Hintzy (Jacques)

Chairman of UNICEF France / Met Carla Bruni-Sarkozy when she was appointed ambassador for the protection of mothers and children for the Global Fund to fight AIDS (1 December 2008) Attended World AIDS Day at the Hotel Marigny (1 December 2010)

The girls he saw patting cow manure into cakes and drying them on their hut walls to use them as fuel, during a trip to Ethiopia and Yemen 35 years ago, were something of an epiphany. He remembers: “That was when I decided that I had to start doing something about improving the conditions that children were living in.” The now Chairman of UNICEF France adds, “What I like about communication is that it leverages change, it coaches society into something new.” Before making his way to the helm of a humanitarian organisation, this HEC and Sciences-Po graduate communicated a lot through advertising: he started his career at Ted Bates 1962, ran Leo Burnett and founded Hintzy Heymann & Associés. He worked on Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s presidential campaign at Havas in 1974. The main issues, he later found, are not so different in the humanitarian field: it is still about getting the message across to as many people as possible to raise their awareness of a cause. For example, “When I first arrived, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of using “celebrities” to serve our cause. Suffering children was just too serious to take the risk of sending out an ambiguous message. I figured we weren’t here to make them look good because doing that could make us look bad. But I got that all wrong. Famous people can rekindle concern over issues that people have heard about all too often to bother about anymore. They put us in touch with new audiences through the media. They use different words that get the message across in different places.” That is precisely what UNICEF ambassadors do: harness their celebrity to do their bit for this UN arm’s efforts for children around the world.