Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, Urges Marketing Innovation at Ad Council Gala

Jeffrey R. Immelt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GE, was honored by the Ad Council in New York on November 20th by receiving the 55th Annual Public Service Award during the association’s largest fund-raising event. Despite a spectacular evening at the Waldorf-Astoria that featured an opening program with American Idol winner, Fantasia, and the Brooklyn Youth Choir, along with NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams as Master of Ceremonies, Mr. Immelt stole the show.

In a spontaneous 7-minute speech acknowledging his award to an audience of over 1000 prominent members of the media, advertising and corporate communities, he captured both the essence of these times and the spirit of marketing at its best. Jeff Immelt’s words inspired the crowd as much as the award-winning public service advertising (PSA) campaigns moved them.

His unscripted remarks follow:

Tomorrow in probably a thousand conference rooms around the United States and around the world your budgets are being cut. The world is tough. It’s probably, in the 30 years I’ve been in business, the toughest environment that I’ve seen. It’s the combination of a typical cycle, of which I’ve seen many, that’s met with just abject fear. People don’t understand what’s going on. People are afraid. There’s a vacuum of guidance right now, and it has just created paralysis.

But I would give you two things, if you’re in the advertising, the marketing, the image business — as most of you are, in this room tonight — two things to think about to really go into your boss — your CEO’s office — and say, ‘You’re crazy to cut that budget right now.’ It’s REPUTATION, and it’s INNOVATION.

We are at war to protect our own reputations in the corporate world. The people in society feel like we’ve let them down. A blogger tomorrow morning can write whatever they want without any guidance at all, and it can hurt our stock price. If you are not willing to fight for your own reputation, why should anyone work for you, why should anyone buy from you, why should anyone invest in you? Our reputation is of a 125-year old company. And we all know what that means.

We’re going to get through this. It is up to those of us in leadership to roll up our shirt sleeves and fight for our own good name, no matter how tough it is. And that’s what we’ll do. That’s where advertisers and marketers are not an added expense. You are a critical part of what makes our companies what they are.

There is going to be a future. And we want to build during this time to protect our future. Many people want to think there are 10 guys down on Wall Street that created this whole mess. Everyone in this country has a piece of it. We live in a country where research & development spending has declined every year for the last 25 years. We live in a country where people don’t spend time to innovate sufficiently. And we’ve gotten to where we’ve gotten, because all of us have a piece of it.

If we don’t look at this as a cycle, [it is] a fundamental resetting of what it means to be business in this society. It means you have to innovate, it means you have to use your employees’ brains to solve big social problems. It means you can dream again, use technology, and value technology again. Then, we will come out a better place than we went in.

The innovators and the creative types, the people that push the boundaries —YOU need to be the people to lead us out of this. Right now, the cynics are winning. The pessimists are winning. And I don’t think we can be unrealistic about what’s going on. It’s serious.

But this is a time to deliver hope back in our organizations, to protect our reputations, but more importantly, to redouble our efforts to be innovators and technologists and together solve some of the world’s toughest problems. So, if you folks [the creative marketers in the room] are dour, then we’re all in tough shape. This has got to come out of this with real hope with real power, real strength.

Jeffrey R. Immelt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GE, was honored by the Ad Council in New York on November 20th by receiving the 55th Annual Public Service Award during the association’s largest fund-raising event. Despite a spectacular evening at the Waldorf-Astoria that featured an opening program with American Idol winner, Fantasia, and the Brooklyn Youth Choir, along with NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams as Master of Ceremonies, Mr. Immelt stole the show.

In a spontaneous 7-minute speech acknowledging his award to an audience of over 1000 prominent members of the media, advertising and corporate communities, he captured both the essence of these times and the spirit of marketing at its best. Jeff Immelt’s words inspired the crowd as much as the award-winning public service advertising (PSA) campaigns moved them.

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