Beyond Advertising

Appendix 1

The BackstoryThe Wharton Future of Advertising Program and the Advertising 2020 Project

If we are not truly about reinvention, rather than tweaking, we should not even bother.

— Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategist, Publicis Groupe (2012)

In 2011, the Wharton Future of Advertising (WFoA) Program was at a crossroads. We were four years into the Program's mission of reinventing the scope, practice, and value of advertising by bringing academic and practitioner visionaries from all corners of the world of advertising together. We had held two global research conferences to establish what had been recently proven about what works and what doesn't, and yet the research, by its very nature, was based on historical data in a world that was rapidly transforming. We wondered, would these findings still hold as things continued to evolve and change? We had held numerous roundtables and workshops around the world (New York, London, Paris, New Delhi, and Beijing) on topics such as the changing role of creatives in the digital age, emerging new business and revenue models, and the impact of disruptive technologies and media drivers. More and more people in the industry were looking to us for guidance and insights, and we realized we had to shift our view more solidly towards the future and start to walk the talk of adopting new models. We decided to create our own “open innovation” project.

The Advertising 2020 Project

Backed by Jerry's extensive knowledge and research on open ...