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Nicolas' World

A FAMILY AFFAIR - LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

BORN INTO GLOBAL BRANDING

MARKETING THE UNMARKETABLE: THE EUROPEAN UNION

GET BIG FAST. LAUNCHING A GLOBAL CURRENCY ONLINE

TAKING ON AIRLINE AND TRAVEL GIANTS DURING THE MOST TURBULENT TIMES IN THE INDUSTRY

ACADEMIC REVOLUTION. MARKETING EDUCATION IN EUROPE IN THE INDUSTRY

ENVISIONING TOMORROW: THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO CREATE IT

A FAMILY AFFAIR - LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION
Nicolas was born in Madrid, Spain in 1966, son of leading Spanish actress Maria Cuadra and Italian actor/producer/entrepreneur Eduardo De Santis. His grandfather, Antonio Cuadra Belmonte, was a bullfighter. Theirs was a family steeped in the entertainment industry and Nicolas grew up on shooting locations meeting international actors. At a young age he watched in awe as his parents worked on or produced incredible films and theatre productions. Before entering the world of business he attended the Lee Strasberg actors studio in London and starred, at age 14, in the award winning film ‘Elisita,’ directed by Juan Cano Arecha. The film tells an improbable love story set during the Spanish civil war. This creative heritage gives Nicolas an innovative approach to the world of business strategy.

BORN INTO GLOBAL BRANDING
His father became one of the leading global brand executives at San Francisco based Landor Associates and so, at the age of five, Nicolas was introduced to the world of global branding. He has referred to this experience as “the best business school I ever attended.” From the age of seven, Nicolas accompanied his father to client, board and management meetings. In one such meeting he asked the chairman of the company point-blank: "what’s on your mind? Because that’s where brands really live.”

Nicolas understood at a young age what many marketing executives still fail to grasp: people’s minds are the battlefields on which Brand Wars are fought. Nicolas learned how to engage the minds of audiences by building global brands for businesses in the most varied sectors. His innate vision of branding later led to his appointment, at the young age of twenty, as Vice President of Landor Associates, where he was instrumental in developing its London- based European operations and clients.

Following Young & Rubicam/WPP Group’s acquisition of Landor in 1991 Nicolas and his father Eduardo founded Corporate Vision Strategists. The mission of this new company was to reinvent the way brands were created in order to give clients a true long term advantage by helping them innovate and transform their businesses. They created an entirely new methodology, Corporate Vision®, to help companies look to the future and innovate internally and externally. Corporate Vision® is, to this day, a complete departure from the typical branding and marketing strategies used (with varying degrees of success) in every industry throughout the world.

MARKETING THE UNMARKETABLE: THE EUROPEAN UNION
In the mid 1990’s, Nicolas was asked to assist in the brand and marketing re-launch of the European Movement, a European think tank founded in 1950 by Sir Winston Churchill. Following the successful launch of this project, which was noticed by MEPs and the European Commission, Nicolas was called on by the European Parliament to help the EEC (now the EU) to better understand how Europeans perceived the European Community, its institutions, enlargement and its future currency, the ECU (later renamed the EURO). Nicolas undertook a series of large scale research projects which identified the difficulties Europe faced in engaging with its citizens.

Nicolas found that citizens did not understand the European project, the EU institutions or their mission. Most importantly, the symbols of the EU, like the European flag, the choice of Beethoven’s 9th symphony as the EU anthem or the fact that the 9th of May was Europe’s day, failed to resonate with most Europeans.

Nicolas presented these problems along with his radical recommendations to define a future vision of Europe that would clarify the project’s purpose to millions of citizens and engage them emotionally. The project required the agreement, cooperation and collaboration of several EU institutions but due to internal EU politics and bureaucracy the project proved impossible to implement. Most of the issues Nicolas’ project addressed are still as important today as they were back then and the EU is still dealing with the difficulties Nicolas identified; as recently as last year the European Constitution was rejected by EU citizens.

As part of his work with the EU, Nicolas privately funded Captain Euro, a superhero character used to research how people felt about EU identity and citizenship. The project became an overnight sensation and made the cover of the Wall Street Journal and was featured in global TV news media. Simple Minds dedicated their City Lights theme to Captain Euro. The Captain Euro project continues to engage people from around the world and the website receives thousands of international visits to this day.

