To say audiences, broadcasters, ad-vertisers and promoters are shift-ing their attention to other sport purely out of cricket-fatigue would be unfair; to cricket, that’s still very much the national pastime, “kind of

like God or Bollywood” as one marketer put it. And it would also be unfair to other sports which have been cultivating a strong following, well be-fore a new breed of leagues (modelled on cricket’s ostentatious Indian Premier League or IPL) for football, kabaddi, hockey, badminton, tennis and most recently wrestling, cropped up. Advertisers, for one, are claiming other sport territory be-cause cricket is just too damn expensive.

Neeraj Vyas, senior EVP and business head, Sony MAX and MAX2 (MSM network, the official broadcaster of the IPL and the new Pro Wrestling League), says that for advertisers, in any sport, the scene has changed and most sport properties are finding sponsors. “Cricket is an expensive acquisition for broadcasters and advertisers,” he says, “Few can afford it on a sustained basis. Most advertisers, even regular cricket advertisers, are devel- oping other ways and investing in conceptive al-ternatives.”

Many market-ers are not so secretly hoping that together the leagues break, not obliterate, cricket’s hegemony. PepsiCo has been investing in sport prop-erties for over 25 years, it’s associated with the Indian Super League (ISL) and is the bever-age sponsor for Champions Tennis League. Says Vipul Prakash, VP, beverage category, PepsiCo India, “It should happen at a faster pace if all these are to form a second front against cricket which is a behemoth today. Maybe not individ-ually, but together. While not as big as cricket, leagues are good from an ROI point of view.” For Pepsi brand Gatorade, the football league is an opportunity to connect with niche audi-ences. Prakash says, “The viewership of ISL today is small and so it’s more about

talking to a young audience. It’s a slower process but this will help build Gatorade into the sports psyche of the country.”

For the Kotak group, non-cricket leagues are a vessel to showcase its Indian pride, global mental-ity. Says Karthi Marshan, senior EVP and head – group marketing Kotak Mahindra Bank, “The Kotak family owns a kabaddi team. The Pro Kabaddi League turned out to be the second most watched sport in India. In terms of salience, the brand got benefits. The Kotak brand position has always been a global Indian which wears its Indianness on its sleeve. We want to be seen as a global citizen and not a jingoistic Indian.” To him whether cricket’s hegemony ends or not is immaterial. “If all of these leagues have a long tail fol-lowing, that’s good enough.”

The New Playground But Rome and the IPL weren’t built in a week. The cricket league, arguably the big-gest sport platform for brands in India, rests on many generations of Indians playing cricket on side streets and in all

whites on manicured fields across the na-

tion. Broadcasters are doing their bit by attempting to build a multi-

sports culture. Says Sanjay Gupta, COO, Star India,

“We have demonstrated this with the thrust on local leagues start-ing with Star Sports Pro Kabaddi League, Hero Indian Super L eag ue, Hockey

I nd i a L e a g ue,

IPTL. We have packaged the sports better and also brought them closer to people by taking it to them in their local languages.”

Puma India’s MD Abhishek Ganguly believes the onus lies on brands. He also believes that in five years’ time ISL will be almost like first divi-sion European football (he’s not oblivious to the enormity of that challenge). However in order to grow properties like the ISL it can’t just be about 90-minutes and 3 months. Brands must think be-yond just visibility on the pitch, and instead “cre-ate, build and sustain buzz. We’re here to build and support the sport (ground-up) and loyalty” he says. Only then will we one day have the kind of atmosphere that’s created in hallowed stands like The Kop at Liverpool FC’s Anfield stadium, on a weekly basis, across the nation.

