Feeling a tad jaded, I soon woke up with the news that VCCP had just been informed of the £100 million Asda win. I now work at Chime’s head office, so this win had nothing to do with me – but I am very proud of the agency I helped start 11 years ago and it’s great to see it flying at the moment. At the meeting, it was also confirmed that I will be taking on a new role within the group at CSM, our sports marketing division – being a sports nut, I am looking forward to it immensely.
Having finished one board meeting, I moved on to another. This time with the Chime youth board, which is made up of ten talented under-30s from across the group, who each presented their ideas on how Chime can innovate across all our operations. I was blown away – insightful, thought-provoking proposals presented with passion and professionalism. It was interesting to be involved in both board meetings in one day to see what the vastly experienced as well as the less experienced bring to the table – both equally valuable.
Wednesday was Chime’s interim results day, so we started with a presentation to analysts showing our half-year figures. You never know what questions will be asked but, in general, we were pleased with the response we received and the press reports that were written about us.
Then it was off to the IPA for a team meeting to update us all on progress on my ADAPT agenda and particularly to plan the forthcoming Adaptathon event on 3 October, for which we are inviting agencies and clients to hack the future of client/agency alliances to continually improve our industry’s commercial creativity. On the way over, I read a recent 北京赛车pk10 On The Couch With Jeremy Bullmore, in which he put forward his view on the current state of agency/client relationships, which, along with many other articles and comments I have heard recently, made me even more convinced that this is a hot topic we need to address – so, hopefully, you will all be signing up to this event at ipa.co.uk/adaptathon to reserve your place and contribute on this vital issue.
The next two days were slightly less frenetic, which allowed me to catch up on e-mails and to-do lists that had accumulated while I’d been away. I also had a number of meetings, one with a budding entrepreneur who was looking for backing on a new venture he was looking to launch that could complement what Chime offers to its clients, so I am looking forward to seeing how this progresses. I also met up with our international team, as we have a gathering of our various managing?directors from the group across the world in September, and so there was a lot to organise in various languages.
A four-day week passed quickly as I’m lucky enough to have a rich and varied role that covers different aspects of our fabulous industry. Friday night, though, was with my football-mad son Fynn and daughter Edie to watch the Chelsea v Bayern Munich game on TV. Hopefully next year, with my new role, I will be able to get some tickets for them to go to a big game – now, isn’t there a World Cup happening in Brazil…
Ian Priest is the international managing director at Chime Communications and the president of the IPA