Boutaïna Araki: “Advertising can nurture our collective imagination”

The year 2022 marks the centenary of Clear Channel in France (previously known as Dauphin in Metropolitan France), which specialises in outdoor advertising. Boutaïna Araki (EDHEC Master 1995), Chief Executive Officer France, tells us about the developments in billboards, the place of communication in cities, the accessibility of content, as well as awareness-raising efforts around diversity and inclusion.

How would you summarise your current position and responsibilities?

I’m the head of Clear Channel in France, which is the firm’s biggest business unit in Europe in terms of revenue. We have a significant range of outdoor advertising units (bus stops and other public transport shelters, digital screens, posters, etc.) and around 800 employees. We work with local authorities and answer calls for tenders to equip towns and cities with urban furniture. We also interact with other types of partners like real estate companies, with whom we operate extensively in shopping centres. Our business consists on the one hand of convincing these partners to entrust their facilities to us so we can advertise on their premises, and on the other of selling these media spaces to advertisers and media agencies. We enhance the value of this inventory using data and our marketing know-how to design the most relevant advertising journeys for those who need to reach out to a particular target segment or geographic area, promote a certain product, whether with a view to driving purchases at a retail outlet or online or developing brand notoriety. 

How does Clear Channel adapt content to the target?

Our network allows us to follow consumers on their journey, but we do not communicate the same thing to everyone. We use units intelligently to carry messages to the right place, where they will reach the real target. Our posters stay up for one week, but we have more flexibility with digital units: media planning has become more sophisticated, we combine the demands of our different brands. Some brands don’t use the same messages in the morning, at lunchtime or in the evening. A beer brand for example will prefer to advertise around 6 pm, whereas a bank tends to choose slots early in the week. Digital loops are therefore highly variable throughout the day and even depending on the weather. While there may be specific ways of doing business in different countries, particularly when it comes to our relationships with landlords or licensors, with regard to technological aspects we benefit from combined strength at a European level that allows us to move forward very quickly and develop solutions that are accessible to all subsidiaries. 

Can France, which is a large market for Clear Channel, be a terrain for experimentation? 

France has unique know-how in Europe in the world of shopping centres, whether in relation to using digital units or slightly unusual projects (the “wow” factor), like a tyrannosaurus at Les 4 Temps in La Défense for the cinema release of Jurassic World 2 in 2018. In France, the dissemination of editorial content has been a hugely important area of development. We were the first in the firm to use a digital unit for something other than advertising. We signed an agreement in 2018 with Brut to show some of their videos on our screens in a shorter format than on social media. Our medium reaches out to everyone indifferently, and we have made the most of that advantage to display content with the aim of raising awareness among the wider public of issues like the environment, biodiversity, gender equality and inclusion generally. We then began to display artistic content through a partnership with Beaux-Arts Magazine, particularly during the Covid period when people could no longer visit museums. Clear Channel is a platform for brands and for collective utility. These two major concepts form a notion that is without boundaries. The more technologies evolve, the more we are in a position to offer services to towns and cities and their citizens. 

Can advertising have the objective of making society more inclusive?

Outdoor advertising is an inclusive medium, the only one that is free, open and accessible to all. Almost all media outlets require a medium (telephone, computer, radio) or upfront expenditure (newspaper, data on social media). Our medium is part of the business, between advertisers, brands, the creative agencies that come up with the advertising message and media agencies, so we have more latitude when it comes to editorial content that is not advertising anything. We are highly committed to gender equality and disability, whether physical or mental. For several years now, we have been supporting female endeavours to promote the women who are transforming the world in all areas, whether they are entrepreneurs or champions. Through our advertising units, we are very careful to show how women can be powerful and at the same time continue to raise awareness that equality has yet to be achieved, that women suffer in ways that are unacceptable such as domestic violence or lack of schooling for young girls. We also offer long-term support to associations across all of our street furniture, generating spikes in each of their fundraising campaigns. This is also an aspect that unites staff at Clear Channel, a feature of the firm’s identity. Our role is of course to engage in advertising, but perhaps also to have a positive influence on the world in our own small way.

What internal policy have you put in place to rally support (men included) for gender equality?

