Financial Times: Technology: Wanted: toolkit for global job ads: “Shell, the multinational oil giant, had a multilateral problem.” (ShellNews.net)
Published: September 28 2004
Shell, the multinational oil giant, had a multilateral problem.
It recruits across 145 markets worldwide and was having difficulty in creating a consistent global brand strategy. The scenario will be familiar to anybody in recruitment advertising. The company briefs the agency, which creates the ad, which goes back to the client for modification and approval and then back to the agency... and so on. It used to take 10 days and each market did its own thing.
Why, thought Navjot Singh, Shell’s global marketing manager, can’t we create an internally consistent advertisement in a few minutes? The answer was a website, created by Shell in conjunction with the web consultancy Adtool and the agency JWT, which hosts an ad creation toolkit accessible by every Shell office worldwide.
The kit is essentially a mix-and-match ad template. The result is an ad in five minutes which reinforces the global brand and saves time and money - about £750,000 a year, Singh estimates. It paid for itself in seven months. It also means that Shell need only employ one ad agency - JWT - for brand management. The tool is used for recruiting staff at every level apart from the most senior executives. Currently it operates only in English, but other languages are in preparation.