What this BrandMasters episode teaches about brand purpose

Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to Brand Studio Live, the series that brings the country's top CXOs to share their insights on the hottest topics in marketing, business and brands. I'm Ramit Arora and today I'm joined by a set of brand masters who are very special. They're all heads of advertising agencies and we're going to be talking about the future of the advertising agencies. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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Thank you. Shamsuddin Akash Shams has been in the digital industry for over 17 years. Under his leadership, ISOBAR achieved the distinction of being the digital agency of the year for India for three years, 2015 to 17. I know you've looked at your agency as an agency with a difference. Talk us through that and tell us what the agency will look like in the future, which is now. Yeah. So I think what we started off with as a digital agency, I would say for the first seven years of our existence, we were a digital agency.

Now I no longer, and I think a lot of our peers no longer call ourselves a digital agency. We are the agency for the digital age. We're a digital first agency. And I think that's where a major change has happened in the last, I think two, three years, is that we have become center stage for a lot of clients. From our perspective, we always started off as a full service digital agency. And I totally understand when you spoke about saying that you need specialists. Yes, you do need specialists. But today, a client is handling 15 specialists.

Especially in digital, there's the poor client has two or three resources, who's chasing eight agencies. Does that really make sense? So we're kind of dialing it back to the old age where you had everything under one roof. And that's what we started off in 2008, was a full service digital agency. And I think that's what's really held us in good stead over the years, because we have very strong media and creative capabilities. And of course, technology, you can't get away from that. And that's where I think our growth has been over the years.

So I think that's really something which we are really proud of as we've moved on. Conventional planning, planning the way I've known it in advertising and in my years in marketing, started with television in print. And in so many ways, by the time it got to the digital brief, the campaign had already been cooked. From a digital point of view, maybe overcooked. I have a feeling that clients, marketeers, brands are realizing more and more that they probably need to invert that funnel and look at planning digital first. Is that really happening?

Is the future of advertising planning going to be digital first? Yes. I don't even need to think twice about that. It's already happening. We have eight clients right now who are full service here, as I said, where we have an end to end. Clients who are spending majority of their monies on digital, their digital first, of course. But I think increasingly what's happening is that it's not just about the monies. It's about the thinking needs to have digital at its core. And not necessarily saying that, okay, my spends are 80%, 90% digital. No.

It's digital led, where digital is going to be your center point. And then all your other media, you might be spending 70% of your budgets on television. That doesn't matter. What really matters is that you are touching digital in one way or the other, because that's the only medium which you can interact with. We are now in an age where digital center stage, where data is center stage. The data scientists are more in the digital agencies. Hence, we make sense of it much better.

And that's where I think that's helping us plan much better and plan much more quickly. So when your teams think through an idea or a campaign, are they trained to actually think digital, but actually produce ideas or campaigns that are media neutral that can actually travel back to print and to TV? Yes. Yes. More experiential, I would say. Yes. TV, print. I would say that's very easy because in digital now you do video first, right? Video is the largest thing that people are consuming right now. Everything is video.

So that's a very easy way to actually reverse engineer to television. We did a commercial, for example, for Visa, where we did a television commercial for Visa, but we thought of digital first and then we thought about a 30 seconder. So we said that, okay, how do we do the five second edits first and then write the 30 second commercial? Because we know that it's going to be used more in the five second edit than the 30 second. It's going to be used more in YouTube. And more importantly, how do I take it to experiential?

Because experiential has a very good connect with digital. I think that's where a lot of our thinking is happening. I know you told me you're launching a transformation consulting division or business unit. What is that? Is that, is the timing, is the market timing right? Do you believe the agencies reached the stage where it should be doing it? What's the, so a lot of people ask us and is, and this is a global isopart thing, not just an India thing. Is do agencies really want to take it on to the consulting firms?

