Why does the Nerve Center exist? Lots of people want to know that. I have just come from a week of meetings with journalists and have been asked the very same thing. Well let’s look at the three months that have just passed. The iPad has launched, the new iPhone announced, iAds were launched, iLevel went bust, News Corp put up firewalls, The Windows 7 phone is around the corner, the Google Phone started to sell and on and on…this is the reason the Vivaki Nerve Center exists and why any major Advertising group needs something like it.

All agency brands are being challenged to be future facing and think about the larger digital world we are living in. Day to day in an agency it is easy to be swamped by either new business pitches or the demands of the average client and suddenly that plan to do a global deal with a publisher falls by the wayside! Also its not always necessary to reinvent the wheel everytime. It is beneficial to have a body of people focused only on the longer term and delivering solutions that satisfy those longer term goals.

The Nerve Center is focused on four key strands that cover technology and platforms within the media landscape, global partnerships, innovation and efficiencies in certain disciplines. It’s exciting times, in technology and platforms I am working on the Ad exchange solution for Vivaki called Audience on Demand, I work closely with Microsoft and Google in relation to our partnerships and am close to launching The Pool in the UK, a research and productisation project that I hope will change the video marketplace in the UK.

It’s taken time for the organization to take hold and become more structured but we are getting there and the one thing that is most exciting is the ambition. The city has recently highlighted Publicis as the most digital and forward thinking agency Group and that’s on the back of the ambition that started the VNC. There are detractors of course, change comes with a price and I understand that but it’s very exciting and feels like being in the centre of the digital revolution as it happens, my role will be to make it ever more real and valuable in the eyes of the Vivaki agencies and I am already enjoying that day to day.

Three months in it’s been a fascinating journey, looking forward to the rest..