Creativebrief: As Chief Marketing Officer, what is your primary focus?

Lucien Boyer: The core of my roadmap at Vivendi is to develop and implement an integrated marketing approach leveraging the whole value chain of Vivendi, making all marketing strategies converge within the group and fostering synergies across all our entities.

Secondary but of critical focus is to build up and develop Vivendi's integrated partnership solutions to brands (“Vivendi for Brands”) leveraging our talents and IPs, so that they can help brands / marketers engage people in a more meaningful way via the power of content & entertainment. This is about Entertainment Planning solutions beyond a more traditional media planning approach.  

Our strategy is also to foster IP diversification, to fully put our talents, platforms and creativity at the service of our IPs – hence the model of Paddington, as we leverage the entire Vivendi value chain to create multiplatform storytelling, beyond the movie itself, through music, gaming, series….

Creativebrief: What is the biggest issue facing Vivendi today?

Lucien Boyer: The major challenge we face is actually the same across the whole content & entertainment industry – how to better leverage all data that we collect through our platforms and communities and transform them into powerful insights to better help brands address their customers who are also our fans, in a more meaningful & authentic way. On a different level, the industry is still missing some solid tools and standards to prove and measure very precisely the impact of content & entertainment marketing strategies and investments (which could be named “E-GRP” as “Engagement or Entertainment – GRP”) that will convince marketers to switch a more important part of their budgets to this approach vs. traditional advertising.

Creativebrief: Before Vivendi, you spent several years agency side with Havas Sports & Entertainment. How has that experience helped you when working with agencies?

Lucien Boyer: All these years as Global CEO of Havas Sports & Entertainment have just made me more certain and convinced on a daily basis that there is a crucial need to shift from the traditional advertising model to convert brands’ massive and unchallenged media investments into content & entertainment marketing. This is all about passion points (vs. touch points) because in every individual there’s a fan with different levels of engagement, vs. a mere audience or customer.

I’ve spent years alongside Havas SE teams and clients to build long-term strategic partnerships and brand engagement platforms, that leverage the power of branded content & entertainment (including live & experiential) to engage consumers as fans and help brands to reconnect with them to enhance their passions. See the wonderful FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour that Coca-Cola brings to all football fans across 80+ countries before each FIFA World Cup for example.

Creativebrief: How do you stay in touch with industry trends?

Lucien Boyer: It’s extremely important to spend some time on a day-to-day basis to look at our industry and see where the most innovative brands and stakeholders shape the future, their latest innovations, the risks they take…

I’m also always taking the time to meet with young entrepreneurs and start-ups who innovate and shake the traditional business models, to keep being inspired and challenged. This is what we need if we want to always be ahead and bring the most relevant solutions and promising talents to our partners.

Creativebrief: Industry wide, what work has excited you most in the last year?

Lucien Boyer: The amazing work by Lego as they launched their second movie earlier this year (Lego Batman Movie, in February 2017), following the 1st movie released in 2014 – demonstrating how brands can be part, and are part, of pop culture and have fantastic and engaging stories to tell. It’s about brand culture beyond brand content. And this is amplified by Lego Experience World shop opened in London few months ago.

Following Cannes Lions 2017, I’ve also been impressed by the Grand Prix winner in the Lions Entertainment for Music category for Adidas Originals - the “My Way” campaign around the meaning of originality, succeeding in reinventing one of the most overplayed songs in history and demonstrating again the emotional power of music to reach out to people.

Creativebrief: What work are you most proud of over the course of your career and why?

Lucien Boyer: 1) The MOET Silver Trophy that brought a silver Jeroboam on the podium of F1 races and celebrated the Art of Formula 1 bringing together luxury and technology. This was back in 1996 when world champion Damon Hill was the first winner of the MOET Silver Trophy.

2) The "Champs Olympiques" where we turned the Champs Elysées into a giant track & field pitch with over 1 million people gathering to test and try all the Olympic sports. I won my first Gold Lion at Cannes in 2006 with this work. 

3) The Official FIFA World Cup travel case by Louis Vuitton, where the most prestigious Trophy has been wrapped by the most prestigious brand in front of one billion people. The most powerful "product placement " ever! It started in South Africa in 2010, then in Brazil in 2014, followed up by the 2015 Rugby World Cup' Ellis Cup, the 2017 Roland Garros Cup, to be followed by the 2018 Ryder Cup and of course the next FIFA 2018 World Cup in Russia. 

4) The Barclays Premier League ' Spirit of the Game’ campaign from 2014 onward. 

Creativebrief: You spoke at AdWeek where you made a point that customers are not data, they are people and we need insights to inform our decisions. How do you ensure you are treating your customers as people in this world of big data?

Lucien Boyer: Indeed, behind every single person, there’s a unique fan who experiences and enjoys content, stories, live events, music, gaming… all along his or her entertainment journey. Deciphering fan journey across all passion points (vs. traditional touch points) remains more than ever critical, as well as understanding what the key drivers of fan engagement are. This is the only way for brands and media to better engage and communicate in the long run with people. This is what has been analysed in the 'Fans.Passions.Brands' study launched by Havas Sports & Entertainment in partnership with USC Annenberg Lab, digging into 8 logics of engagement.

Creativebrief: You spoke at the Cannes Lions in June. Can you give us any insights into the topics you covered?

Lucien Boyer: It was a pleasure to share the stage with Sir William Sargent – the CEO and founder of Framestore, who has been working closely with David Heyman on Fantastic Beasts, all Harry Potter movies and also on Paddington 1 and upcoming Paddington 2 movies with Studiocanal.

We talked about Multiplatform Storytelling as a new cultural destination for brands. How to better capitalize on fans' hunger for engaging longer with a film and its characters beyond the cinema screen, or with a talented artist beyond their latest album.

As storytelling has become the mandatory core of branding, there is a crucial need for marketers to leverage integrated content to spread their story across all platforms. And the entertainment world now offers such multiplatform IPs through hi-end assets, CG characters and photorealistic environments that can fit with a brand DNA and engage its audience.

Such a move will enable marketers to break away from a short-termist and siloed marketing approach, leveraging the creativity of talents across all genres (from music to cinema) to build long-term and strategic content franchise marketing.

I was also able to address brands on the opportunity of associating themselves with a franchise like Paddington, while defining clearly the creative rules to be respected by marketers when partnering with a movie production, in order to succeed and be authentic to fans.