My name is Nabil Aniss, 34 years old, and I’m a freelance Senior Strategist / Strategy Director with 9 years of experience.
I work for different Belgian, French and international agencies, for local and international brands.
I prefer to start this portfolio with one of the last missions that I carried out as strategy director, and which focused not only on the substance, that is to say the creative / brand strategy, but also on the structuring of the team, management and agency culture.
I spent 8 months at Media.Monks Paris, formerly Dare.Win, as strategy director, precisely at the time of the acquisition by Martin Sorrell & S4.
It was therefore necessary to continue working with the agency's major historical clients such as ARTE, Netflix, Nike, Sony Music... But also on-board clients of the group, such as Google, Zalando, Paris2024...
BBDO Belgium was also an important transition for me in 2023 as strategy director, with budgets that require not only advertising and strategic creativity, but also an understanding of business issues above all, with brands that operate in highly competitive industries, such as Campina, Toyota, Worldline, Lidl… where the fundamental question is that of acquiring more market shares and expanding the business.
You will have understood, this is a quick update of the portfolio, I promise I will go more in depth the day I have less clients.
To go into more detail, however, I can give the example of a brand leaving the advertising field to (start to) enter the field of popular culture. Which is, in a world of antagonisms, the hidden fantasy of every strategist.
Because this is what marks the beginning of a change in the collective imagination.
The Jules project was crystallized, among other things, in the Men In Progress campaign.
With a client who opens his internal kitchen to his partner agency, where discussions with those responsible for design, the supply of raw materials, the supply chain, then especially discussions with young agents* who have a conflictual relationship with the world and with the relationship to masculinity, have made it possible to bring about this paradigm shift, much more than workshops-among-oneself-filled-with-jargon.
We all knew that this project was not an advertising issue.
This is the trend, many brands proclaim themselves useful and “of general interest” for agents, but very few are in the end.
And it turns out that I had the chance to be the strategist of Partenamut (mutuality), which really is.
So much of general interest that the overhaul of the brand platform was a return to something that is today considered obsolete: the concept of mutuality.
A situation which actually pushed us, with my friends at Air and especially with Eric Hollander, to think about a meta-discourse, or a reflective discourse to think about what brands should say or not say in a structural way during the pandemic. This gave rise to the “Go With The Curve” model, shared as open-source, and which benefited from widespread media coverage.
The press also being one of the most important citizen organs, especially in a deleterious context of daily press, it was essential to help one of the largest Belgian daily newspapers like Le Soir to maintain its position and assert its usefulness in life agents, and move the concept of “truth” from an abstract conception to a daily act.
Not far from projects of general interest but with a somewhat mercantile dimension of course, having been the strategist of AG Insurance was an enormous challenge: to change course for a dominant brand in the market, where internal policy is managed by experts in risk management, and make it adopt in its essence one of the major issues of today's society, while extending the brand's territory to additional causes, such as support for the Paralympic Games.
With a significant component of qualitative and quantitative studies, designed, prepared and produced in collaboration with research agencies.
A field where everything has already been done, said, repeated, redone, repeated, and where cognitive biases had to be avoided, easy.
To stay on the roads, and in an industry where distrust reigns more than anything else, with Midas we had the responsibility to shift the perception held by agents across the entire industry and not just the brand.
Alongside national and European brands and campaigns, there are international campaigns, with gigantic stakes, such as Qualcomm to deploy 5G worldwide, in collaboration with McCann New York, with major political stakes and social reluctance .
In the international FMCG campaigns, the Nomad Foods projects (parent brand) for Iglo and Green Cuisine, or the national Belviva fries were very important because they touched on the fundamental questioning that we are all making with regard to our eating habits.
And we can’t help it, one of the obsessions of advertisers remains their daily living environment and their city.
When I worked on the Visit.brussels pitch, after the famous Call Brussels, there was no question of missing out on a campaign for my city (it certainly smells like piss, but I still like it a lot) , and this gave rise to the “Brussels is open” platform.
There were also many other brand campaigns that contained Brussels that I worked on: Brussels Housing, Brussels Environment, Brussels Taxation, Brussels Cleanliness…
I happened to be very corporate too and learn European monetary policy in a few days, to win the pitch of the European Central Bank, and explain the importance of maintaining the inflation rate at 2% at very dissipated creatives… I like lost causes.
As corporate as one of the projects that most marked me, and which concerned the release of Emmanuel Macron's first finance law (specifically for the Ministry of the Budget and the Economy), a project for which I had to understand, synthesize and propose a strategic line concerning the French relationship with debt and taxes (Ha Ha…). I slept for 3 days straight after the project ended.
I have also advised political parties on their electoral, local, national and European communication strategies, but I will ignore the party names, so as not to offend the right-wing people who read this portfolio.
I also had the experience of joining the dark side for a year, and joining in-house a brand to work on the launch of a new tel-co product: “Epic” (2,3) at the Belgian market leader Proximus.
And after having had some "stratospheric" experiences with traditional banking giants, I took enormous pleasure in discussing teenage money management with a 23-year-old CEO, which gave birth to the neo- Rise bank.
I’ll spare you the projects we don’t implement because we’re not proud of them and the pitches lost “because we finished second and I would have preferred to finish last rather than second.”
Otherwise you can also see an impressive long list of logos.
I am very flexible and open to the most absurd proposals, but we all have our limits, taboos and prohibitions, for me that is The Why.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) I don't give a workshop on The Why.
And you can ask me why over coffee if you want to watch me rant for an hour about this intellectual scam.
Otherwise, I'm officially not a sociologist because I haven't done a PhD, but I know you're going to tell clients that I am because it sounds good.
Speaking of academic activities, I have been teaching at university for several years, and specifically at IHECS this year (Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Communications). Among other things, I teach a course called “Critique of strategic judgment” which addresses the sociology and anthropology of advertising and advertisers.
Finally, like all thirty-somethings today, I made my podcast, which deals with the issue of social mobility and class defectors, and I am obviously an artist too, using abstract photography and the language of social sciences as mediums, and as a research subject “the conditions of possibility of freedom”
*Agents: An actor who acts in a field defined as a rational and irrational consumer and citizen, having choice strategies and limiting determinisms.
It was long, of course, but I think that to develop a thought on something, that is to say an objectification of reality, you need time and space.