And what do you have, which is going to augur well? Well, for, for everyone here in this audience, I don't think the consultants understand, you know, consumers as well as we do. And I think that's where the whole digital transformation bit that we are launching and we're calling it digital transformation through experience design, because that's what we're doing with designing experience for consumers is changing it on its head where we are co-creating with the consumer. There's a brand called Glossier, I was in Cannes last year.

Glossier is completely co-created along with consumers. It was, it was started by a blogger and she's created, she's actually taking on, taking on the, you know, beauty, Baymonds. And this is someone who's created digital only brand. And they just came out with an Instagram makeup pack where, you know, that makeup pack becomes a background for your Instagram photographs. And those kinds of products, you are not going to be able to make it yourself. You need the consumer to participate.

And that's where we think as a digital agency, because we've got data, we've got to understand your consumers. We understand technology. Now we are understanding clients, businesses and connecting everything together to be able to launch products. Wonderful. And that really is future of agency. But any questions? How do you think that the agencies of the future is going to be human-less? Well, I think that's a beautiful, beautiful question, because I've actually spoken about this earlier. It's not going to be human-less.

It's actually going, that is going to be the biggest reason why ideas are only, only going to get better. Because half of the agency time or 70% of the agency time goes and work, which is the AI or the machine can actually take up. And we'd love banners. We'd love websites to be, you know, repurposed and done by technology and by robots. I mean, honestly, no human wants to do that today. The human will sit on top of that and really explode that into ideas, which will work with you as a startup.

So I think machine learning and AI, they are really going to augur humanity, augment humanity, sorry. And it's going to only make us better and better and better what we're doing. On that note, Rams, thank you so much. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. My next guest is a digital marketing veteran who has two decades of experience. I'm very pleased to invite Vivek Bhargav. CEO Dan Performance Group is an early front runner in the digital revolution in India.

He believes that digital is much more than a mere marketing medium and can play the role of a catalyst and multiplier across every business aspect. Quick take. What does the agency of the future look like? The biggest challenge is that something what Shams said that we are no longer about marketing. Digital is the age we're living in. So you need almost like a consultant who's going to play a role of ensuring that digital delivers on business outcomes. Now these outcomes could be customer acquisition.

The outcomes could be cross selling, upselling to existing customers. The outcome could be what kind of product you should develop. The outcome could be that, you know, how do you understand the consumer trends that are appearing, even if it goes to any fashion of an organization like, it's a talent acquisition. Right? So digital can play a role in talent acquisition. So role of digital is no longer about marketing or advertising. The role of digital is to deliver a business outcome, which is tangible for the business.

And I think that's what the role of agency must be that we should become that solution provider, a consultant who can help brands achieve the business outcome regardless of what they may be. Interesting. You know, with data and AI and so much real time intelligence, and I know other speakers have spoken about it. Has the creative process been completely disrupted or is that a rhetorical question? Right? And how is it panning out?

I mean, how do you execute advertising with all the data that's coming in and coming in real time, coming in fast and coming in in drove? AI is made up of three things data algorithm machine learning, right? For machine learning to work, a lot of consumer data is needed. So in a way, agencies of the future, they have consumer data. So the kind of AI system they can build will be far superior. And what happens is that early advertising was about interruption of content, right? So one ad would go to 20 million people.

So very important that creativity was coming out with one single idea. Now we have 1000 data points in each consumer. So you can customize each ad per se to a segment of one. If you can do that, AI can replicate their ad into millions of units. So I think it's going to be a very, very challenging thing for human beings to beat AI as far as creativity is concerned on a segment of one. But you know, the best chess players in the world today are actually not human beings or machines. It's actually something they call it a term called Centaur, right?

Centaur is a group of human beings and group of machines that come together as players one unit. So they are the best chess players in the world. The same in the field of advertising or creativity, it's going to be happiness is going to be a bunch of AI systems along with a bunch of humans. And they collectively will be able to produce billion campaigns and ideas. It's not going to be one versus the other, but it's going to be one and the other.

