Thank you, Ben. We're going to hear a lot from you about the movie as director. I'd like to bring in Publicis Sapient. And Teresa, what did you hope to achieve with this project?
For me, the goal was very clear. I think first and foremost, I wanted to tell a human story how digital transformation and technology can actually impact people's lives for the good. I wanted to show that technology can be a force for good. And technology is the enabler, not the enemy, especially right now. There is such much negative discourse in the role of technology. I also wanted to show that digital business transformation, which is what we do as a company, it's not just about big business helping big business, but ultimately is in the service of people. And we create solutions like the one we did for the LA Public Defender's Office. As Ben said, that we digitized millions of records. It can really help people like Johnny that otherwise would not be able to get the help. So it can help people that actually need it. So I think this film, and if you get to watch, and I encourage everybody here to actually watch the entire documentary, just 20 minutes. It's a beautiful story, but you will see, isn't it, great example how technology lived its promise. Technology in this case became the equalizer. It democratized access for all. And when you watch the film, you'll see that a law existed in California, as Ben said, but people like Johnny would never have had access to that law. I would never have been able to grant forgiveness, which he so deserved, what is right by law. Because as you saw in that clip, what his attorney said, paper is money. And so in that sense, what technology has done in this case, a level the playing field between a large law firm and a public defender that doesn't have a lot of resources. And then finally, the other motivation for me, I have, you know, is that, you know, like I said, as a company, this is the type of work we do. And I really wanted to bring humanity to that work, show the meaning and make it relatable, easy to understand. And to show that what we do as a company is not just to help our clients, which it is, to help them drive outcomes, efficiencies, reduce costs, drive more growth. But also it does help our clients' customers, which is real people, ordinary people, people like Johnny. And that to me was a huge motivation as well.
Yeah, you mentioned the digitization of records, and that can seem very cumbersome and laborious. And then to transfer it into this beautiful movie, it's 20 minutes, as Teresa mentioned. So I encourage you all to see it. And you really see the family of Johnny and you get to see the impact, the human impact. And I'd like to ask you, Nigel, as CEO of Publicis Sapient, you know, lots of companies work with tech and lots of them want to do good. And, you know, it's mixed on how effective they are. How does Publicis Sapient do it?
You know, I think when you think about anything, what you focus on as the primary outcome is what you ultimately accomplish, right? So in this case, our orientation in the context of not only the LA Public Defender's Office, but with many of the clients we work with, is focusing very much on the human outcome we're trying to create. So in this case, building a case management system and digitizing millions of records, 160 million Ben mentioned, or enabling lawyers to fight up to 200,000 cases a year, wasn't the objective alone. The objective was always focused on the individuals in the midst of this transformational story. The individuals being the lawyers defending people and ultimately the people benefiting from this defense whose lives were fundamentally being affected. Because if I go back to, you know, the premise that if you focus on something, that that's what you choose to accomplish, that idea is true of any industry in any business and area we work in. So, you know, very recently we just launched a platform that allows people to identify where the nearest charging stations are, which is essentially, think about it as the Airbnb for charging. So if you've got a charger in your home and you're not using it, I can use it because it exists on this platform that we've built, that kind of addresses range anxiety, right? Now, if you think about the humans in the middle of the story, why aren't people buying electric cars? Well, they're not buying electric cars because they're worried about range, you know, and how quickly they'll get the next charge. So we essentially partnered with a very large automaker to build this platform that is essentially allowing people to go in there, lodge their own personal, you know, charging device and get paid for it when somebody uses it in a kind of Airbnb fashion. But the insight comes from the idea that people have a range anxiety and that's what's preventing them from being able to buy electric cars and drive electric cars. And so if you start from that human perspective, then it's very much at the center of what it is that you're trying to do, as opposed to a kind of byproduct on the side. And these examples hold true in various different industries in many contexts, whether it's providing healthcare or dispersing aid, or in this case, you know, criminal justice reform. Because when you start with the person, our philosophy around transformation centers around this acronym we call SPEED. So it's an acronym which is all about helping organizations move quickly, but doing so in the context of bringing a bunch of different priorities together. And it's an acronym because it stands for strategy, the S, which is be very clear about what are the strategic priorities you're trying to affect. And in this case, it was about the individual's experiences who were experiencing criminal justice reform and the lawyers who were needing to provide this, you know, service to these individuals and leveling them up as, you know, Teresa and Ben were talking about, right? So that's the strategy. The P is the product. So how is the actual physical product that you're building being built? So in this case, the case management system, which is not just about digitizing a bunch of records, but it's also about allowing them to see and connect the dots on various pieces of information and build patterns that they otherwise would not be able to do. Then the E is experience. So the experience of the lawyer, the experience of the individual, and more broadly of anybody interfacing with that, you know, platform. The next D is engineering. So really thinking about technology as something that can be used to differentiate and create value. And then the D is data and AI. So how do you make it a living, breathing system? Because that system is only as good as the data in it. And the more you can connect the dots across those pieces of data. So that speed acronym as a metaphor for making sure you deliver on all of these outcomes, which then I think deliver the purpose in this case of enabling the reform that allowed Johnny to kind of essentially receive what was something that he was genuinely deserving of.
