I have seen many ways in which agencies have reinvented themselves. Here are a list of observations that I have. Let’s begin with the ‘rapid’ word in the topic that means speed. In today’s day and age, things move very quickly and therefore agencies need to respond very quickly. We recently had a pitch where one of the agencies presented a case study where they are so embedded with the clients that the agency has field teams in every state of the country and they are on conference calls with the client every month. They are not waiting for a brief. It’s not a relay race — where something happens and then you get a brand brief and then you respond.
They are rather working like a basketball team that’s ready to respond right away. We saw the speed for something even as mundane as film production. We had to make eight commercials that had to get on air very quickly. It was no longer production, processing and then editing, but we had an editor on the set churning out the edit as we were shooting. Literally, as we finished the shoot, we had the edits in hand. The first response I am seeing from agencies is action on speed.
Second is on capability. Every other month we hear about acquisitions. Whether it’s JWT buying into Social Wavelength, or Publicis and Dentsu Aegis buying digital agencies and so on. All this action is taking place because agencies agree that capability is needed, you do not have time to home-grow the expertise, so you acquire it and you fit it in.
It’s not just about fitting it in. First it operated like a specialist, then it became a single window to the client and now we are seeing a single P&L approach. So it is not just about bringing in capability but about moving it into the next level.
Moving to new levels Third is the workflow. The single window, single P&L approach by agencies is itself new and it is a move forward. In terms of specialisation, it’s not just about placing ads in a section of the media but about working together with media houses and creating content. I will share some examples. We have had creative ideas that integrated multiple products from the Godrej group into an engaging fashion on television. For International Women’s Day, we had interesting executions on social media. It’s all old-world agencies making new-age creatives. Agencies are now writing music videos for us. We are now getting a stream of content from the same agency. Even in traditional media we have go to a level of analytics that was never seen before. Technology is being used not just in the digital space but in other areas as well. Look at research.
We are getting into GPS tracking of respondents. We are using neuroscience. So we are using new sets of tools that take into account the changing landscape and helping us measure things we could not measure before. There are numerous ways in which agencies have not just got it but also taken action at an investment level by acquiring capabilities, taken action at a structural level and found new ways of working and rearranged the building blocks and found ways of building new skills.
Shireesh Joshi is Head, Strategic Marketing Group, Godrej