strategy. It’s been a fantastic journey, interacting on a daily basis with entrepreneurs, talents, and renowned academics in order to understand where the media and entertainment industry is heading in order to benefit from these trends.
What’s the most exciting innovation on the market now? What is defining the next 18 months to you?
Cities are the new key playground to focus on for the coming months and years. By itself, people could claim that “smart cities” have been around for a while. But similar to how Amazon Echo is finally giving birth to a scalable connected home market, cities are on the verge to experience massive revolutions ultimately leveraging billions of smartphones and IoT sensors. Brands have a massive opportunity to create sustainable playful experiences reinventing physical spaces through new digital standards. They have a lead here, before GAFA and NATU, to engage consumers in meaningful experiences.
What’s a great example of innovative marketing in your opinion?
Snapchat has been amazing in 2016 to instrumentalize the soft launch of their Spectacles glasses/camera. In a challenging year facing an unprecedented competition from Facebook/Instagram, the company has to move forward to create an ecosystem mixing software and hardware. The word of mouth on the Spectacles launch is, to me, one of the best use cases of the market, leveraging their brand identity of “authentic” as much as “obscure navigation”. The viral user-generated pictures of the Snapbots (read vending machines) in Venice Beach, California, in the Grand Canyon Park or by a lake near Tulsa, Oklahoma are just amazing marketing assets.
What’s your favorite TV series, movie, video game, or music?
I’m definitely a big fan of Walking Dead, as I find fascinating how this show has been able to recreate a world of its own. A great way to disconnect from the real life ;-). Beyond that, I love Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy (1951) and all the challenging human/robots interactions it raises. I, Robot (movie released in 2004, starring Will Smith) was a direct adaptation of his work and would love to see more in the coming years, even though it already infiltrates most of sci-fi movies we see these days.