Has technology actually replaced the backbone or the back end of the agency, which is always this human back end, human backbone, the human intelligence, creativity? Has technology really become the centerpiece already? I think it has. So I think this is one area where, let's say, Dan has put in a lot of effort over the last few years. We built up a complete technology team called Dan Radio Labs two and a half years ago. The tools and products that we've built now are licensed in 25 countries.

We basically are tapping into whether it's Facebook, whether it's Google, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Bach, whether it's our own proprietary thing called CCS, Consumer Connect system, and actually creating insights, which helps our creative guys, helps our media planning guys, helps our budget optimization guys. And we have actually had man versus machine in a way across 20 countries where the optimization done by these tools have been superior. But having said that, I think there is a challenge in the agency world.

In the last three decades, we have grown acquiring services companies. So it's a challenge to reorient ourselves to acquire technology companies because evaluating IP and products is not in our DNA per se. Secondly, I think attracting the best talent in tech and competing with Facebook and Google's of the world is not an easy task. So the kind of quality of technologies that we can attract as agencies is going to be difficult.

But I think there are a lot of areas that, let's say, Densoo globally is working on, where we acquire technology companies, we are building technology talent, we are building layers of technology on top of Google and Facebook. So that layer goes across all the platforms. So all the platforms will have their own AI, will deliver some value. And this platform is a layer on top of all those platforms. So I think that's the role that I think agencies of the future and networks like us will have to play.

I want to check if there's an audience question to take our time first. Yes, there is a question. So much data, which is expected to be with the agencies of the future, would these agencies be able to work for competing brands? So I think the biggest challenge in the conventional media world has been that one creative unit is producing the best creative team and is going to go to 15 million people.

So what happens is that it's almost impossible for a brand to work with a competing brand because you are afraid that the best creative idea may go to competition. When you take, when you have 1000 data points about a consumer and you're coming out with a million creative units, you're going to find insights about every single segment of the audience and communicate the brand value to that person. So theoretically speaking, let's take an example, right?

A Toyota Corolla, in a way I would hate to say this to a brand manager Toyota, but it's a value for money car for a person with 1000 crore net worth. The same car is an aspirational car for a person with one crore net worth. It's the same car. So if your creative unit is targeting a 1000 crore guy, please don't sell him aspiration for a Toyota Corolla. So what happens is that whatever, when you actually create a segment of one, this concept of not being able to work with competition actually becomes irrelevant.

It was meant for the television world, meant for the print world, where you had to create a cohort of 50 million people. So obviously you didn't want your creative idea to be shared. But in the digital age, in the WUCA world, I think that whole idea of not working with competition is irrelevant. On that note Vivek, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you. My pleasure. Yes. I'm thrilled to invite my next guest Partha Sinha, Vice Chairman and MD at McCann World Group.

Partha is an ex-City Banker, ex-Planning Head of Ogilvy, an ex-Marketing and Strategy Head of Z Telefilms. He's won multiple awards in India and Asia, including the Grand F.E. Welcome. Happy to have you here today. Thank you very much. You're a veteran. You've seen this for decades. What does the future look like? As they say, women need what is called a radical agency and I actually believe in that. But you know, what is the origin of the word radical? It actually comes from roots.

So basically some of the things that agencies did before is where the solution lies. What happened was we are always outcome based and not output based. You know, at some point in time then, you know, output became everything. So it became digital agency, you know, analog agency, sorry, traditional agency, whatever it was. But that was not the point. The point was there was a solution which every brand owner, business owner wanted from an agency. And the idea was to give that solution.

Truth about tomorrow's agency will be people who can give very robust solutions. And I don't think that has something which has dramatically changed. Basically, this is the root of the agency business. Is consumer planning dead? And if it is, who's responsible? Is it the economics? Is it the clients? Or have you just scored self-codes? Problem is the way we have ended up defining consumer planning. You know, like having a lot of understanding and data about consumer as a definition of consumer planning is a rather impoverished view of consumer planning.

