艾菲对话Sir Martin Sorrel，如何赢得下一个十年？

12月28日，在2021大中华区艾菲国际论坛上，S4 Capital/Media.Monks 创始人兼执行董事长苏铭天爵士（Sir Martin Sorrel）通过实时视频连线与大中华区艾菲总裁、全球艾菲高级执行副总裁徐浩宇先生对话。

在论坛现场，徐浩宇先生不仅就中国市场及品牌发展现状、品牌出海等最新发展动态进行了分享，还与Sir Martin Sorrel就创办S4 Capital的初衷和愿景、Media.Monks的定位与未来计划、Media.Monks如何助力中国品牌出海、S4 Capital团队与业务成长的秘诀、海外品牌如何在中国获得成功等话题进行了探讨。

对话实录

创办S4 Capital的初衷和愿景：

创立S4 Capital是为了解决以前在代理工作中遇到的问题。遵循四项核心原则：纯数字化，数据驱动业务，更快、更好、更高效地进入市场，保持单一架构。我们的愿景是改变工作，成为行业数字创意的首选，实现更大商业价值的合作。 

Media.Monks的定位和计划：

今年8月，我们对Media.Monks品牌进行升级，进入Media.Monks品牌时代。客户可以通过Media.Monks的所有业务而受益。不论是哪个国家/地区具备不同能力的、能够为客户创造价值的公司都是我们投资的对象。如中国的TOMORROW，合并之后，团队增长了300%，业务增长了350%，并在Campaign Asia 年度最佳代理商中赢得了4 个类别，包括2 个金奖。

Media.Monks如何助力中国品牌出海：

作为数字和创意合作伙伴，我们中国团队服务华为、Honor、美的、Realme、OPPO和蔚来等品牌，共同开拓全球市场。作为一个由最优秀的数字人才组成全球化团队，我们能够预测技术领域发生的变化，并在变化发生时为之努力。在与蔚来的合作中，我们打造了一场沉浸式的虚拟新闻发布会，宣布其进军欧洲的计划。

S4 Capital团队与业务成长的秘诀：

我们团队通过人性关怀和对社会负责方式快速、健康和有机地成长。为员工提供一流的保险和培训计划，为新晋父母提供至少90天的全薪陪产假。同时，员工可选择他想去的世界各地办公室工作，时长28天。回馈社会是我们的核心价值观之一，为人民和社会做好事，与员工和社区建立充分联系，这也吸引了拥有相同价值观的人才和客户选择我们。

海外品牌如何在中国获得成功：

要想赢得一个市场，你必须首先理解并尊重它。对品牌来说，了解市场、文化、人和社会，是一个很好的起点。随着中国经济的快速发展，中国品牌是（或将很快成为）你最大的竞争对手，向他们学习。中国消费者正变得越来越成熟，对文化感到自豪，并通过品牌塑造潮流。

Dialogue Record

Sir Martin set up S4 Capital nearly 3 years ago. But it was really amazing that you built S4 capital from zero to what it is now. So what inspired you to set up S4 Capital and the new Media.Monks? What was the incentive? What's the vision?

S4 Capital was built to solve the issues that I witnessed in my previous agency life. While there are many amazing teams within the traditional networks, they tend to be put in competitive spaces that make it difficult for them to work together, because doing so is often to the detriment of their own incentives. Clients complain about this constantly for a variety of reasons. Commercially, it means they end up paying additional overhead as each team has their own margin targets. Operationally, they end up managing each agency separately, even if they’re from the same network, as there is a lack of cohesion across teams. And in general it means clients aren’t getting the best solutions, as each agency wants to sell only their offering. This means clients often don’t have access to the best team and talent within the network.

S4 Capital is guided by four core principles. First, we’re purely digital—because that’s where the growth is. Next, we are a data-driven business. Data drives the creation, production and distribution of content in a continuous loop. This allows us to create content with a big idea at its heart, but executed in a totally different way that allows for continuous optimization and relevance to audiences. Third, we go to market faster, better and more efficiently. This means having agility and understanding the ecosystem that we operate within very well. Fourth, we are built around a unitary structure with a single P&L. One of the biggest problems of the holding companies is the verticality of their structure, whereas we don’t have any silos that prevent you from crossing capabilities. 

Our vision is to change the work, who does the work and the impact of the work, to be the industry’s go-to player for innovative digital ideas. We wanted to build new, transformative outcomes for our clients and help them future-proof for a digital-first, newly virtualized world, for the upcoming Metaverse age. 

We do so by giving brands the flexibility to tap into capabilities and subject matter experts across the global network. That said, if our client chooses us to be their creative partner, they get instant access to all the resources, production capabilities, firepower, insights, talents and everything in a click! Our single P&L model empowers our team to really work collaboratively together.