So the speed for tech is this process that, I mean, you highlighted connectivity. I think it's really remarkable as well that it's Johnny and it's also the lawyer. So there's multiple humans and stakeholders, as we would say too. So that's brilliant. And we're going to see a clip now from the movie. So Ben, set some context for what we're about to see.
Yeah, so this clip talks about the stakes of the case and specifically the California law, which is a new law in California that allows for defendants with a developmental disability to apply for diversion where they seek treatment instead of going to prison. And the lawyer, Noah Cox, talks about, you know, how sort of this digital case management system allowed him to build his case for Johnny to access that diversion.
Great. You can tell a lot about a country by how it treats its most vulnerable people. That's why I'm here. He was my brother, but we raised Johnny like he is our son. But everything changed. We can't control him. His disabilities were causing his interaction with the criminal justice system. His maximum punishment is 20 years in state prison. I want him home, but Johnny hurts my husband. Diversion is an opportunity to avoid a conviction by doing treatment. Breaking away from the criminal justice prosecution, the chance to change everything for Johnny. But this case is limited by the amount of time we have, and paper equals time. Forgiveness is the best thing that we can have because it makes our heart free.
Yeah. We'll be catching a little bit more of the movie as well, but I wanted to start off by asking you, Ben, talk about what attracted you to this story. How did your involvement come about?
Yeah, thank you. Well, my dad was a lawyer, and he had just passed away in 2020, and I think my sort of heart was searching for a story like this. His passion was all about equal access to the law. I'm from Nova Scotia in Canada, and I remember growing up, the car was always filled with boxes and bankers' boxes and bankers' boxes of paper. If anybody has a parent who's a lawyer, you know the feeling of a trunk filled. Yeah, somebody over there. A trunk filled with bankers' boxes full of case files. And when the opportunity arose to work together with Theresa and her team at Publicist Sapient to find a story about how technology was transforming the L.A. Public Defender's Office, I was intrigued for that reason. And when I talked to Noah and he told me about, I mean, you quickly see this warehouse. There are massive warehouses filled with truly millions of boxes and tens of millions of documents. I think Publicist Sapient digitized 160 million documents. Just the L.A. County Public Defender's Office. And I was astounded by theThe first online banks and equities trading platforms, so the first time you could buy stock online, which for somebody growing up today, you know, seems just natural, right? I mean, where else would you buy a stock except for online? But there was a time when, you know, you didn't, right? And so now we're helping reimagine the next iteration in that journey. So thinking about trade finance as an example, which is a super complicated area of, you know, multi-geography trains. And how do you actually entirely take out and digitize trade finance, which is a hugely complicated area, or get into the heart of banking with, you know, mainframes that existed from the 1980s and move those to modern core banking environments that allow you to deliver financial services products in the same way a fintech might. Or, you know, figure out what are the best ways to distribute stuff to people with retail delivery where you don't have vans driving all over themselves because you are able to figure out based on what people order and what temperature the groceries need to be stored at, which delivery vans can cover which routes without needing to drive over themselves. And these are all things we're doing from retail to healthcare to financial services on a regular basis, all of which have millions of Johnnies embedded in them, from people during the pandemic who couldn't get access to food because they lived in locations that weren't conducive to kind of getting food delivered easily, or people who were not able to bank but now are able to bank because there were tools that allowed them to do that. Each of these is a story of hope and a story of a positive shift in the world that I think often gets overlooked in the broader discourse around technology, which centers around very narrow aspects of technology, often, you know, social media. I mean, even there, you know, we're using platforms like WhatsApp as an example, which is, you know, to kind of enable transactions and get people driving commerce. And so there's so much more to even a company like that, which has historically got a brand around, you know, one idea, but being able to expand its products to do so much more.
You've given us so many industries and examples, and to me it strikes me as a very expansive way of looking at tech for good. And Teresa, I'll ask you, you know, throughout this whole process, what are their expansive learnings or unexpected surprises?
