I jumped into digital advertising about 10 years ago, after a longish stint in traditional advertising (TV and print-driven, mostly). Digital those days was mostly website banners with offers, spammy mailers and brochure-type websites, and clients would normally allocate 2-3% of the marketing budget, to the medium.
Today, digital advertising is set to grow at 31.96% CAGR, according to a Dentsu Aegis Network Digital Report released earlier this year. The Indian advertising market itself is estimated to grow at 10.62% CAGR until 2021. So while digital has about 17% of the market share now, this is only going to rise. Last year, a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar IMRB put down this growth to the trust people were beginning to have in online advertising.
Increasingly, digital jobs are replacing older, traditional roles: at the Dentsu Aegis Network (a top Japanese-held network of ad agencies), 1,600 out of a total 3,500 employees now exclusively work on digital, contributing to nearly 50% of revenues. A creative director in digital at a mid-sized agency gets about 25 lakh upwards, annually. And a top digital agency could charge ₹8 lakh a month as just creative fees, unheard of 10 years ago.
As we go to press, Webchutney, the digital agency, has got more award nominations than traditional ad agencies at the 2019 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, held every year in France. Webchutney also won 14 awards at the recently held Kyoorius Creative Awards. Meaning they were neck to neck with the bigger, traditional Ogilvy’s 15. “This is the most definitive indicator that the digital vs mainline agency battle is over. They are now peas in a pod, birds of a feather,” says Sidharth Rao, the co-founder of Webchutney. One of the most recognised digital faces in the country, he held up his agency’s winning entry Haggle Bot, as an example of this.
Webchutney and Google Zoo Australia (the Google creative think tank) worked for over four months on Haggle Bot, which let Flipkart customers ‘haggle’ online during its Big Billion sale. Such a partnership was impossible to even think of a few years ago, when a digital agency would typically ‘execute’ the big, traditional agency’s work. (A lot of my work as digital lead at a famous cola brand was uploading TV ads on YouTube.)
“Yes, it’s true digital is centerstage, but look closer and you’ll realise there are a lot of traditional agencies that have started doing good digital work,” says Anant Rangaswami, Kyoorius advisor, an author and journalist. “In 2011, I had asked if traditional ‘brand’ agencies would do digital or would it be vice versa, and I think the answer is emerging now.” Here a few top creative leaders from cities that are advertising hotspots, on what’s going on in India, good, bad, ugly.
Delhi
Satbir Singh, co-founder of Thinkstr, the writer of the much-loved and awarded Incredible India campaign, says not much disruptive work has come out of Delhi in the past one year; odd, considering the bigger clients and bigger budgets were here.
Barring a few, like the BJP campaign. “Unlike most brand campaigns that release one piece across media to become ‘integrated,’ the BJP and their creative teams used all media touchpoints brilliantly. Ten out of ten.” Incidentally, Thinkstr is the start-up that launched the #StartupIndia project a few years ago, with a fresh, bold approach.
Mumbai
Malvika Mehra, the two-time Cannes Gold Lion and D&AD pencil winner points out how large-network agencies are investing in smaller ‘intellectual’ specialist hubs. Malvika, after longish stints at Ogilvy and Grey, had started Tomorrow Creative Lab, a design innovation lab that married design and technology. The country’s biggest advertisers (such as Hindustan Unilever) quickly approached her with work, and soon the big networks came calling. Last month, Dentsu picked up a stake and it’s now Dentsu India Tomorrow Lab.
A clutch of new ‘integrated marketing’, digital-driven agencies have come out of Mumbai, and Harshil Karia’s Schbang leads the pack with 50 new accounts and 28 awards in the past year. Harshil feels the future is all about the creative use of technology.
Ashish Khazanchi, ex-Ogilvy, and the founder of the very successful Enormous Brands agrees the biggest disruptor has been tech. “In the past, it was one strategy for all of India; now thanks to technology, we can have as many strategies as number of people.” He loved the Carvaan (digital radio player) work out of Mumbai, by The Womb. The idea for the product itself was the agency’s. Also noteworthy is the Enormous campaign for Motorola, an on-ground campaign that focused on reviving small, travelling cinemas in Maharashtra, through the ‘projector’, a Moto phone.
Finally, DDB Mudra’s ‘Free Period’, where the agency partnered with Stayfree to create a vocational-training programme for sex workers held during the days the women have their menstrual periods. Such brilliance.
Bengaluru
Senthil Kumar the CCO of Wunderman Thompson is perhaps in the hottest seat in Indian advertising today. Since JWT and Wunderman merged to become a “creative, data and technology agency,” the world’s his oyster. The Blink Test, which celebrated indigenous, endangered communities, was a strong hint of things to come. (The campaign was a collage of tribal communities, and a ‘blink’ would tell how many communities were lost in the fraction of a second.) Senthil has been a crusader of the ‘India as EU’ school of thought, versus the traditional, monochromatic One Creative For All approach.
Vineet Gupta, former Group CEO of the DDB Mudra Group, has just launched Spring Marketing, an agency that is a combination of startup fund and marketing consultancy. “We believe that timely marketing intervention can unlock significant value for all stakeholders,” says Vineet. “We are not an agency; we are a startup working with startups. The best companies in the world have remained startups for as long as they could.”