You can say that we have embraced collaboration for the greater good！

Can you elaborate more especially regarding the single P&L model and API, which I think is the differentiation for Media.Monks?

In August this year, we merged Media.Monks, a world-class creative production company, and MightyHive, an award-winning data&digital media consultancy, and launched our unitary brand as Media.Monks. Along the way and still ongoing, we have integrated many other like-minded collaborators that can immediately expand our collective ability to disrupt the industry with our single P&L and API model for creativity!

Operating with a single P&L model lets our clients benefit from a single integrated company by accessing all its capabilities, which is more cost-efficient than paying separate silos with their own overheads and ending up with complicated billings.

The API structure is inspired by the APIs that connect digital tools and services. It breaks down the silos and boundaries of a conventional structure and offers seamless access to our global resources and best talents. It allows us to find the best fit for a client’s needs based on experience and skills, not geography, which makes it easy for us to deliver what we present to our clients without any delay in time or physical constraints. As  a true system for scale, the API model  combines disciplines, offices and capabilities globally while opening ownable space for our merger model and further growth.

For instance, we now have Cashmere in LA that specialises in identifying trends to create and execute campaigns that resonate and drive culture. Maverick Digital, a Salesforce consulting and implementation partner, enables companies to win more customers and build deeper connections. 

Then in China, we have merged with TOMORROW, which has a great reputation of knowing the China market and Chinese youth. All these companies add great value to our clients and enable them to tap into different capabilities in different countries easily. 

And it works well in every market—clients are happy about this too. Earlier this year, our Shanghai office did a film for Chinese smartphone brand Realme, called How Dare You. For this film, we came up with the creative idea and strategy with the Shanghai team, shot the film with the Singapore team, then handled post-production in the Buenos Aires office, without any delay in delivery or complex internal billing.

Sir Martin, I think you are one of the few top global executives who travels to China on a regular basis and truly understands the market and business here. Can you please share with us your vision and plan for Media.Monks China? What’s the positioning of Media.Monks in China, as we understand that the company merged with the award winning agency, TOMORROW earlier this year?

My relationship with China spans the past 2-3 decades. The pandemic has changed a lot of things, but one thing that has never changed is my passion, my feelings and my confidence in China. I would like to say China is one of the world’s safest countries in terms of public health and business stability, with strong capabilities in responding to major epidemics and emergencies, and is the best place for business as well. It’s really exciting to see how the market in China has grown in recent years, which also reinforces our commitment and investment to this market. 

Earlier this year, we merged with a hyper-local, award-winning creative agency TOMORROW, where the combination of TOMORROW’s creative and social capabilities with Media.Monks’ digital and production strength makes a lot of sense. Having established itself as a creative leader specialized in representing global brands to the Chinese youth, TOMORROW has added strong insight in youth marketing and creativity. Media.Monks China now integrates Creative and Production under one roof to offer Strategy and Creative, Film and Content, Experiential and Platform, Digital and Data services in China. 

Thanks to the single P&L model, we are able to offer brands in China closer access to our global wisdom, unitary structure and team of talents from different parts of the globe. For instance, globally Media.Monks has a great reputation of being a digital-first creative company. That said, Media.Monks always stay at the cutting edge of the digital landscape. In the past years, we partnered with our clients to explore and create exciting projects in virtual worlds, now considered Metaverse worlds, and are currently working on several Metaverse-related projects in China too. 

We recently launched our Making the Metaverse report in China. This report is authored by leadership from across our global team, not just in China, who have put their heads together to build a solid framework that explores the opportunities for brands in the metaverse. We believe the Metaverse is the new era of digital. It is not some future state of technology, it’s already here. This report is a profound yet accessible guidebook to understanding the opportunities within the Metaverse and the steps that brands should take to seize them.

Since our merger with TOMORROW in January this year, we kept the staff retention rate high, grew the team by 300%, and grew the business by 350%, and won a pitch every 8 days. 

In the recently revealed 2021 Campaign Asia Agency of the Year list of award winners, our China team won 4 categories, including the Gold award for 2 of them. It shows our model is working.

In the past few years, more and more Chinese brands/companies have expanded their territories into global markets, such as Xiaomi, OPPO, Huawei and Haier. In China, we call it Chinese brands going outbound. What is Media.Monks’s approach/strategy to facilitating these brand’s outbound business?

It's exciting to see the phenomenal success of Chinese brands and their ambition to go abroad to further the success globally. In our China office, we are actually working with Midea, Huawei, Honor, realme, Oppo and Nio as their digital & creative partners to explore the global market.

