Frank Jons: chromatic explosions!
He could have ended up as a partner in an auditing firm, but a job interview convinced him to follow his true calling: painting. Interview.
Jerome Bloch (360): Communication and growth in the A.I. age.
360 is celebrating its 25-year anniversary. Jerome Bloch, the founder, accepted to share his analysis of the past, and the future.
Can you wrap up 25 years in a few words?
Everything started with a wild dream. I arrived in 1996 in Luxembourg as a very happy Golf Professional, but when I interacted on the golf course with communication professionals like Bob Kneip or Jean-Luc Mines, I realized that communication was my second dream beyond pushing a small golf ball in a distant hole. 360 started with events in Luxembourg, France and Belgium. It diversified into magazines in 2006 with Andy, that we created in Paris, which led to Duke, LuxembourgOfficial and corporate magazines fully financed by ads. During the 2008 crisis, we went full digital mode with MyOfficialStory and we broke the internet when we invented the www.360-box.com in 2017, an automated, portable video studio that is a game changer for all our clients and for us. Before that, a video recording used to cost far too much money and took up to 5 days. Now everything is immediate, for a few euros. Our LinkedIn reach alone went from 500.000 to 15.000.000 in 3 years.
Which major evolutions did you witness in 25 years?
2000 sounds like 200 years ago. Files of 10MB were sent by regular post on a CD-ROM. The print house made you choose your font by showing you characters made of lead. We used antiquities like a rolodex and had to travel hundreds of miles to collect business cards. In short: it was a world without LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce, Dropbox, WhatsApp, InDesign, Teams, and everything below.
Clearly, 3 main innovations changed the game:
1. The commoditization of publishing. We went straight from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg. In 2000, an editor or the Wort decided if you were worthy of publishing anything. Now, any individual, ASBL or company can deploy its own posts, TV programs or corporate magazines and finance them through ads.
2. Data. It used to be rare and expensive, now everyone can get it, more or less for free. One example: for our LuxembourgOfficial Top150, we crawl the entire Luxembourg Business Register. I can check in one click how any company in the country is doing, beyond any nonsensical award or P.R. job.
3 A.I. of course.
Are you not afraid to see your company impacted by A.I.?
It is exactly the opposite! 360 is being reshaped by A.I. for the better. We use it at every level in total transparency: content generation, Data crawling, Video dubbing, coding. We were the first to publish a Parliamentary video of our Prime Minister, Luc Frieden, in English with his own voice, generated from a video recorded only in Luxembourgish. The secret of our resilience is that we never sell low added-value services: we refuse to do any third party posting on LinkedIn. Any community management. Any maintenance of websites. In short: We refuse to sell what we would not buy. Instead, we empower our clients with the proper tools and the proper training. And we build long lasting relationships through high added-value services that generate a measurable impact. Think “Strong accountability”. I have never met a CEO or Marketeer who would refuse to spend 10€ on something that generates 30€ of value. A.I. is simply making our clients more efficient and enhances our long-term collaboration! Because in the end, 25 years of entrepreneurship have taught me 2 main lessons in business:
1. Culture is the most precious asset of any company.
2. The only product that every company sells is trust.
Anything you would do differently if you had to start again?
Everything! I did all the possible mistakes. The “Atlas syndrome”, the “Lead by example nonsense”, the “Lack of focus”. But I get it: it takes time to build anything significant. And today, the whole team led by Carole Hoffmann is proud to start a new journey during the next decades of growth!