 "Ogilvy makes the digital leap")
When Ogilvy & Mather appointed its digital head Kunal Jeswani as India CEO in 2015, it was making its intentions very clear: Digital was the agency's future. Driven by shifting market realities, the agency, considered a creative power house at the forefront of the TV advertising revolution in India two decades ago, was letting clients and employees know what lay ahead. It is now transforming itself with help from its digital arm OgilvyOne.
For O&M, part of the WPP group, the switch to digital has been gradual, but it was inevitable given that consumer behaviour is changing very rapidly. According to GroupM, WPP's media arm, digital advertising in India will see a higher rate of growth in 2016 over 2015 at 47.5 per cent (it was 45.5 per cent last year), pushing its overall size to Rs 7,300 crore this year versus Rs 4,950 crore last year. GroupM's January 2016 forecast also notes that digital advertising will make up nearly 13 per cent of the total ad spend in India, up from nearly 10 per cent last year.
Industry estimates are that in the next five to seven years, digital advertising will constitute 20-22 per cent of India's total ad spend. No agency can afford to ignore this reality.
Ogilvy's digital wing has in recent years emerged as a leading digital marketing specialist in the country. The Mumbai office of OgilvyOne, for the record, was ranked eighth in the annual ranking of the world's best digital/specialist agencies by Warc, a global marketing and advertising insights company, this March. The Mumbai office was also the only Indian representative on the top 50 Warc list released this year, and OgilvyOne has been the only Indian digital agency to make it to the Warc list every year since it first edition in 2014, says Vikram Menon, OgilvyOne Worldwide India's president and country head.
"The Warc 100 list is among the industry's most credible rating, globally. And to rank in the top 10 is a matter of great pride," he said. How are they working to change the way O&M India works? Fifty per cent of OglivyOne's clients are part of the mainline agency's advertising roster giving the two a chance to work closely and help the latter imbibe a digital spirit.
"There are different models at work. But generally, on bigger projects and new campaigns, we work with the mainline advertising team. The process starts with strategic planning where the brief is cracked together by the advertising and digital teams. Then the creative teams on the digital and advertising sides take over. We come up with a solution. They come up with a solution. We exchange notes and decide the way forward," says Menon.
For instance, for Cadbury 5 Star, Mondelez Foods's chocolate brand, OgilvyOne worked with the mainline agency team to create a campaign that looped itself around different media, even tied in with on-ground activations, in a bid to give the brand a 360-degree edge. Ramesh-Suresh, the pair popularised by the television commercials for the brand, known to get lost when consuming a bar of Cadbury 5 Star, were given real-life jobs for a day in PVR Cinemas in Mumbai and Gurgaon, respectively. The two were asked to man the ticketing counters at these multiplexes and surprise unsuspecting movie-goers with their idiosyncrasies. This was captured in short videos and uploaded to Youtube, posted to Facebook and tweeted. The campaign saw huge traction on social media.
The second leg of this campaign had the pair turn part-time commentators for the India-South Africa match at the Cricket World Cup in 2015. OgilvyOne, then, used the audio clips to create a humorous and engaging interaction on social media, hugely improving the brand's scores online. In recent months, OgilvyOne has found global attention for its Twitter campaign for Reliance General Insurance and NGO Child Rights and You (CRY), which uses the hashtag #DON'T_EMPLOY_LITTLE_ONES.
"The campaign urges Twitter followers to capitalise their letters in their tweets, moving away from using lower case," Menon says. "This was an interesting way to highlight why it is important not to employ children."
OgilvyOne has also been organising workshops to help the mainline ad agency raise its digital game. "We do a lot of sessions globally, regionally and locally that are intended to drive Ogilvy (the ad agency) into the future. There are a lot of proprietary tools that we have which we are trying to cascade to the entire organisation," says Menon.
As digital slowly but steadily gains ground, Menon admits that a couple of clients are asking for digital-first campaigns ahead of other media. "That trend is growing, but it is difficult to say where it will go because TV is also becoming interactive," he says. "The challenge is to build content for the person you are talking to, which means it is not what you decide, but what the individual you are talking to will decide," Menon says. That will mark a complete shift from how things exist now where the 30-second ad still counts. Ogilvy is gearing up for the change.