Our unitary brand, API structure and single P&L model truly enable us to help world-leading brands adopt a multi-local approach. With the presence of 57 talent hubs in 33 countries and 7,000+ employees of over 50 nationalities, our team comprises locals that come from different cultures, backgrounds and communities. This means local and global mindsets intersect and bridge together data, technology and creativity to deliver hyper-local relevance for our clients, regardless of an increasingly disconnected geopolitical landscape. That said, once clients choose any of our offices as creative partners, clients actually get access to all of our wisdom, presence, resources, insights and powers from within the global network. And with the breadth of our business offerings and the add-ons from the specialist companies that we merged with, clients would get access to everything that they need in a click.

Being a digital-first and diverse team of the best digital talent, we are able to anticipate and build towards changes in the technology landscape as they happen. We have the capabilities to help brands adapt to their every digital need, from creative concepting to coding to everything in between. 

For instance, we collaborated with NIO to announce their European expansion through an immersive, virtual press conference. We combined live Q&As with pre-recorded presentations celebrating the electric carmaker’s arrival in Norway—the country that boasts the world’s highest market share for electric vehicles. The virtual format enabled stakeholders and journalists around the world to participate in the launch. Handling everything from script to stream, we developed the creative concept, art direction and live event production from scratch. There are more cases to share.

While the Metaverse has been quite a buzzword these days, Media.Monks has been crafting the building blocks of the metaverse for the better part of ten years. They can be extended reality experiences that support larger campaigns, brand activations inside video games, prototyping virtual fashion designs and so on. Our strong understanding and methodology around the tech, as well as close our partnership with leading metaverse platforms and developers, make us a trusted partner. Our agile, maker first approach to virtualisation enables us to deliver large scale transformation with much greater efficiency and a shorter path to value.

I noticed that Chinese brands are in an extremely fast growing period, and they have the vision of becoming a global brand, yet they have encountered great challenges in growing the team, culture, brand thinking, etc. In the past 3 years, you have built S4 capital from zero to more than 6000 people across the globe. That is unbelievable!  

So what is the success formula in growing a big team in such a short term while growing the business at the same time?

I believe every successful business person has their own unique philosophy and approach, and it varies case by case. So I won’t talk much about the business, but I really feel proud of my team and how fast, healthy and organically we grow through a humanized, social-responsible and caring way. 

Not only are we digital-first in our business, we are people-first when it comes to our employees. With people being at the main asset of everything that drives us, it’s only right that they are treated right. So in our company, we have a delicate team to come up with complex benefit plans that work best for our staff.

For our employees’ wellbeing, we offer the best-in-class insurance to help them with taking care of themselves physically and mentally. To support them through life events, we’ve implemented fully paid long-term leave plans for new parents. For instance, in China normally the paternity leave is around 10days, but we offer at least 90 days of fully-paid paternity leave for our employees. On top of that, new parents have the option of requesting flexible work arrangements when they return from their leave with job protection being assured.

We’ve also rolled out a hybrid-remote work model where employees choose the days they’d like to return to the office and anywhere in the world for up to 28 days.

We also have exciting initiatives to advance our employees in a brighter career path. We always provide a diversified variety of training programs internally and externally with 3rd parties, like Linkedin. Most recently, we are launching our first internal creative award, Young.Monks, to incubate and celebrate the creativity of our young creatives. Our employees can seek out lots of growth opportunities in whatever ‘lanes’ or job roles they want to evolve in. By working with a global team of the best talents, there’s plenty of opportunities for our people to network and produce global work outside the region they live in. There are also no local restrictions, or we try to minimise it, on where they choose to work, so our employees are also as diverse as it can get.

Giving back to society is one of the core values in our company culture. That also attracts talents who share the same values to join us. We try to bring in zero-emissions targets with our business goals. We aim to work with partners, from clients to suppliers, who move towards the same sustainability goals as we do. This way, we amplify each others’ efforts and impact. We want to build a sustainable and inclusive organisation and our endeavour is to become B Corp Certified. We launched a series of ‘Sustainable Production’ goals that focus on our work for and with clients, and ‘Zero Impact Workspaces’ goals that concentrate on our own operations. Earlier this year, we launched the S4Capital forest. Tree-Nation planted enough trees for all S4 employees to capture their average annual emissions. To date, we have planted 264,554 trees and have already exceeded our 2020 carbon emissions in offsets and are well toward our goal to become a carbon neutral workplace by 2024. And, we’ll offer clients the opportunity to offset the emissions caused by the production of their digital solution in our S4 forest as well. 

Doing good to our people and society helps us to bond with employees, connect with communities, and ultimately attract people and clients who share our values.

Similarly, more and more foreign brands are facing more competition and challenges in China. For example, the mobile phone industry used to be foreign brands. Now, except Apple, Android mobile phone consumers almost buy Chinese brands, such as Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi and Vivo. As I said, you know China best. What are your suggestions for foreign brands who want to continue the success in China?

When I first visited China 30 years ago, many global brands were trying to get into the market. To win a market, you always have to understand it first and respect it. Understanding the market, its culture, people and society is always a good starting point for brands. And that is still the case, and it’s even more crucial in the fast-changing context of China.

