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Sheila Hartnett says she has learned to think about subsequent generations of shoppers and what is happening culturally – from her days as a sales associate in the Procter & Gamble paper products division in the 1970s to CEO of JWT/OgilvyAction.

Like others of her generation, Hart-nett is not assumed to be able to master today’s personal technology – PCs and smartphones and tablets. But Hartnett says she recognizes that she needs to know what those subsequent genera-tions know as digital takes a bigger role in shopper marketing.

Her children are “digital natives,” and increasingly so are the people who work for and with her. For instance, as she guides her agency’s current project on global sustainability with Unilever and Walmart, the person she’s working most closely with on a digital application is just two years out of college.

“I’ve been initiated through my kids, so now when I see really smart folks in their 20s who are true digital natives, I love to pick their brain and I love to hire them,” she says. “And I’m usually the one saying, ‘I don’t care whether they’ve got seven years experience, they’re brilliant and they’re

really at the edge of things.’ ”To promote a New Balance

store opening in New York’s Manhattan borough, Ogilvy-Action created a game that was downloadable after scan-ning QR codes. Announce-ments on Twitter and Face-book divulged the locations of digital “batons” placed throughout New York each day for a month; players could nab the batons by coming within 100 feet of them, but other players could locate ba-ton holders and steal them if they got close enough. Baton holders could visit the new store and trade them for a pair of shoes, and the person who collected the most batons in the month won a solid gold baton worth

$20,000.“New Balance has always

been about running,” Hart-nett says. “We wanted to go back to the heritage, and at the same time show how futuristic and technologi-

cally savvy New Balance is. We worked on an out-of-store campaign to drive people into the store, and combined it with expe-riential and digital activation out-of-store and in-store.”

Hartnett says she hasn’t forgotten what she learned in her days with Revlon

in the 1980s, when she led a group that changed the way Target sold cosmetics.

“Good shopper marketing is always grounded in insights around what we call the four truths – the brand, the shopper, the retailer and the moment, which is re-ally what’s happening culturally,” she says.

“If you look at retail marketing, there are so many things that haven’t changed in 20-plus years, but now it’s changing overnight because of the marketers’ and retailers’ ac-cess to data. With the whole data and tech-nology revolution, the retailers have been ahead of the brands, which is very different from any other change I’ve seen.”

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Photo by Steve Hockstein

“ If you look at retail marketing ... it’s changing overnight because of the marketers’ and retailers’ access to data.”

JWT/OGILVYACTIONSheila Hartnett, Chief Executive Officer

IN SHOPPER MARKETINGAgencies