Battle for rating is battle for better ideas and smarter data

It was a turbulent year, but in retrospect a good one. When the long-standing CEO of OMD Switzerland moved to the competition and Manfred Strobl took his place in Zurich in July 2010, this was "naturally a great challenge" for him. On the one hand, a lot had previously been built up over years together with a proven team. "And the higher you go, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the level or even expand it." New business wins is one thing, but keeping customers "loyal for years and getting them excited about the agency's services again and again is something else," Manfred Strobl reflects on his first months at OMD Switzerland.

In the international Group structure, the network has lost Honda. In Switzerland, the departure of Suva hurt in 2010. In addition, a few employees from key positions followed their old boss or otherwise developed personally. "What was really difficult this year was the issue of personnel. It's not easy to find new top people; you always have to poach the good people or develop them from your own ranks in the medium and long term." In addition, the industry is currently dealing with "a digital revolution." Developments are increasingly moving online. Finding specialists who not only have a solid education in traditional media, but who also have a high level of expertise in search engine marketing, are Google-certified, play a role in community management in the area of social media, can create concepts and not only book displays, and are also strategically active, "you can look for them like a needle in a haystack," says Strobl. In the meantime, however, his team is largely complete again and set up in such a way "that we can score at the very top.

OMD Switzerland is at the top of the Swiss media agencies in the current RECMA ranking 2011 "by Agency Brand" with 440 million euros gross billings, 23.1 percent market share and over 90 employees. "Since the beginning of these surveys, OMD Switzerland has shown steady organic growth, generally far above the market average," Manfred Strobl and Gerda Schröck, his responsible for New Business & Marketing, can be pleased.

Internationally, Omnicom is ranked second behind Starcom MediaVest in the RECMA "by Global Networks" ranking. With a total of eight awards, once gold, twice silver and five times bronze, OMD was the most awarded media agency network in the "Media Lions" category in Cannes this year. In the prestigious "Gunn Report for Media", OMD has been voted the most creative media network every time from 2004 to the most recent assessment. M&M Magazine named OMD "Best Digitally Integrated Network" in 2010.

And what are Manfred Strobl's goals? "In the future, we want to be a communications consulting agency and no longer just a media agency," he says, explaining his ambitious plans. OMD Switzerland also wants to provide its customers with even more holistic support than before. "We plan campaigns, arrange media buying, negotiate on behalf of our clients, but we'd also like to advise on what else the client can do to market their products." The offer ranges from measures to increase awareness and involvement for brands to media activities around the point of sales and aftersales strategies, but also comprehensive market research and interfaces to customers' own IT solutions. Another goal is that the new CEO at OMD wants to make the transitions between creative agency and media agency more fluid. "When we get advertising materials for online display, we often see that these banners are not yet as click-affine as they could be." OMD certainly doesn't want to compete with the creative agencies, but is happy to help in the final design of the banners so that performance is more optimal.

"In the true sense of the word, it has to click more often with the user." In order to become "even more intelligent" in the online sector, Strobl wants to further improve the qualitative planning performance there, allow little overlap and strive for perfect positioning of the advertising media. In OMD's international network, a lot of research and development has already been done in the area of tracking. With these success measurements in digital, "we can usually show what advertising can really do." OMD's media specialists can also offer clients sales modeling. In this multivariate analysis method, several factors can be shown in their impact context: What do individual media achieve in the marketing mix? When and where are costly TV campaigns worthwhile? What has what effect?

Around all these offerings, the ultimate goal is to improve data management - from reporting to post control. "We like to justify our work in terms of return on investment. "

With all these services, it is very important to Manfred Strobl that his agency is "at the table as early as possible" for creative media planning. If the creative team has already created everything, the task of questioning that if necessary is very difficult. "Nobody usually wants to throw away an expensive spot just because the format no longer fits the media concept." So instead of just planners, Strobl wants to be able to bring creative minds into the processes. People who think laterally and have also questioned things. "The battle for ratings is a battle for ideas based on intelligent data," is a philosophy at OMD in Zurich.

Manfred Strobl has been able to prove that he himself is a lateral thinker and fighter several times in his career in a wide variety of industries and situations.