I think the idea of planning is to connect brands to cultures. The point is as long as I'm not associating my brand's issue or my business's issue directly with culture, I don't think there's a hope in hell for any planner. That part of planning can never die. So what is the future of account planning? The future of account planning will remain exactly the same connecting brands to cultures. Now, culture will come in many forms. Because if the world is becoming more and more connected, of course, culture will change.

If the world is becoming more and more individualistic, that is another form of culture. But I'm saying if you are not associating a brand or a business issue directly with culture, then you will be able to try and give a behavioral solution to every individual. At the end of the day, role of planning will remain in trying to navigate through this entire jungle called data, analytics, and you know, everything else which is available. And at a fundamental level, connecting brands and businesses to culture.

There's lots of advertising and marketing folks in this room. Sure. What's your word of advice to them across brand globally? I mean, I've worked on some of the tech brands for the global planning work and stuff like that. I mean, I've been the first global planner of Google. From that time onwards, I've been seeing there has always been a fight between what we call differentiation and the other thing is relevance. So people used to spend a lot of time trying to differentiate their brands and products and not just make it relevant.

Now relevance became such an important thing that everything started getting sacrificed at the altar of relevance. And so happened, it's what we call the wind tunnel syndrome. Every car started getting manufactured in a wind tunnel. So everything looked like this because it's an aerodynamic design. In Bombay, we drive at 10 kilometers per hour. What will an aerodynamic design do? A square bus runs as well. So the point is nobody even thinks because of the standardization of process, standardization of trying to be more and more relevant.

You know, like people do things at a very blind level. And that's, I think, the fundamental death of planning. What they keep on saying is raise the floor, raise the floor. They don't understand by raising the floor, the ceiling will also come closer. Eventually, we will become absolutely tunnel. The problem is if you lose the power of innocence, lose the power of getting surprised, then nothing can help you. You know, they come up with very gross, you know, like observations and they call it insight.

There is no even attempt to try and find the surprising connection. The truth of our business had always been being able to connect the seemingly unconnected. If that human process is taken out of anything, there would be no agency of the future. There will be no future of agency. Would you agree that the best talent isn't coming to advertising anymore? And is that a problem? It is a problem. It is a problem of business model. How to solve for it is very different.

So therefore, yes, structurally, there would be a lot of changes in terms of business model. Because if you don't earn more, you can't pay more. There are a lot of people join from IM Ahmedabad and IM Calcutta during our time from campus. From campus, they joined. I came through a lateral route, but a lot of my friends had joined advertising directly from IM Ahmedabad. Do you think that is possible anymore? Even marketing is not getting people from IM Ahmedabad anymore.

You know, like they are also settling for, you know, like slightly lesser known business schools and stuff like that. The point is the, it is a reflection of the business model. Do you think the agency of the future will be younger, more gender inclusive, more vernacular in its character? Do you think all of those things are actually happening or is it just advertising has been the most gender inclusive business I've ever seen in my life? Yeah, it will remain and become more gender inclusive. Vernacular, of course, because, you know, like there's a-

There's 200 million customers. There's a famous Google BCG study which says that it's moving from 3M to 3V, which is Metro, male, mineral to video, vernacular and voice. That I think, I don't know how much of the voice part is absolutely true, but video and vernacular we're seeing around us. So yes, it will change. It will become more inclusive. On that note, thank you so much. Thank you. It was lovely having you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I would now like to welcome Sabhyasachi Mittar, founder and managing director of Fulcro.

Sabhyasachi founded the digital media agency Fulcro previously known as Interface Business Solutions in 2003. Over the years, Fulcro has won over 200 awards for its work in the digital space, including the Grand Prix at the Abbey and the Grand MV. Let me put it to you as directly as possible. What's wrong with the client agency model? So, I started my career in 1996. Like the previous speaker was saying, I'm from IM Calcutta. So I joined Asian Pints. And at that time, Ogilvy was our agency and Piyush and Madhukar were like gods.

