The exterior view of the Central Office of Information (COI) headquarters near Waterloo is, it has to be said, less than awe-inspiring; and on the rain-drenched day I arrive to interview boss Mark Lund, it is particularly grim. Hercules House is a drab mixture of sackcloth brown and battleship grey.

Yet once inside, visitors are transported into a bright, modern space full of colourful meeting rooms with words such as ‘innovative’ emblazoned across their glass fronts. It feels more like the office of a trendy Soho media outfit than a government agency – and this is perhaps appropriate, given Lund’s professional background. He’s spent a lifetime in the advertising industry, most recently as the chief executive of the agency he co-founded – Delaney Lund Knox Warren (DLKW) – and says the two worlds have more in common than some might think. “It’s bright young people working with ideas and doing very creative stuff,” he says. “So from that point of view it’s very similar. Government is more serious, though. The average ad agency is a very playful place.”

Lund took over at the helm of the COI in June, four months after his appointment to succeed Alan Bishop was formally announced. As COI boss, he is responsible for government’s own specialised advertising and PR agency. The trading fund gives advice to departments and agencies, acting as a channel for media buying contracts. The agency also has responsibility for the government’s regional press office network. Lund explains that he reports to both Tessa Jowell, as minister for the Cabinet Office, and the “very bright” permanent secretary of government communications, Matt Tee – whose appointment at the start of year, he says, convinced him to apply for the COI job.

Lund is affable and open, enthusing about cult US cop drama The Wire and laughing heartily when, mid-interview, the lights suddenly go out in his office. In short, there’s ample evidence of the charm and charisma he needed to run DLKW’s £300m-a-year ad business. Has he sensed any internal hostility over the COI’s top job going to another ad man (his predecessor, Alan Bishop, had been a Saatchi & Saatchi executive)? “I haven’t. I’m probably being very insensitive but I haven’t noticed too much overt scepticism. Maybe they’re just being polite!” he says, laughing again.

Two worlds
Perhaps in order to stress the seriousness with which Lund takes his (fairly) new job, he points out that although the worlds of commercial and government communications have similarities, there is a basic and profound difference. “A lot of people work here because they feel that there’s a really powerful benevolent purpose,” he says. “I’ve spent my life in the commercial sector, and it’s different: you don’t have that sense of shared mission.”

His commercial background, however, does allow him to bring extensive knowledge of life as a supplier to government. He also knows the relationship between government and the industry intimately, having served as chair of the trade body the Advertising Association until his COI appointment. At this point, it is worth noting that his shares in DLKW have been placed in a blind trust for the duration of his government stint, and he has said that he will be distanced enough from COI decisions on individual tenders to avoid suggestions of favouritism if the agency wins public business.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he says his past experience of COI as a client is good. “DLKW worked with COI for ten years [prior to Lund’s appointment] as a supplier, and they are a good client: it’s interesting work, relationships are managed well, and it’s very fair.”

The importance of integration
However, Lund does believe that the COI could learn from industry how to better align disparate forms of marketing to a common end. Lund says his own agency “started off very much as an advertising agency and became pretty much an integrated marketing agency over time – which is the way the world is going”. He wants to see the various efforts of the COI more closely coordinated, from its traditional advertising buying role to PR work, events planning and direct marketing – all services which it offers to clients across government.

Ambitious multi-platform campaigns such as the anti-obesity Change4Life and Act on CO2 strategies, both of which COI was heavily involved in, require this kind of joined-up approach, he says.

One solid example of greater integration is in the area of media buying. Currently, contracts awarded to purchasing agencies are split by channel – print, television, online and several others – but from next March, COI will consolidate these into a single tendering framework, albeit one that may offer contracts to consortia of different agencies. “If you think about the way you consume media and the way campaigns go from one medium to another, the idea of buying them in silos feels like an outdated concept,” comments Lund.

It hardly needs saying that the proliferation of digital media has transformed the context in which government communications operate. The emphasis placed on exploiting the potential of online communications has been a particular preoccupation, and – perhaps to head off suggestions that, having a fairly traditional background as an ad-man, he lacks the necessary experience of digital engagement – Lund stresses that this area is a priority. He enthuses about the use of blogs and video diaries composed by RAF members serving in Afghanistan as part of a recruitment drive, and the use of social media as part of Change4Life. The government’s online efforts have improved dramatically recently, he says: “In the past year, online spend grew by 84 per cent – which is way outpacing the market – and qualitatively we have done some really good things.”

However, given COI’s efforts to become a centre of excellence for digital communication, doesn’t it create confusion – and possible tension – when the government appoints its first director of digital engagement (Andrew Stott) and places him in the Cabinet Office? Again, Lund’s optimism shines through. “It actually works really well,” he says. “Andrew Stott is a very bright guy, and he and Alex Butler [COI’s online supremo] work very well together. Andrew takes the lead on some of the big policy issues – particularly where technological infrastructure is concerned – and we do a lot of the communications. We don’t do any stuff without consulting him, and he always tells us what he’s doing.”

Given Lund’s almost exclusively advertising background, he’ll also have to develop expertise in overseeing the news management side of COI’s work. As well as the regional news service already mentioned, COI employs press officers to handle media relations for particular projects – such as those for Sir John Chilcott’s Iraq war inquiry. The latter, he says, is a specialised service which COI communicators handle “pretty successfully”, but a Lords communications committee report last year complained that the regional news service has not improved in the way envisaged in a wide-ranging 2004 review by former Guardian media group boss, Bob Phillis.

