Last week Adam Gerhart, Global CEO Mindshare, which won the Media network’s agency of the year at Cannes Lions, was in India. “One of the reasons I’m here is because the velocity, scale and the pace of change and development here is quickly eclipsing what we’re seeing in other parts of the world,” he told businessline. In terms of ad spends, Mindshare, a part of WPP’s Group M, is forecasting about 5.9 per cent global growth. “What’s interesting is that India is projected to be 2-3X of that at 12 per cent growth,” he added.
Excerpts from an interview with him and Amin Lakhani, CEO, Mindshare South Asia.
Where do you see India as a market for Mindshare globally?
Adam: It is certainly one of our top markets. And importantly, it is one of our fastest growing markets. We are watching India keenly because of the velocity of change and the enormity of the opportunity we’re seeing here. India is growing two to three times faster in terms of ad expenditure, paired with the fact that the country’s GDP is also growing equally fast, compared to the rest of the world. So we’re investing in India as a critical driver of our future success globally.
Some of the investments done by Mindshare in the US is in neuroscience and voice commerce. Are we seeing this in India as well?
Adam: There’s a constant drive of lifting our game through bespoke products like these.
Amin: We have launched mSampling in India. This is a very tech-oriented ability for our clients to drive trials for their new products. It leverages tech, data and also the entire e-commerce ecosystem. We’ve brought all of this together through our tech partnerships and we’re enabling that for our clients now. In addition to trials, clients are looking to us to help them with the launch of their new products and getting the first view of consumers’ response to these new products because the run rate of success among new product launches is very low. As they want a very fast turnaround to some of these conversations, we provide them with tons of live feedback within a week or 10-15 days. This helps them build on what is missing in the product or find out what could really work for them if they were to make slight changes.
The other piece that we’re developing in our bespoke line of products in India is our deep dive into consumer culture. We look at the way consumers are consuming content and we bring in the brand tension points across markets. For example, content consumption is very different for South India and even within South, say, between Tamil Nadu and Kerala, it is very different. Therefore, we look at how we can solve this brand tension point within the cultural context. This is something that is really helping us help our clients, to bring out newer ways to solve their marketing challenges.
Adam, looking at the way various markets are progressing in different platforms, is India moving in the same direction on digital and other channels as in mature markets?
Adam: The biggest thing we’re seeing in India is the role of social influencers. There are 400 million active social media users in India which is bigger than most countries to begin with. There are around 650 million mobile gamers in India. This is a staggering number. So I think the trends are similar, but what we’re seeing is a pace and a scale that is unlike anywhere else in the world. We’re seeing the likes of mobile leading in many ways and e-commerce exploding in a way that other markets are only catching up to. The infrastructure and the shape of the market in India provides for some of these trends taking hold faster or the scale is just outpacing anything that we’ve seen in other parts of the world.
Earlier this year Group M talked about helping brands to invest in responsible media. Given the plethora of toxic media and fake news sites, how is that panning out?
Adam: It is something that we’re taking incredibly seriously because, with the availability of content and how quickly content can be produced these days, the challenge of misinformation is very real and so one of our pillars of investment is supporting responsible journalism. We are using and building AI technologies to identify news outlets that might be toxic towards certain consumer groups. In markets like the US, we’ve launched an Impact Index, which scores the quality and the calibre of content on news sites.
Amin: From an Indian perspective, I think we’re seeing the same trend and we’re moving from reach to ‘right reach’. I think reaching the right audience is extremely important than to just get reach because our clients are increasingly pushing us to drive authenticity.
Last year WPP restructured and Mindshare merged with Neo and a few other integrations happened. What does it do to the talent?
Adam: What we’re trying to create is an ecosystem within WPP and Group M, which is far more open source where we can draw in the best talent, regardless of where they sit based on their specialism, their expertise to solve clients’ business problems.
In that sense, we want to evolve well beyond the media agency so that we are solving problems for our clients and in doing so it means that we need to open the aperture of how we think about talent.
So in some cases it might be an integrated team with a creative agency and another case it might be Choreograph, which is Group M and WPP’s data spine. And I think what we’re starting to see is far more integration of capabilities and services as a result of that. There may be duplication, but it is entirely built around the client’s objective and challenge that we are trying to solve.
And I think that is a big pivot for the industry as they try and grapple with how they transform to not just be silo-ed into the vertical area of expertise that they grew up in.
Every time a shiny new technology comes up, brands line up invest. But are brands ruing the investment on metaverse now that Generative AI is here?
Adam: Last year at Cannes, every conversation was focused on the metaverse. This year, I didn’t hear even one about the metaverse. It was all generative AI, and the role that AI will play in the ecosystem moving forward. So I think that’s pretty indicative.
Amin: Each of these technological innovations have their own place. So if you look at this year’s Cannes wins, the agency that won the Titanium was actually a metaverse initiative for an island which is sinking so that it could thrive digitally. So yes, right now AI is important, products are getting shaped up and there are use cases that are adding value. In my mind it is not one against the other, both will grow and have their own use cases.