 "No more Chinese whispers")
Increasingly advertisers appear to have lost interest in being patronising towards their agencies. The reasons range from responding to the competition in real time to cashing in on televised sporting events and tweaking the creative for different price points from time to time etc. Agencies now have to turn in their creative product much faster. Explains brand expert Harish Bijoor, The shortening of the life-span of brand communication has added to the marketers deadline woes. Today some agencies we collaborate with have to release new ads in three weeks flat.
But there is a problem. Many network agencies in India and abroad operate in silos. How can one talk about integration and be disintegrated in structure? asks Rohit Ohri, executive chairman, Dentsu India group. Any large network has several layers within the same function (servicing, planning or creative) where people follow rigid processes that are a part of that groups legacy. While the multi-layered working style may help agencies in preventing turf wars between different functions, it can become a hurdle in the way of creating effective communication for the advertiser whose deadlines are shrinking by the day. This sometimes makes potential clients, who think cracking a new campaign should be as smooth as shopping at the Apple Store, irritated: What do you mean you cant get the creative sorted before the IPL? We dont have the wherewithal to do it in four weeks. Thats non-negotiable! Im ready to pay.
From the advertisers point of view, therefore, taking control of the creative process is the top-most need of the hour.
Old is not always gold
Let us understand the traditional processes in advertising, which is still prevalent in many network agencies in some form. First the servicing department gets the brief from the client; after adding its inputs it passes on the brief to the creative team. At this stage, all the stakeholders of the account within the agency in servicing, creative and planning come together to share their thoughts. Once a consensus is reached about the best way forward often after a few more meetings with the client the creative team is expected to start work on the idea. (Click for table)
This approach was a waste of time. Agency folks agree that the whole process from generating ideas to final execution need to be streamlined to offer clients best value in this era of competition. The agencies that will succeed are the ones that realise that circumstances on the ground have changed and they have no alternative but to adapt to the new environment. Its a survival issue. As Raghu Bhat, founder director, Scarecrow Communications, puts it, Every agency must devise a system to exist in this new reality. One answer to this problem lies in working with a multi-disciplinary team at the same time. This will leave no room for Chinese whispers between servicing, creative and planning. While Indian independent and some network agencies like Ogilvy & Mather, Dentsu and Leo Burnett have been servicing their clients in this manner for quite some time now, in recent years, there has been a surge in the number of advertisers that are asking their agency partners to dismantle the layers and follow a more ope
* system. Big ticket advertisers like Nestle, Dabur, Coca-Cola and DLF are already working in this fashion. They realise that when functions are overlapping and insights are difficult to come by, a great idea cannot be the exclusive preserve of the creative department.
The walls are collapsing
There are a whole host of things that are working together to pull the walls down. Over the last decade or so, the industry has seen creative people coming out of the planner/service executives shadow with clients choosing to deal with them directly. Many companies have hired servicing talent from agencies to fill marketing positions. Among them are Bharat Bambawale, who was global team leader heading Unilever Hair account at JWT, is now with Airtel; then there is Mohit Beotra, ex-executive director at Lowe Lintas, who is also with Airtel now; Ajay Naqvi, who was EVP, Mudra (North and East) is now on the other side with Coca-Cola. With experienced servicing staff available in-house, companies can save on time and money by dealing only with the top creative guys at agencies for their communication needs.
At the same time, it wont be fair on the part of clients to expect their resource-strapped agencies to get rid of hierarchies instantly. Arvind Sharma, chairman of Indian sub-continent, Leo Burnett, points out, While working with a multi-disciplinary team can fast track the creative process, it may bring a sense of less clarity and responsibility. A transition like this can be fun for some and difficult for others. But then, he agrees, the agencies will have to come to terms with this new reality sooner than later. This trend does not indicate that client servicing profiles are redundant. On the contrary, advertisers regard servicing or planning resource in high esteem given their critical ability to bring new insights to the table.
There are some dos and donts that advertisers should follow to ensure efficiency. First, to avoid confusion, an advertiser should always share the campaign brief with the agency in a written form, via email if you really want to crank up speed. As of now, a large number of clients do this over the phone. This exposes the brief to the interpretation of the listener. For new campaigns, a marketer must insist on meeting a team of people working under different functions and not only the account director or business head.
The benefits of integration
Some agencies have taken the walls down; many others are working on it. Piyush Pandey, executive chairman and creative director, South Asia, Ogilvy & Mather India,says, At Oglivy, we never subscribed to the assembly line creative process in which each function takes its time to work on an idea. Sending a multi-disciplinary team increases involvement and we have been doing this for more than 15 years now.
But how does the advertiser ensure it has got the best representative team from the agency? Heres how a few are trying to sort things out.
Take Manmeet Ahluwalia, travel portal Expedias head of marketing, who says he walks the fine line between allowing creative freedom to the agency (Lowe Lintas) and taking full control when required. He spends this time of the year in devising the right communication strategy to be implemented for the rest of the year, starting with the holiday season in April. Explaining the significance of effective communication, he says, In travel, it is the service and not the product which is the differentiator and communication can make or break a brand. In February last year, Expedia launched its first TV campaign in India dubbed The one world for travel. Since then, various cuts of the two ad films shot in Singapore and Kerala are being aired by the company. A new cut is created every fortnight by adding a fresh voiceover and super for new product launches and travel deals. Depending on criticality of the campaign, Ahluwalia speaks to the business head or the creative head at the agency directly. This saves time
which would be wasted if he was to follow the traditional system of routing queries through servicing.
Bottomline: The agency and the client need to work seamlessly to churn out multiple ads across TV, print and online round the year.
Kohinoor Speciality Foods India, an 85:15 JV between $3.3 billion US-based McCormick and Kohinoor Foods, and among the biggest spenders in its category, is doing something similar. After roping in Scarecrow Communications as creative partner, it is more than happy to jettison the traditional creative process for a far leaner system. Shishir Mishra, director, marketing, Kohinoor Speciality Foods, says, Consumer market segmentation is becoming a challenge for companies across various categories of products and services. By working with multi-disciplinary team, we have cut the time spent on creating communication by 50 per cent.
But challenges remain. First, its human nature to resist change. On the condition of anonymity, many senior hands in creative and planning told The Strategist how even today, their colleagues in servicing do not welcome the idea of taking the creative types along for client meetings. Sharing his experience, an independent agency head who was earlier a creative director with a Top 10 agency, explains how small delays tend to turn into big ones. Once a client wanted to zero in on a print creative, he says, the servicing team did not know the cost of printing the visual offhand. Had he taken an art director to that meeting, the approval would come instantly and not after two days, as it happened.
So there you have it. Slow food might be a virtue, but slow decision-making and creative throughput clearly arent. As they say, Chance favours the prepared mind. We could repurpose it to, Short deadlines favour the integrated agency.