IPG Mediabrands’ new global chief executive Henry Tajer caught up with M&M Global at this year’s Dmexco digital marketing conference in Cologne.

Outlining his speaker session in the Congress Hall, Tajer said: “We talked about new bridges to the consumer, we talked about the bridges we’re going to burn down and the bridges we’re going to build.”

The session also featured Babs Rangaiah, vice president of global innovation and ventures at Unilever, TBWA chief executive Troy Ruhanen, and was moderated by Wenda Harris Millard from Medialink.

Tajer, who was made CEO in April, said the core to what Mediabrands does fell in embracing the notion of dynamic marketing, whilst really embracing the company’s objectives. “It’s amazing what you can do when you align a group of people,” said Tajer.

“Success is constantly moving forward and constantly improving who and what we are as an organisation, improving the way in which we are working with our clients, improving the talent base and who we are attracting into our business,” he added. “Part of the process to go through that is to make changes.”

Big growth agenda

Tajer is really pleased with the way his first summer in the role has gone, focusing on shifting away from big name branded talent to recruiting people who have more of a cultural fit with a big growth agenda across all aspects of the business. “We want dynamic people in the organisation who represent what we stand for,” he said.

He said another focus was to encourage trust and make sure that everyone in the organisation remained humble, when representing brands, products and services of clients.

“The consumer is now faster, more agile and more dynamic than ever before thanks to the great technology on show here at Dmexco”

“You can have the cultural feeling of a start-up as opposed to an upstart. We are given the responsibility to work on the brands of our clients as opposed to our brands – we are behind the scenes and I think it’s important that we continue to remind ourselves that we are not the stars of the show.”

Looking to the future, Tajer felt the underlying determinant of success or failure will be how agencies and their partners increase the pace on how they are marketing to their consumers, the cadence of change and how dynamic they are around their brand.

“The consumer is now faster, more agile and more dynamic than ever before thanks to the great technology on show here at Dmexco,” he added.

He went on to say that philosophy is nothing without the people who make the philosophy real: “The difference is in people, we are in the talent business.”

“We are actively set out to becoming the most selfish when it comes to having the best talent,” he said. “We have fantastic taste in people and we are greedy when it comes to people – I want to have a disproportionate amount of the world’s best talent working for us.”