People are the first media: Tim Love

Having spent 40 years in advertising, Tim Love, Vice-Chairman of the Omnicom group, and CEO, Omnicom's APIMA (Asia Pacific, India, Middle East and Africa) business, is a keen observer of trends in the industry. The ad veteran who used to run his own agency, Tim Love Advertising, before stints at D'Arcy and Saatchi & Saatchi has written and lectured extensively on globalisation, consumer and cultural understanding.

On the sidelines of Goafest 2012 last week, Love spoke to BrandLine about where advertising is headed, and on Omnicom's India interests. A few months ago, Omnicom Group, which manages three big global advertising agency networks, BBDO, DDB and TBWA, had hiked its stake in Indian advertising agency Mudra and rechristened it DDB Mudra. Excerpts:

How do you view the changes in advertising over the last four decades?

I think it's a wonderful time to be in the advertising industry today because a lot of the things I've had the privilege to see are converging - how people think, how they communicate, the effect that technology has on communication. The world has become more transparent and we can see cultures engage without losing their identities.

What are the events and trends shaping advertising these days?

The two biggest ones, in my opinion, are the proliferation of access that people have to each other, and that access is really amplified when the tech people figured out how to get universal compatibility – when different software systems became compatible. This is the kind of thing the fish wouldn't have seen in the fishbowl, because it was happening so quickly, and that's made people the first media.

Word of mouth has always been the most powerful and persuasive medium, you check with your mother or friends when you seek the truth about information that you're being told. Now you can seek those word-of-mouth endorsements much more readily. You don't have to rely on what someone's telling you.

That kind of transparency has collided with another development that has happened over the last 10 years. Of the top 100 economies in the world, 51 are now corporations. That means that more people's lives are being touched by corporations, brands and people that work in those corporations than any single nation's government. It has made it very, very important that a company is responsible for what it says and how it acts.

Where is India in the Omnicom universe?

India has been important to us well before the acquisition. We reframed the regional business as APIMA - Asia Pacific, India, Middle East and Africa. Some agencies and some clients might not include India when they say Asia Pacific but I think India has a well-earned right to sit at the world economic table, and it's inappropriate when you say Asia Pacific; there's no Pacific around India. It's time to honour India with its rightful position as a leading economy in the world. It may seem like a little thing but it's a big thing to me to do that. It was a signal that we are not going anywhere without India.

How is the Mudra buy manifesting itself?

For all the people involved it has been an eye-opener of access to greater talent, diverse ideas, understanding things about each other and parts of the world that we had not really understood before, because we've been operating at a bit of a distance. But you know it's fascinating … Madhukar (Kamath, Group CEO & MD, DDB Mudra, who is present at this interview) said there are 18 official languages ... eighteen ... that's amazing and 300 different dialects, probably more – the importance of language and the importance of understanding its effect on communication is extraordinary. We underestimate the impact that language has on human misunderstanding. Things like that that come out of the partnership are very exciting.

What kind of businesses or clients would you be interested in working with?

I am interested in a richer exchange of not only multinational brands coming into India but truly Indian brands moving out of India to the rest of the world. We are handling some such brands in some of our companies, some of the large Indian companies that are having to engage in the global economy. It's very interesting because I think you learn more that way, when we see a situation from two different angles we see it better.

As you know Omnicom wasn't historically as well developed in India as some of our competitors. That wasn't a function of strategy, that was a function of history and what clients we had. But I believe it's placed in a better position to help India move to the rest of the world.