GET BIG FAST. LAUNCHING A GLOBAL CURRENCY ONLINE
During its bubble years (roughly 1995-2001) the internet was growing exponentially and it seemed as though dot-coms had a license to print money. In 1998 Nicolas was asked to develop the brand and marketing for a small, unfunded UK internet start up called Beenz.com. Beenz.com was a web site that allowed web users to earn virtual currency, called Beenz, for performing activities such as visiting a Web site, shopping online, or logging onto the web through an Internet service provider. These Beenz could then be spent online at participating Web merchants around the world. Nicolas was offered the position of Chief Marketing Officer responsible for the international launch of Beenz. It was an opportunity he couldn’t refuse, considering the momentum the internet was gaining throughout the world. The marketing concept he created positioned Beenz as ‘the web’s currency,’ global money that would challenge the world’s major currencies, including the dollar and the pound. The project made marketing history by creating the first ever global, digital currency and even beat the new Euro to the market.

The press went wild. The Beenz brand and global marketing helped raise over $100 million in capital from giants such as Larry Ellison of Oracle, Francois Pinault of PPR, Vivendi Universal, Italian financier Carlo de Benedetti and Hikari Tsushin of Japan, among others. Since launching a new currency is illegal, Nicolas had to meet with finance ministers across Europe to assure them that Beenz was not a true currency but, in fact, virtual money. Beenz was an edgy, original start up and its image as a renegade company, bucking government institutions, garnered it immediate cult status. Beenz offices in London were actually raided by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the police on suspicion of counterfeiting (apparently the FSA misunderstood some of their claims). As a result of its marketing Beenz received several international awards. The international launch of Beenz included the U.S., Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, China and many more. The company was later sold privately to US-based Carlzon Marketing Group in 2001 for an undisclosed sum.

TAKING ON AIRLINE AND TRAVEL GIANTS DURING THE MOST TURBULENT TIMES IN THE INDUSTRY
Launching Beenz internationally was a colossal undertaking and after two years of living on transatlantic flights Nicolas wanted to spend some time in London with his family and take a rest from the rock n’ roll lifestyle of the bubble era internet.

It wasn’t to be a long break.

One morning in December 2000 he got a call from the headhunting firm Spencer Stuart. They offered him the opportunity to join ‘a new kind of internet start up.’ He turned them down. But, knowing what he’d done for Beenz, they wouldn’t take no for an answer and over the following weeks he received many more phone calls from Spencer Stuart. They needed someone to help Europe’s largest airlines come together for the first time to launch an internet travel portal called Opodo and they said he was the perfect man for the job. It was a challenge too enticing to resist and, following intense negotiations, he took the job. Opodo’s board unanimously approved hiring him and so, in January of 2001, Nicolas began to shake things up in the European travel market!

His new position meant going head-to-head with established online mega-players like the Microsoft owned travel portal Expedia and Lastminute.com, as well as traditional travel agents like Thomas Cook, Thompson and First Choice. These companies all had a head start of several years in the market and some, like Expedia, could afford to run at a loss just to choke out competition. For Opodo to succeed it would need to be successful almost immediately. The goal was to create an alternate distribution channel to both improve airline inventory availability and yield and cut distribution costs. Opodo was a challenging project because it involved creating a new travel infrastructure from scratch; bringing together, for the first time, nine of Europe’s leading airlines (including British Airways, Lufthansa, Air France, Alitalia, Iberia, and Finnair). But the biggest challenge would prove impossible to predict. An event that would shake the world and threaten to bring down the entire global airline industry was on the horizon.

On September 11th, 2001 the world faced the most devastating terrorist attack it had ever seen. The future was anything but certain for the entire airline industry not to mention Opodo. The events of September 11th forced most of Opodo’s airline shareholders to restructure their operations in the face of massive losses and redundancies. The entire Opodo project hung in the balance. Following several strategic meetings, Nicolas and the Opodo management team convinced the airlines to maintain their investment and proceed with the launch. A strategic decision was made to scrap all the previous marketing plans, which focused on offering cheap prices, and instead focus on providing unmatched customer support and travel resources. The strategy worked and the public quickly saw that Opodo was a viable alternative to the established travel providers; a fresh, new player offering the guarantee of improved service.

Today Opodo has one billion Euros in gross sales and has become one of the leading travel portals in Europe. Under Nicolas’ marketing directorship Opodo became one of Europe's most successful online business launches. It ranked as Germany’s number one travel portal just one month after its launch and one of the top two most visited portals in the UK and France. Opodo also won the prestigious "Revolution Award" for Best Brand Building by an Online Business. The Revolution Awards are widely recognised as the premier accolade in the digital industry.