The peers urged the COI chief executive to take the lead in improving engagement with local and regional media; now that he’s in the job, what’s happening? “Neil Martinson, the guy who runs our news and PR network, is taking this issue forward. What he’s done is make sure the regional offices are really working on the big campaigns. So it’s about showing how the Change4Life campaign affects East Anglia or work on taking the knife crime [campaign] into Manchester… The feedback we are starting to get from the press is that it is very helpful.”

Changing behaviour
Another zeitgeist issue for government communicators is the use of what’s often called ‘behavioural economics’ to subtly influence the actions of citizenry for the greater good. The most celebrated articulation of these ideas, Nudge, a book written by two US academics, seems to be on reading lists across Whitehall.

These theories are “massively high” on the government agenda, Lund says, pointing to the frequently-cited obesity and climate-change campaigns as areas where they are already being practically applied to deal with particularly complex policy problems. He also points out that Nudge’s authors, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, isolate five ‘levers’ of behaviour change, of which communications is one.

If their ideas become widely accepted ways of approaching thorny societal problems, Lund suggests, marketing and communications could get a much higher profile within government: “If communications is one of the main levers of behaviour change as opposed to it being an afterthought, that’s very good for communications, because it makes it a central plank of policy delivery.”

However, Lund is keenly aware that evaluating the success of marketing and PR work is more difficult in government than in the commercial world. “The big behaviour-change campaigns [in government] are as sophisticated – or more sophisticated – than the best corporate ones,” he says. “But at the end of the day in any commercial environment, you can be assessed by profit. It’s harder in government because you have to define your [desired] behaviour change, measure that, then measure the effectiveness of marketing towards that.”

Measuring impact
As Matt Tee indicated to Civil Service World recently (see CSW, September 9), government marketers are preoccupied by the process of improving evaluation. Currently, COI tracks the effectiveness of its campaigns using a database called Artemis, but Lund wants to have an improved, more holistic measurement system in place by next spring; tenders from analytical service providers are being considered. “It’s going to be another stage of sophistication,” he says.

It may sound highly technical, but measuring the success of marketing efforts will be crucial in the austere period of spending cuts that is now inevitable, whichever party is elected next year. At the 2008 Tory conference, George Osborne promised that Whitehall PR spending would be among the first areas he would slash – a move that would, of course, have a grave impact on the COI’s revenue. Lund must be concerned about cuts; what would he tell staff if and when the axe falls?

“We’re getting into hypotheses – and if it happens, we’ll react to it,” he replies. “Our job is to support the government of the day, but it’s also incumbent on us to demonstrate where communications is making a really good difference to the effectiveness of policy, and that money spent is spent well.”

A lot certainly has been spent in recent years. Cuts may be on the horizon, but in 2008-9 the agency spent £540m on advertising and marketing – a rise of 43 per cent from the previous year. Lund says that this rise is partly because the aforementioned behaviour change campaigns got underway with big presences across advertising platforms, but also because departments and agencies have become increasingly convinced of the importance of effective marketing. Has it all been well spent?

“The big campaigns have been really good,” he responds. “On smoking, we are in line to get down to 20 per cent of people; Change4Life has signed up over 300,000 people to take part, and awareness of it is incredibly high. Our stroke campaign has really been a revelation; people are reporting that they have saved lives because they now know what to do.”

When I ask if the boost in spending had anything to do with propping up a creative industry that has suffered more than most during the recession, the former advertising executive is clear. “There’s absolutely no question that it was to support the industry. COI’s a big client to the industry, but it’s a £19bn industry overall – the COI’s still a pretty small part of that.”

On the subject of the COI’s relationship with the marketing and advertising industries, in an age when government is increasingly keen on off-loading saleable assets in order to free up capital, does Lund think what he calls COI’s “quasi-commercial” status is sustainable in the long term? Will there be pressure to wholly or partially privatise the agency?

The possibility was examined in the 1990s, he replies, in successive five-yearly reviews of the agency. “The answer was: ‘We can’t see that [some form of privatisation] does add value’,” he explains. “It works between government and the best of the private sector; as soon as you put it into commercial ownership, you lose this distinctive sense of us being in it together.”

The COI’s current status, as a trading fund which generates its revenue by selling its wares to other departments, is, he says, a highly effective set-up, despite the bleak spending period on the horizon. “There’s no reason why the model should change,” Lund concludes. “And there’s no reason why the COI shouldn’t thrive.”

Mark Lund: CV highlights

1981 
Graduates from Bristol University with a degree in English and Philosophy; joins advertising agency Lintas as account management trainee, working on ice cream accounts

1984 
Moves to Collett Dickinson Pearce, rising to become account group head

1990 
Changes agency again, moving to Euro RSCG as director of international development

1992 
Returns to Lintas as head of account management

1995 
Ads firm Delaney Fletcher Bozell poaches Lund to serve as managing director

2000 
Leads management buyout of the agency; made  chief exec of the new Delaney Lund Knox Warren

2006 
Made chair of the Advertising Association

2009 
Succeeds Alan Bishop as chief executive of the COI