A lot of learnings, not many surprises, but a lot of learnings. I think I'm a CMO. Any CMOs in the room here? Not many. But one of the biggest learnings for me, actually, was not to think like a CMO, even a marketeer. Because if I thought like a CMO or a marketeer, I would consider the risks of making this investment, and I would probably come to the conclusion that's not a good career move. And as a result of that, I wouldn't invest, and we wouldn't be here talking about it today. Instead, we took a very unconventional approach and basically threw away the marketing playbook, meaning no brief, no review, no back and forth. And instead, I literally gave here Ben, now my partner in crime, all autonomy to go really go find the truth. And that's, like I told him, go find the truth in our work. And that gave him the sort of the license to create a story that is authentic. It's real. It's engaging. It's entertaining. And frankly, has been one of the best assets to elevate our brand. And what it taught me in this process is actually that great marketing and differentiated marketing, it's really about informed judgment. I made a decision to make an investment in a film that although it is about our work, but does not, and again, encourage you to see it, it does not show our work, doesn't mention the work. It doesn't even mention our name. And like I said, it's been a great asset for us to elevate our brand. And the other discovery for me, that's a personal one and very inspiring one in this process, I really discover that our work really does have meaning. And as a company, we do live our purpose. And our purpose is to help people thrive. And I really discover this that our work does inform our purpose. And as a company, we are living that purpose, not through CSR or a 30-second commercial or posting on wall, but through what we do. So that for me was the most inspiring thing.
This sounds like a really compelling example of big business partnering with filmmaking. And Teresa, you reflecting on the marketing side of it and kind of not being a marketer and then getting still a really great return is fantastic. It sounds like it impacted you almost as a CMO and how you thought. Are there other ways that technology has impacted, and I'll ask you as well, Nigel, our two folks from Publicis Sapient, how has technology impacted you both from the C-suite personally or professionally?
You know, I think you have every, you know, Ben talked about the context for how he found the story because of his dad and his dad passing away. And for me, technology, our purpose is, Teresa talked about it, was helping people thrive. She didn't complete that, is in the brave pursuit of next, you know, in how things are going to evolve and how things are going to. So for me, that started very early on as a kid. I had something called dysgraphia, which made it very difficult for me to move things with my fingers and fine motor skills becomes a challenge. It wasn't even diagnosed with that language. We know what it is today. Back then, a lot of people thought I'm not very bright, right, because I couldn't articulate ideas, you know, in written form. I could do it verbally just fine, but I wasn't able to kind of write. And then all of a sudden, I discovered computers, and all of a sudden, I could communicate ideas, write code. And I went from being potentially somebody who was borderline, you know, like an underperformer to an overachiever very, very quickly. And so to me, it very much brought this idea that I was surrounded by as a kid at the time, which I didn't think about until that moment, that technology is a superpower. And it's an incredible superpower. It's the thing that makes Batman Batman from a regular person or Wonder Woman or Iron Man, you know, like these are superheroes not born with things, but augmented through technology became incredibly powerful. And so to me, at a very early age, it became my purpose, which is I believe I want to be in a world where technology can benefit and create and shape the world for individuals and people. And in Sapient, I found a company whose purpose was that, to help people thrive in the brave pursuit of next. And the confluence of those two things, I think, is what makes it so very personal for me to hear stories like Johnny because I see versions of my own story in that story.
I guess technology for me has fundamentally allowed me to do things that I never imagined I could do. I grew up in a village of a thousand people in the northern part of Portugal. In my village when I grew up, most people didn't have running water in their houses. And today, not everybody still does. And no one actually has like connected gas into their homes, but everybody has a cell phone and has Wi-Fi in a village. So technology has enabled me to connect with people in that village to be part of those traditions, those customs virtually. Also as a mom, I have two teenage sons, and it has enabled me to have a career and be a mom, to work from home and to be home present for the moments that mean, there for them what actually matters. So for that has really kind of enabled me to do the things that I never imagined I could do. Never mind my own career. So yeah, I'm grateful for it.
We've been talking about technology for good. And Ben, I'd like to bring it back to you as the director. Parting thoughts for when we watch this film, how we should be experiencing it, things that we can reflect on?
Well, you know, I think, you know, hopefully the film speaks for itself. But I think the real takeaway for me is, like I just have to return to the idea of hope, you know. Like that was a very moving story, right, of feeling like you're blocked from your potential but with the right tool, you know. And now you're sitting here as CEO, you know, like what other human potential can technology unblock? For sure. You know, what barriers can we break down? And to me, that's very hopeful, very inspiring. I mean, even what I do as a filmmaker, right, is entirely digital, from the image captured and the sound captured all the way through to, you know, that projector wherever it is, you know, projecting the film. And that is an entirely digital process that if it was celluloid would have been too expensive, it would have been too cumbersome to have going on here today. And so I feel very hopeful for the future, and I feel like it's in good hands, and I'm thrilled to be a part of that story.
I'm going to just make another shameless plug to watch the film, but we talked a lot about technology, but when you watch the film, it's really for me, the theme is forgiveness. That's what I think the central story is. We've talked about hope. The film is called Forgiving Johnny.
Nigel, did you have one more thing to say?
No, no.
Okay, well, I'm going to repeat your mantra or your motto, not to steal it, but maybe it's something we can all just carry today. Thrive in the brave pursuit of next. Thank you all so much for your insights and for this wonderful film. Thank you.