Category: Members’ Spotlight

The past October members’ meeting saw the election of our new edcom President, Gilles Nakhle. Professor and International Academic Projects Manager at Sup de Pub, Paris, Gilles has developed an exciting programme for his 2-year tenure.

Challenge. Collect. Collaborate. Connect.

These are the 4 C’s that sum up the programme presented during the last Board meeting on 17 February to grow and improve the EDCOM network. These points are based on the main challenges EDCOM is currently facing, the first and main of which is a lack of image and awareness. While this would be the first objective, others would include recruiting new members as well as encouraging existing members to be more involved and become EDCOM advocates.

Each with its own dedicated Task Force, these are the 4 C’s proposed as the line to be used for all future EDCOM communications:

• Challenge: to introduce new competitions for current members. As Ad Venture Student Competition continues to be a huge success, the Challenge Task Force would have the goal to come up with new ideas for competitions. Challenges could also extend to academics talents and students talents by creating initiatives such as TEDx talks. Other initiatives such as The Talent Academy could be the new community.
• Collect: to develop a European research around the Gen Z, conducted by students and sponsored by clients or research agencies. Some of the members have manifested their interest to this action and could contribute to form the Collect Task Force. Furthermore, this could help recruiting members that are well-known for research, all the while keeping new information centralised with very frequent collaborations.
• Collaborate: to reinforce and expand the current network, encouraging mobility through collaborations between universities around topics on a monthly basis, as well as strengthening existing collaborations with partners (EACA, D&AD, Cannes Festival of Creativity, WARC) and extending new ideas of partnerships in other areas such as European institutions, charity entities and NGOs. A Collaborate Task Force is a necessity!
• Connect: to communicate more efficiently and consistently internally and externally and most importantly using new digital marcomms. The Connect Task Force would be the most important one, aiming to decide the most efficient platform to communicate both internally and with stakeholders, such as students (through the use of socials like Tik Tok and Instagram). Having a platform where information about all members’ and partners’ projects to never miss out on chances to collaborate.

With this new programme and task forces, the new President hopes to make EDCOM the reference in communication education and beyond on a European level, develop a positive inspiring image and encourage new members and partnerships and strengthen pre-existing relationships between member universities ensuring the creation of communities and EDCOM advocates. What an exciting 2-years ahead!

The edcom Talent Roundtable, in partnership with Kantar, brought together professionals with different backgrounds from across Europe to discuss what skills and qualities are required from the next generation of talent and what the challenges in recruiting talented young people are. Today, edcom published the results of this discussion.

Brussels, 27. June 2019 – Despite offering exciting, interesting and rewarding career opportunities, the advertising industry is struggling to attract the depth and diversity of talent it needs to thrive. Changing priorities of Generation Y and Z, the need for greater diversity and inclusion as well as the competition of the media giants are the main challenges the industry is facing. While ad agencies are taking steps to address these challenges, universities that teach commercial communications are also striving to adapt their curricula to the changing needs of the industry to better prepare students for a job in an agency.

The White Paper distils the discussion and the outcomes of the Roundtable providing insights for both universities teaching commercial communications as well as for advertising agencies.

Dan White, Head of Expertise at Kantar stated: ‘This whole project has been fascinating from start to finish!  It is clear that people entering the workforce today have very different priorities and expectations from previous generations and that the communications industry needs to adapt quickly if it wants to continue attracting the brightest and the best. Our roundtable provided clear direction on how universities and employers can work together to attract and develop future talent that will re-energize the industry’.

edcom would like to thank all the contributors and Kantar for the partnership. For more information please contact Sibylle Stanciu at Sibylle.stanciu@eaca.eu

About edcom

edcom was created by the European Association of Communications Agencies (EACA) and its academic partners to promote excellence in commercial communications education and research and to further exchanges between the commercial communications sector and academic partners. The institute now gathers 53 members from 19 countries. You can find out more about edcom’s initiatives on the Inspire! by EACA website.