L’Oréal’s Chief Marketing Officer for Western Europe, Stéphane Bérubé called out marketing agencies for failing to invest in their main asset – people – at the ad:tech London conference last week, according to a report published by Campaign.

“When you think about an agency, you don’t sell a product – what you sell is the quality of your people,” he said, during his key note address. “I’m always surprised when I see agencies that don’t even have an HR department with a training manager that is responsible for training the people.”

“We have to get better by bringing in experts – but if you want to retain the experts you hire, you need to train them, develop them, and that’s a very difficult thing to do. That’s something we take very seriously – to train our experts to be best-in-class experts.”