WPP’s media conglomerate GroupM and global media agency Mindshare recently announced the restructuring of their top management. Mindshare is now headed by Parthasarathy Mandayam, CEO for South Asia.

Mandayam is keen to drive profitability through “adaptive marketing”, a new approach for strategising marketing efforts by actively tracking and responding to consumers. “It is critical to constantly evolve and enhance our capabilities,” Mandayam told BusinessLine . “With the rapid evolution of the ‘consumer’s path to purchase’ across categories, we need to be at the forefront of providing solutions, from brand-building to demand-generation,” he said, adding, “We are investing significantly in data, content and technology to enable this.”

Potential to grow

Noting that the advertising industry in India is one of the fastest-growing in the world, and is set to continue the pace, Mandayam said it could grow even faster with “some enablers, such as reliable single-source data across mediums, and more investment in analytics through the funnel, for instance.”

Referring to the saying, “necessity is the mother of invention”, Mandayam says it also holds true of the advertising industry. “Media dark areas, large rural consumer base, a leapfrogging of internet usage and limited brand budgets have all led to some incredibly innovative ideas. Some of the work done in mobile marketing and experiential marketing, for instance, is really outstanding.”

Noting that the country has a “strong culture of storytelling with emotion,” the CEO maintained video revolution has seen some powerful storytelling across formats and platforms.

Speaking about Mindshare’s large network, and the constant flow of ideas and best practices from across the world, Mandayam said: “We are inspired by work from across the network — how China leverages gaming, for instance, or how the Western markets drive performance marketing. But it has to be intelligently adapted to Indian habits and culture.”

The CEO added that some of the company’s own work has travelled across borders. “Our ‘Content Day’ format and Intelligent Dashboards are just two examples,” he said. Content Day is a congregation of iconic brands and content creators or story tellers. Corporates, notably FMCG firms, partner with a wide range of content ecosystem experts and create content around brands that consumers love to engage with and share.

Last year, Mindshare launched a raw ideation service called Mindshare 24 to kick-start creativity and scale it. Designed to help companies tap into the global Mindshare network, Mindshare 24 pulls together strategic and creative talent to come up with solutions within 24 hours, with a guarantee that if the corporate does not like the ideas, there is no fee.

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