I would like to share with you these key factors:

Accept that Chinese brands are (or will quickly be) your biggest competitors and learn from them.

Over the past decade, young Chinese entrepreneurs have been leading innovation in several industries, as seen in brands such as Tmall, Douyin, Pin Duo Duo, Xiao Hong Shu, DJI and Oppo, to name a few. These local brands also found success globally.

Chinese consumers’ national pride has propelled local brands to market dominance across almost every category. Local brands will inevitably be at the top of consumers’ considerations, so be ready to communicate a compelling advantage that your brand has over its local competitors. And be realistic about what that advantage is; simply being a foreign brand doesn’t cut it anymore.

Local brands are also often more nimble and daring. They are unafraid to test and fail, always innovating and co-creating new products and experiences alongside their novelty-hungry consumers. Foreign brands, regardless of the size of their businesses, need to adopt the same mindset, adapt to the pace the market moves and be bold to experiment, especially digitally.

China consumers are growing more sophisticated, being culturally proud and shaping the trends with brands.

2021 marks the 20th year of China joining the WTO. In the past two decades, consumers have been exposed to products and brands that flooded into China from all over the world. With the infrastructure and tech advancements that China has, with the rise of retail and E-commerce in China, Chinese consumers are now the most sophisticated consumer group in the world. 

Today the environment that once accelerated foreign global brands' growth in China no longer exists. Chinese youth are growing more and more culturally proud and patriotic. They are feeling proud of the rising local brands, culture and the technology. The turn inward has culminated in a national wave or "Guochao", in which brands proudly leverage Chinese provenance in their communications. The rise of “中国李宁”, the sub fashion apparel brand of LiNing, is a proving case of “Guochao”.

In another example, Balenciaga attempted to tap into the “土酷 (too cool)'' trend and received massive backlash for their advertising campaign, which insinuated that Chinese culture was tacky. Meanwhile, local brands like Marrknull, Fabricqorn have achieved explosive success by authentically building “too cool'' into the core of their identities.

While foreign brands should learn from their local counterparts, they need to keep in mind their place as cultural outsiders, no matter how long your brand has been in the China market. As such, foreign brands need to be conscious of nuanced cultural sensitivities when creating communications for the local market, and be careful of seeming like they’re leveraging the Chinese culture for profit.

Mindfully invest in your team in China

As a creative partner for world leading brands that are setting the trends in their industries and in marketing, we get increasing requests these days for APAC or global campaigns to be “in China for China”. China is to be the core creative powerhouse and ideas are to be adapted. It’s no longer the case of global creativity being adapted for China.

To succeed, foreign brands need to view China not just as a massive source of consumption power, but also a massive source of creative power. Across sectors, Chinese creative talent have been leading the way in disrupting their respective fields to great reception from Chinese, and increasingly global, consumers. 

To keep up, foreign brands must be intentional with how they tap into this rich pool of creative talent. It’s not about one-off collaborations with the latest trendy Chinese designer or IP. It’s about long-term investment in developing local teams and co-creating with them on a sustained basis.

Lastly, trust your China team.

China is the most hybrid and fast evolving country in the world. When it comes to understanding the China market, do trust your local team’s insights and their judgement, and take them into serious consideration. Because they are the natives—who are born here, live here and shape the culture here.

苏铭天爵士

Sir Martin Sorrel

苏铭天爵士 ( Sir Martin Sorrel )是 S4 Capital 的创始人兼执行董事长，该公司正在为全球、跨国、区域、本地客，以及千禧一代有影响力的品牌，打造一个全新时代/世纪的纯数字广告和营销服务业务。

苏铭天爵士曾担任 WPP 集团的创始人兼首席执行官长达 33 年，带领其发展成为全球最大的广告和营销服务公司。在此之前，他担任盛世长城集团财务总监长达 9 年，之前还曾就职于 James Gulliver、Mark McCormack 和 Glendinning Associates。

S4 Capital 于 2018 年 7 月与其内容业务公司 Media.Monks 合并，同年 12 月合并了其数据和数字媒体业务公司 MightyHive ，并于次年在这两个业务中新增了 9 家内容、数据和数字媒体公司。2020 年新增了5 家，截止 2021 年 9 月新增了 8 家。S4 Capital 已于伦敦证券交易所上市，经过三年多的时间，在 33 个国家拥有近 6000 名员工，市值超过 50 亿美元。

苏铭天爵士支持许多世界领先的商学院和大学，包括他的母校哈佛商学院和剑桥大学，同时，他也是剑桥大学基督学院的名誉研究员。他还通过他的家族基金会广泛支持慈善事业。苏铭天爵士入选《时代》杂志全球100位最具影响力的人物榜单，并获得哈佛商学院校友成就奖。