Media veteran Shashi Sinha took over as chief executive of Mediabrands – the media arm of the fourth largest advertising network IPG – in India a few weeks ago. As the newly appointed CEO, Sinha will oversee operations of both Lodestar UM, an agency he already manages and Lintas Media Group (LMG), the agency that saw the exit of its chairman Lynn de Souza recently. Sinha has his task cut out since taking stock of operations at LMG besides growing Mediabrands, which stands at number two after Group M in India, are his key priorities. In this interview with Viveat Susan Pinto, 54-year-old Sinha, who holds an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and is also a passout from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, which recently gave him the distinguished alumni award, indicates how he intends to position Mediabrands in the country. Edited Excerpts:
You are known to act with speed, how do you propose to deal with LMG now that Lynn has decided to move on?
The first thing I did right after my appointment (on October 29) was I spent some time at the Delhi office of Initiative, which is one of the main agencies under LMG. I met a few clients there. I also spent some time with the team there. My attempt was to assuage their fears since they were bound to have questions post Lynn’s decision to move on. She was associated with Initiative for long. I also held a town hall meeting of the Initiative team in Mumbai, attempted to answer their questions, clear doubts in their minds. My priority at this stage will be to strengthen the team at Initiative, work closely with all members including the senior staff and help them align themselves with the philosophy with which I propose to drive Mediabrands.
Will the task be easy given that Initiative has lost quite a few hands in recent months?
There are strong points that Initiative has. It is a strong legacy brand, with good entrenched people, who are managing their clients well. In other words, the client leaders at Initiative are solid. There are, however, two gaps that I see. The “talkability” is not there. That is, they haven’t spoken about themselves much in the marketplace for whatever reasons. That has its own repercussions.. Second, while I won’t say they are weak in strategy, but I do see some gaps in their ability to address client needs. Communications planning is an area they need to focus their attention on. By getting some Lodestar team members to work closely with them or by hiring talent from outside, I propose to bridge this gap. There are also cross-learnings that we can take from both agencies besides harnessing synergies. For instance, setting up centres of excellence where team members from both agencies can work together. Apart from communications planning, which is about taking an integrated or holistic approach to a client’s communication needs as well as digital and branded content, these are some of the areas where I see the two agencies working closely together.
Like Lodestar, Initiative has a good bunch of clients. How have they responded to your idea of getting Lodestar and Initiative guys to work closely together?
They were surprised that I was proposing the idea of doing communications planning, which is strategic in nature in addition to media planning and buying. But they appreciated the idea. So far, communications planning is something that the advertising agency would do, not the media agency. But in the last few years, some media agencies have begun taking the lead in driving the communications plan for a client. Advertisers are looking for strategic work that has a core idea at the heart of it. Whether it comes from the media or ad agency does not matter any longer. I broached the subject of communications planning first with Sony Entertainment Television, which is an Initiative client. They appreciated the idea.
Where do you see Mediabrands three to four years from now? Will you try and narrow the gap with GroupM, the leader in the media agency space in the country?
My priorities are to get going at the moment. I have a 90 to 120-day plan in place to win the trust of people internally, then client trust followed by global trust. After that I will look at developing value-added services such as customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, digital and branded content. So when a client approaches us we have everything at our disposal right from communication planning, which basically is strategic work to hardcore media buying and media planning to value-added services. This bouquet of offerings should help us hold our ground in a media environment which is fragmented. GroupM is large, but I certainly feel there is an alternate position to GroupM.