We were product marketers, right? And IM, we didn't even have a subject on brand. We were taught the four Ps. So when we joined, we knew how to make products. We need to, I was an Asian Pints. So we knew how to make shade cards. But then we turned to Piyush and Bharat Puri then used to be our CMO. And literally we used to pray that let Piyush crack this campaign. Okay. So we knew nothing about brand and advertising. I spent 30 days at Ogilvy. And we used to literally look up to these agencies to solve our problems.

Now what has happened in my opinion, and I'll take you through five stages of the so-called collapse of the so-called collapse of agencies is that the aura of these agencies are no longer what they used to be. Let me tell you the first problem which happened when I saw that at about late 1990s, early 2000s, is a flight of talent. Now what happened at that time was not so much salary because I used to be paid pretty much the same as what a person in Ogilvy was paid. But Asian Pints had the most guju office. Ogilvy was cool.

We could sneak in beers and it had a brainstorming room. So it was cool to be in the agency. Now, brands started getting cool. The startups started coming in. And it was more cool to be in a startup with a better working environment. Better pay obviously followed thereafter. And the best talent from not only agencies but also traditional companies started moving to these cool organizations.

So the third thing which happened after the flight of talent was digital coming in and slowly changing the way both the consumer interacts with us and the way communication gets deployed. So the agency initially, I knew Ogilvy had every division. We had Ogilvy PR, Ogilvy One, and I know Ogilvy Rural and everything else. And we used to just say Ogilvy solve our problem. Now, early 2000s Ogilvy could not solve our problems. And then we brought in specialized media agencies and specialized PR agencies and specialized. And it just went on.

And by the time, you know, we were in the late 2000s, there were more agencies than a brand marketer could handle. We moved into the fourth stage of the problem that today's CMOs were born in probably our times. They don't get digital. So they brought in digital marketing managers, which was the same flight of talent, which moved to these brands. But these guys don't know communication. So now you have a CMO who's trying to build and solve for a business problem. And there's a digital marketing guy who's chasing his cost per view targets.

And I think all other agency heads over here will agree that all of us are known to be great at something. And decently good with the others. But brand marketers are looking for specialists. So, you know, the problem today, if I were to summarize, is that you have the best tire available. You have the best, you know, engine available. You have the best, you know, acoustics available, but nobody knows how to design the car. And I think agencies have failed to step up to be able to be the solution architect, which builds the car.

So let me ask you about stage six and stage seven. Right. What does stage seven and stage six look like? What is the future? Okay. So see, I always used to wonder what is the genesis of the word agency. And I was told then by Piyush that we were the agents of publications at some point in time. And as agents, we used to represent these publications to brands. I think we've still remained in the place where we expect a brief and we expect to solve for the brief.

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So, you know, we've been talking about the company, but we've been talking about the company, but we've been talking about the company. So, you know, we've been talking about the company, but we've been talking about the company. And with a lot of our clients, there is no brief and there is no agency coming back. We sit in the room, we state what the problem is, we brainstorm together. Sometimes a brilliant idea comes from the brilliant guy to the client side. Sometimes it comes from somebody from our side, but we co-create the solution.

The next thing is about scaling up the talent. You kept asking a lot of people, are agencies becoming younger? We are becoming older. Like that, I've reached out to so many ex-CMOs and CIOs to build a talent pool. A lot of people who are in the world, the talent pool on average age has actually gone up. And today, when we walk into a room, they look for two things from us. Industry-wide experience and depth of knowledge. And that's really going to be something that some agencies will be able to provide, scale up, and that's where the revenue really is.

And hopefully someday valuation. Fascinating. Thank you so much. Pleasure. It's been wonderful having you here. That was great. Thank you. Thank you. Well, they say you preserve the best for the last. Our last speaker today, my last guest is Vatsal Ashar, CEO of DMA. Vatsal has a demonstrated history of working in the marketing and advertising industry. Its expertise lies in digital strategy, data privacy, marketing management, customer acquisition. Vatsal, you have the unique privilege of seeing the industry outside in.

