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Talking Shop With VivaKi's Jeff Flemings

Posted by Michael Lazerow on November 18, 2008 at 11:00 AM PDT

I was fortunate enough to catch up with Jeff Flemings, Senior VP of Renaissance Planning at VivaKi, a new unit of Publicis Group S.A. at this year’s ad:tech New York. Jeff was previously founder and leader of the planning discipline at Digitas, and always impresses me with his forward thinking in regards to digital marketing.

This conversation took place after a panel that I spoke on and Jeff moderated called, “Mobilizing and Leveraging Consumer Insights: Best Practices for the Digital and Social Media Age,” alongside Kay Madati, VP, Audience Experience, CNN Worldwide; Jeff Hunter, Innovation Toolkit Director, Cereal Partners Worldwide, General Mills, Inc.; Marc Ruxin, Chief Innovation Officer, Digital, McCann Worldgroup San Francisco; and Chris Pan, Head of Brand Solutions, Facebook.

You can check out the video of our post panel conversation below, but in the meantime here are some of Jeff’s high level thoughts.

On growth areas:
“One of the big takeaways for me is that the whole interactive and social marketing lane is still very much alive and growing, which is great.”

On social media:
“The most exciting thing for me, hands down, is anything to do with social, because it’s increasingly the way consumers are choosing to spend their time. It provides un-parelleled opportunities for brands to get into a consumer’s life, so from a marketer’s perspective, it’s an incredible opportunity. I think we are only just now scratching the surface of what’s possible.”

On social and search:
“One interesting dimension will be the intersection of social and search…so, taking what we’ve learned from social media interactions and driving that into search strategy.”

On the future:
“I think we will be talking about the further expansion of social. I think all the cool things about social that marketers really need that haven’t quite materialized yet, like sourcing audiences that scale reliably…we have to see progress there if brands are to move significant budgets [in that direction.]”