Manfred Strobl spent the first 30 years of his life "very down to earth" in Munich. He studied business administration and took his first professional steps as a market researcher at Roland Berger. After four years, he wanted to get to know this discipline from a different angle and moved to Philip Morris. "At the time, that was the top address for marketing in Germany." At this hotspot, Strobl was able to gain valuable experience with qualitative and, above all, quantitative research around all sales channels, customer behavior and tracked advertising. For the group, he was able to organize various workshops and international meetings, also for the management. As a co-author, he also incorporated his findings from this time into a non-fiction book. In 1993, the time was ripe for a move away from Munich. Together with Detlev Braun, then head of marketing at Marlboro, Strobl moved to Wiesbaden. The Lancaster Group offered the opportunity to turn the company, which had previously been run by the owner in a "fairly patriarchal" manner, into a major branded goods company. The company traded in selective cosmetics from Davidoff, Jil Sander and Joop, for example.

Together with Braun, Strobl introduced professional marketing for these designer brands for the first time. In addition to the market research required for this, he also set up the media department there and organized promotions, from decorations to events. This work also caught the attention of the Milchstrasse publishing group. Strobl was poached to Hamburg, where he took care of marketing titles such as TV Spielfilm, Fit for Fun, Amica and the real estate magazine Bellevue. "A dynamic time in a very interesting publishing house," Strobl recalls. In 1998, he also set up the publishing office in Frankfurt for Milchstrasse, but later "fell out a bit" with the managing director. Today, he says, everything is fine again. But the dispute wasn't so bad back then.

Manfred Strobl suddenly had some free time ahead of him and, thanks to the successes of recent years, for the first time also the means to realize his old dream of studying abroad. In Holland, he earned his Master of Business Administration and Business Informatics at the Rotterdam School of Management. Strobl's grades placed him second among 120 students from 40 nations. This honor earned him a semester abroad in Texas at the University of Austin and an internship at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis.

After completing his post-graduate studies, Strobl founded an Internet start-up in Paris together with an international group of like-minded people. They developed the idea of "trading of digital assets" in a loft. How could digital products such as music or art be sold over the Internet? But the founders were "partly too late and partly too early. The dotcom bubble had already overheated. Strobl had correctly assessed the impending flop in good time and left for overseas again after a few months.

Back in Austin, he was able to join Dell Computer Corporation as a project manager for a year. There he had the chance to develop Internet products with a team and created one of the first digital audio receivers for the home. But he also sold "beyond-the-box solutions" or "custom computers" on the phone in the run-up to Christmas. It was amusing to see how many Americans believed that they were listening to a joke call from Arnold Schwarzenegger on the phone to the salesman from Bavaria ...

The next door opened at Lilly. At the pharmaceutical company in Indianapolis, where he had already completed his internship, a new drug had reached market maturity. Strobl first accompanied the development in the USA and was later responsible for the complete brand launch in Germany in a collaboration between Lilly and Boehringer. This commitment lasted five years until 2005, when Manfred Strobl came to the conclusion: "That can't be it!" He wanted to be more "on the front lines with the customers" again. He also felt held back by the rigid structures of the globally active company. "The whole thing was great, but already very political."

The redemption was an offer as Executive Managing Director at Optimedia. Manfred Strobl headed the agency in Frankfurt for five years. With over 40 employees, he managed the budgets of major clients such as Nestlé, HP and Richemont. It was a bit of "wanderlust" that made Strobl look for a new challenge in 2010. However, this should not be further than a maximum of two hours by plane from Munich. "My relatives are slowly getting to an age where I would also like to visit them spontaneously without much trouble." Manfred Strobl finally landed in Zurich. He has been working here as the new CEO of OMD Switzerland since July 2010. To keep fit for his job, Manfred Strobl has been going jogging and to Kieser at least twice a week for over ten years, and often enjoys an early morning swim in Lake Zurich or an indoor pool in winter. Some of his weekends are a bit un-Swiss: he often travels to Munich, Vienna or Rome - for the sake of family and love. Andreas Panzeri