ACADEMIC REVOLUTION. MARKETING EDUCATION IN EUROPE
CEU, a non-profit Catholic educational institution, is one of the most prestigious Spanish-speaking higher education groups in the world. It encompasses three universities, a business school, several research institutes and think tanks and 28 educational centres and serves more than 28,000 students. In 2005, due to Nicolas’ extensive knowledge of European markets, CEU chose Corporate Vision Strategists to create a new Vision Strategy that would enable it to face the radical transformation underway in the European higher education market due to the Bologna Process.

The Bologna Process aims to create a single European Education area by 2010. As a result, CEU needed to not only restructure its educational offerings, but also rethink its market strategy to face increased national and international competition.

Nicolas saw that each of CEU’s institutions had its own brand. Corporate Vision Strategists created a radical new vision which mobilised CEU to unify its many disparate brands of academic services under a powerful and dynamic new CEU brand. Corporate Vision Strategists vision of ‘education for responsible leaders’ was consistent across all of CEU’s academic offerings and focused on strengthening CEU’s commitment to making the world a better place, by creating future leaders who always combine leadership with ethics.

Nicolas was asked to become interim Chief Marketing Officer for the entire institution during the product launch and, over several months, he launched the new brand and managed all marketing activities including: media, advertising, web strategy and internal and external communications. Nicolas also jump-started several projects related to the development strategy of CEU’s academic publications, future web-based platforms, e-commerce, merchandising strategy and campus retail stores.

ENVISIONING TOMORROW:
THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO CREATE IT
Nicolas continues to be involved in the development of the internet, advising start ups and public companies alike. He is currently on the board and a member of the audit committee of the US-based public company J.L. Halsey Corporation/Lyris, a leading email marketing technology firm.

He is regularly featured in global media and broadcasting including: The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Expansion Spain, Business Week, La Vanguardia of Barcelona, La Republicca Italy, Financial Times, Revolution Magazine, New Media Age Magazine and Advertising Age. He has also been featured on CNN International, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fuji TV- Japan, TVE Spain, BBC TV and BBC Radio 5 Live, Prosieben Germany and Channel 4 UK.

Today Nicolas focuses on consulting some of the world’s leading firms and organisations. In 2005 Nicolas set up the Alpherat Group to provide clients worldwide with high level strategic business consulting services. Each company in the group is a niche leader in their field of competence. Nicolas has also recently become Secretary General of global think tank Gold Mercury International which focuses on Global Governance and ethical leadership. The organisation grants the prestigious Gold Mercury awards, winners of which include: Ronald Reagan, H.R.H. King Juan Carlos of Spain, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and H.E. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia. Through Gold Mercury Nicolas meets world leaders and focuses on diverse issues of sustainability in areas such as health, security, development and more.

Whether it means introducing a new player to the market or transforming world class organisations to meet the challenges of the future head on, Nicolas has used his revolutionary thinking and management expertise to tackle the problems of some of the world’s biggest brands. Nicolas has advised companies and organisations like British Airways, Iberdrola, CEU, Google, Disney, Alitalia, Ferruzzi, the European Parliament, Pirelli, Philip Morris, Coca-Cola, IBM, Elf Aquitaine, GE, Smithkline Beecham, Campsa, WWF, Argentaria Bank, Garanti bank, the European Movement and many more. Though these enterprises are vastly different they all benefit from Nicolas’ unique philosophy: envision tomorrow. He has the vision to see what an organisation needs to be successful and unearth the fundamental core competencies and values that can propel them to the next level of success. He also knows what a company needs to do to maintain its success in the future.

From film sets to the halls of the European Union, from meeting heads of state to launching internet start ups or reinventing established international companies Nicolas’ diverse experience has given him unique insight into the world of business, technology and world affairs. Always innovative and daring, he is a riveting speaker with revolutionary ideas about how businesses and organisations can adapt to create sustainable futures in an ever-changing world. For a taste of his transformative ideas visit the video clips area and see how Nicolas De Santis’ visionary thinking can help you change the world and create a future in which your brand has won the war.

Nicolas devotes his spare time to various philanthropic endeavours through Gold Mercury International. He has two children and currently lives in London with his wife, renowned fashion designer Melissa Odabash.

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