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The Union Jackpot – The billion dollar prize for UK advertising

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By Matthew Charlton, CEO

May 13, 2014 | 3 min read

One of the things that is interesting about the collapse of Omnicom Publicis deal (cultural differences have been blamed, partly, for its demise) is the the reminder that actually the UK is pretty damn good at integrating multiple cultures and ethnicities into our business culture. In fact really good.

It seems pretty clear now that we are approaching that time where the globalisation of information via the internet is flipping into the globalisation of purchasing. The big players, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Microsoft, and the extraordinary brands coming Eastwards from China like Alibaba, are interested in treating the world as a single market.

It is common sense really. If you have billions of users, globally geographic lines blur to almost nothing. If all of those people used you via online then you have a big pile of data about them as well. How you can harness that collective purchasing and editing power of your audience for their and your mutual benefit is much more powerful than trying to weave through the constraints of every single individual market.

This leads to opportunity to sell these brands central locations or hubs that are embracing deregulation, have highly skilled and dedicated work forces, and geographically are situated in-between time zones.

This points at the UK as the single country in the world that ticks all of these boxes. We could shift from Greenwich Mean Time to Greenwich Boom Time.

The world is really changing and so is business. The structures of historic global organisations are understandably finding it hard to adapt at speed. But the relatively new internet mega brands have no such problem. But ultimately I can't help but believe that everyone will have to move at the pace and vision of digital and internet brands and governments need to truly embrace this and start to create different types of treaties and laws to work this way.

The UK's 'Silicon Roundabout' is the same shape as the earth, but frankly a damn site smaller. If we really understand the opportunity and build on what we are already great at it could indeed put the UK at the forefront of the next generation of global business.

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