And you deal with dozens, if not hundreds of marketers and advertisers on a weekly, monthly basis. From your many interactions, tell us what's changing in that relationship. Primarily, trust transparency is what is becoming essential. The impetus for marketers, not only to just drive ROI, but how they are driving brand purpose, how they are driving sustainability for their brands. The entire trust and advisory thing is coming in. So you would be seeing that a lot of agencies which had various different verticals,

different speciality verticals are now all bringing it under one group. We have seen a lot of agencies while they could be different parts, but they share a common P&L, it's a structured P&L. So there are various models that are evolving and emerging. What is importantly happening is, what the big change that we are seeing, is a lot of brands are also moving stuff in-house, a lot of stuff in-house. So it's not just the agency, but a lot of things are getting in-house. So that's the key. Is there any skills that need to evolve, change in the agency side,

from the marketing or the brand side saying, I wish my agencies did this, or hone these skills? Do you see some skill deficits? Not really. So this is a unique time, day and age. And what we are saying is, there is going to be change that is unprecedented. We are in the fifth mind step, and this is all about this conference. Some of you have read the conference literature that we shared. In context, today the role is becoming highly specialized. So it's becoming very siloed. Perhaps many of us grew from a time from radio to TV to print to digital.

So we could straddle across very successfully. Today millennials, and my daughter is a millennial, and her batch mates and the people that I speak to, they are so narrow-casted about a certain skill. I try to talk to them about something else to bring the big picture together. Getting that talent is very difficult. Unlike the West, where people have a continuous learning intent. In India, we work on the model of replacement, that I can get the same guy doing the same stuff at the same salary. Why upskill the guy?

Is there a very natural and healthy conflict happening right now between performance and efficiency on one side, and creativity on the other side? And are the two worlds struggling to reconcile? The most interesting part about data and creativity. So it's like art and science, it's the old same debate. It's new jargon, it's new words, getting to marketing more often. But what's the most interesting part, and this is an exciting time that I want to live in marketing and advertising,

is when would we have a time, day and age where AI, ML is going to take over creativity, is going to take over a lot of functions. But things are going to dramatically change, because the conversion from a one-to-one, which direct marketing always propagated for the last, whatever, 150 years, has now become one is to one is to millions. So that's getting to such a high degree of personalization and sophistication, with increased usage of the advanced AI and ML stuff that's going to come in.

It's going to impact creativity, it's going to impact conversation, it's going to impact customer journeys. Last question. Quick words of advice for the young advertising and marketing people sitting in the audience and watching this show. Yeah, so the first advice is keep watching this show. There are a lot of great leaders that come to this show and there's a lot of advice that is there. It's not only young marketing and advertising people, but I don't know, Rameed, if you shared on this episode already,

but we've got feedback from people who are librarians, people who come from different walks of life that watch this Brand Studio live. So it's immensely helpful. So this is one, of course. The second piece of advice that is there, please go to as many forums or do as much learning as you would like to, but don't get set up on a path of discovery that you have not defined for yourself. The biggest challenge, whether it's a young marketing professional, and that's what I spoke to about 150 of the agency leaders and marketers.

Today, whether it's a CMO or it's agency leader, the key challenge that is there is everybody is dealing with half-truths. The vendors, the suppliers, everybody that we have access to is sending us some part of the truth and we are trying to ape it to our business. Don't do that. Understand where the essence of your brand lies and then try and find the better than the half-truths because the full-truths are not going to be available. That's going to make a key change and a key difference to the brands and the people that they serve.

On that fantastic note, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us on this episode of Brand Studio live. A heartfelt thanks to Vatsal, to Shelly and to DMA Asia for hosting the episode today on the sidelines of the ECHO Awards. A big thank you to Pever FM who evangelizes us. We'll be back with another episode. So stay tuned. Stay tuned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.