Imogen Hewitt’s future talent fix: a university in the metaverse
Imogen Hewitt, CEO of Spark Foundry told a Mumbrella360 audience yesterday that as she expects the talent crisis to roll on, the business she will be buying in 2030 for her agency holding group will be a “university in the metaverse”.
Hewitt’s co-panelists were asked: “It’s 2030 and Imogen is the group CEO of an agency holding company. They’ve just completed an acquisition. What type of business has her group acquired?”
Hewitt says the industry needs to ‘think bigger’ on training the right people
Hewitt’s answer was a surprising one for the audience, and her fellow panelists, Nine’s Michael Stephenson and Westpac’s Carly Boyle.
“It’s a really good question, and I equally was thinking about it, is it something that enables the monetisation of data assets, or is it something that enables us to be absolutely comprehensive in measurement? But I actually landed on a slightly ‘metaverse’ reference. A university with campuses in the metaverse, because I don’t think that the talent crisis is going to go anywhere.”
“So I think maybe it would be quite interesting to think about how do you build a group where ongoing education is core to your retention, but also helps to build a pipeline of talent into the future.
“I want to make it really clear actually that I don’t mean from the point of view of graduates, I mean retraining, lateral training, skillset extension, all of those things that we put more and more and more effort into.
“But it becomes sort of another responsibility of people and talent and HR kind of functions within agencies, and if we are going to change the world, which I think that the industry has the potential to do, and has the influence to potentially do, then I think we need to think bigger about how do we train the kind of people that are capable of doing that.”
Hewitt joined Spark in 2019 from Havas Media, where she was managing director. She replaced Sue Squillace, who left in June of that year to take the CEO role at Carat.
This year, her role was expanded to include Spark Foundry New Zealand. She also sits on the board of the MFA.
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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Carly Boyle
Imogen Hewitt
Michael Stephenson
Mumbrella360
Nine
Publicis Groupe
Spark Foundry
Westpac
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