It has not always been easy because men sometimes think to themselves that they won’t have the same opportunities for promotion. The terms we should really be using are “inclusion policy for all” and “diversity” rather than “gender equality”. Inclusion includes older staff as well as their newly arrived young colleagues, it includes men and women with different backgrounds and educations. Being open to all in any case involves greater acceptance of gender equality. I have promoted women to very important positions overseeing sales and operations. These roles represent two thirds of all staff at Clear Channel and have historically been filled by men. This means being extremely demanding with each new recruitment. For the position of sales director, I promoted a woman who had been with us for years, who had progressed and overseen sales in our digital business. Appointing a woman as head of operations has allowed us to change perspective, leave behind what was quite a hierarchical management structure and adopt a more collaborative approach. Our staff – and especially the men – see the benefit of this approach. Inclusion is about more than having very different people, it’s about listening to them, allowing them to express themselves and taking into account their ideas and suggestions and then doing something with them. And the more we pay attention to that, the more people sense that this is a win-win approach. Clear Channel has a score of 96/100 in the professional gender equality index put in place by the government.   

How do you intend to reach your target of a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030?

Our marketing team, who come up with the ideas for our products and services, systematically reflect on what we can offer a brand and city. Environmental concerns are now of crucial importance for advertisers, citizens and local authorities, and so those concerns are an integral part of all our reflections and value propositions. We feel a duty to offer local authorities street furniture that is more economical in terms of their energy consumption and carbon footprint. Brands also need to know the carbon footprint of their advertising campaigns in partnership with us, and seek to reduce it over time. We work on the entire production chain to reduce carbon footprints: in our own operations by properly equipping our staff and using recycled paper and plant-based ink, etc. Outdoor advertising is by far the most regulated form of media in France, and it is the only one that is subject to the Environment code. Our digital units are eco-designed, and together with our integrators we are developing units that consume less electricity. The amount they consume depends on ventilation and light density, so we modify their intensity throughout the day. And the more we use these units for longer, the more the annual carbon footprint is reduced. We have already achieved a 26% reduction in greenhouse gases compared to 2018, beyond the impact of the units themselves.

Outdoor advertising seems to have changed function: from convincing to raising awareness …

Outdoor advertising is a very powerful medium. We are without a doubt the very opposite of the web, which closely targets an individual (one to one) with the aim of generating clicks and immediate transformation. Billboards, by contrast, address everyone (one to many). Outdoor advertising is the last form of mass media, contrary to television, which is increasingly fragmented due to the phenomenon of editorialization. That gives us great power but also responsibility. We cannot continue indefinitely to consume more and more or buy gas-guzzling cars. We probably won’t manage to change everything in one go, but new and more sober products are being invented, and advertising can play a very important role by nurturing our collective imagination. Advertising has a huge influence on the way we see things, it has the power to define what is beautiful. And, for example, eating less or eating organic, having an electric rather than a combustion-engine car, or carpooling rather than driving on your own are now things that can be beautiful. If properly oriented, advertising can be a veritable ally of the environmental and societal transition, of gender equality, of LGBT inclusion and so on. It is one of the strengths of shared living. 

Like a play within the play, would you say that there is a need nowadays for a story within the story in advertising, particularly outdoor advertising? 

Yes, most definitely. Jacques Dauphin, the son of the firm’s founder, already saw himself as a kind of “street playwright”. All forms of media are evolving towards that notion of telling a story. Brands need to do it, but so do towns and cities. We are increasingly seeing that what makes consumers loyal to a brand is not only its price or the quality of its products, but also the values it conveys. During the George Floyd saga in the spring of 2020, many international brands felt the need to speak out about discrimination against the black community. Political parties, living spaces and public transport are also positioning themselves as part of a movement that expresses sincerity. All actors of the economic world are obliged to tell a story, to explain who they are and what they are committed to. The street is one location for such storytelling, which first emerged on social media and the internet generally. It is even possible to tell a story through poster advertising. The Grand Prix of outdoor communication, which we organise, was this year given to the campaign for the documentary series ORELSAN : Montre jamais ça à personne, on Amazon Prime Video. The displays ran from Caen to Paris with huge photo panels covering all the phases in the life of the singer Orelsan, from his birth in Caen to his career success in Paris.

Has the aim of the gradual shift to moving displays since the 1980s been to better capture the attention of consumers?

What we call the “value of attention” is greater when there is movement, with the corollary advantage of being able to display more ads. But beyond that, digital technology above all allows us to considerably expand the scope of what is possible because it speaks to our sense of immediacy and responsiveness. This was apparent during the Covid period, with curfews, social distancing, violence against women ... That need to communicate in the here and now is increasingly felt by local authorities. It is also why we are part of two components of the smart city: the technological dimension (connected cities to facilitate the lives of citizens and increase their level of comfort) and the environmental dimension (combating pollution, ecology in urban spaces, cities that breathe better and are more inhabitable and calming). Smart cities are both connected and better thought out with the citizen in mind.