Working for one of the most creative agencies across the world has its perks and privileges. At Crispin, Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), Benny Thomas, executive strategy director, leads strategy, planning and a team of COGs (Cultural Anthropologists) for clients such as PayPal, ABInBev and Charles Schwab. He also previously served as the planning lead on the agency’s American Express account. As a result, Thomas is often called by Indian agency leaders for advice on how to deal with the large multinational clients.
“I can understand that because I have been on both sides,” says Thomas, who has worked in agencies in Mumbai and Delhi before he went abroad. “You have some guy sitting in some global office who wants you to execute what’s been decided at the headquarters. I have been that guy sitting in Mumbai and I am that guy sitting in New York. I feel both sides have to work a little harder to understand each other better,” he says.
For that to happen, ad executives need to borrow lessons from politics. “Good politicians bring people together. They find a way to work together to get the job done. We can no longer define our job as just making ads. Part of our job as an agency now is diplomacy. It’s about creating those connections,” he says and adds, “In the best relationships that I have had with clients, we have been bringing different departments at the client’s organisation together. Sometimes I feel like I work in the UN.”
Thomas speaks about the time he worked with Young & Rubicam as the global strategy director on the LG brand. Agencies are called upon for innovation projects, but he had the rare privilege of working with them on an innovation project. The company was developing a new product and the CMO wanted the agency team to work with the engineers as they did not have the consumer mindset that was required to make the product relevant. “I embedded myself in their team in Korea. For three months we did research around the world and eventually we could convince the engineers about the consumer relevance — they actually changed the specs of the product. They were trying to put all kinds of complex features in the DVR. But the agency convinced them to instead look at features like uploading photos — a very simple thing for the engineers, but very meaningful for the consumer.”
However, the advertising business today requires diplomacy to not just bring together clients but also a diverse set of agencies which are working on every single brand. “If we start with collaboration, more often than not it works,” says Thomas, citing the example of Charles Schwab, a major financial services provider in the US.
The lead media partner for the client is Universal McCann, which is not part of the CP+B group. But over the years both the agencies have started to work very closely on practically every brief, he claims.
That said, there are also examples of bad collaboration. When Thomas was in Y&R, he was handling two global projects — Bacardi and LG. On Bacardi, Martin Sorrell’s WPP put together a team with different agency talent across disciplines. Each of the agencies started out fighting. Y&R was the lead agency on the account for which Thomas was the lead strategist.
“You had to sit down with each of them and talk to them about doing it the right way. You could either do it the hard way and override them but nobody would like it. Or we could get some of their inputs. I believed that everybody can contribute to the idea and we got a lot of ideas,” he says.
The other thing that CP+B believes in is internal collaboration where everybody gets the opportunity to critique an idea. However, can it also pull the idea in many directions?
“Our management team — two management directors, head of creative and head of strategy — sit together and make decisions. Even when we see people pulling an idea in different directions, it’s our job to keep the ship on track,” defends Thomas.
At the end of the day, each idea has to solve the business problem. Unless you have a clear idea about the business problem, you will never be able to make headway.
“If you had ten hours to cut a tree, you can spend all the ten hours hacking at the tree. Or one can spend nine hours sharpening the axe and in one hour the tree will go down.”