The Maa of All LeaguesSports in India is a $2 billion industry that could, in the next five years, grow to around $10 billion. For now, stakeholders’ faith in sport properties beyond the realm of cricket has been met with

equal enthusiasm on the audience’s side, at least in the inaugural editions. People, support-

ers both old and the newborn variety at-

tracted by the glitz, auctions, slick formats and multi-crore marketing bang, are lapping up the action on pitches 115 yd × 74 yd and eco-friendly kabaddi mats. 429 million viewers tuned in for the first season of the Hero Indian Super League (our version of football’s English Premier League) and 435 million for Pro Kabaddi League, in its first edition. That’s commendable by any standard, especially if one considers the 552 million viewers IPL got in its 8th edition in 2014.

The IPL, however, is the mother of all Indian sport leagues. Despite the controversy surround-ing the tourney and its myriad flaws regularly pointed out by purists, we can’t dismiss its influ-ence on how we consume sport.

Yes, as Indians we only cared for cricket. And only when ‘India’ played. As an industry veteran points out “A great Ashes series was as much in the pale as any other sport. A sport may have

Olympic stature but it was still not very well regarded. Indian fans were tutored to

cheer for team India (especially when it was winning); and their attitude to sport was more voy-euristic than participative. IPL

gave you the delicious possibility of India not losing. It was the first time in sports that citi-zenship got down to a city level affiliation.”

In spite of a long tradition of regional sport rival-ries in legacy tournaments, some of which have involved lathi charges to keep passionate fans in check; they are still perceived as poorer con-tests. IPL gave the Indian viewer, not necessarily the cricket or sport lover, an opportunity to in-dulge that voyeuristic side (without judgement) with unadulterated entertainment in the form of sport. That’s exactly what promoters of the newer leagues are banking on to spark a similar revolu-tion in their respective fields. When we ask Pro Wrestling League’s promoter Vishal Gurnani of ProSportify how he plans to attract audiences and advertisers to this brand new league starting tomorrow, he says they’re building up players, rivalries, city team conflicts in what is tradition-ally an individual sport, to ensure participation.

Some say there’s no shame in acknowledging that IPL became the mould for all other leagues. But it also begs the question: are the other leagues merely the nth version of the IPL? A question we attempt to answer in this story when we look into three leagues in different stages of their life-cycle.

Continued on Pg 2 >>

AMIT BAPNA

Change is in the air indeed, for Samsung, both at the Seoul HQ and closer home in India. Leading

this is buzz about the imminent succession of heir-apparent Jay Y Lee taking over from ailing patriarch Lee Kun-hee. Another major shift has been at Samsung’s global mobile busi-ness, where current head Shin Jong-kyun, will hand over the business to DJ Koh, the man who led development of the

Galaxy S6 and Note 5 handsets. The latter change has been born out of pressures of dwindling smartphone sales, among other reasons.

Closer home, the Korean brand has been facing challenges: Apple at the top end and a clutch of aggressive Chinese players at the low end. That pretty much leaves the middle to keep the business moving. Keeping this in mind and aiming to latch on to the en-suing 4G rollout, Samsung launched the 4G enabled Galaxy J series re-cently, in the hope of appealing to the sub-`15,000 smartphone market.

Tough times often need creative answers, said a wise man. To ensure the J series gets adequate traction, the brand’s creative agency Cheil has revived a long dead strategy of using a celebrity — Aamir Khan fronted the brand through the ‘Next is What’ campaign all the way up till 2010. And now, there’s Shahid Kapoor in a campaign by A-list director Dibakar Banerjee, better known for Shanghai

and Byomkesh Baskhi, but also a former ad filmmaker. Incidentally, Banerjee has signed on exclusively with communication solutions company, The 120 Media Collective, founded by Roopak Saluja to direct commercials and digital content.

The campaign is built around

popular nursery rhyme ‘Johnny Johnny’ with a humorous twist in the tail. The message: ‘don’t be a Johnny’ by being fooled into buying a 4G phone that cannot provide the real experience. It’s a coordinated exchange between two characters bringing in a uniquely Indian flavor. As per Kundan Joshee, senior vice president, Cheil, “with J-Series it was clearly a case of de-positioning everyone else who were offering 4G handsets, by making the consumer think about the “real 4G experience” and not just about “compatibility”.”

Anupama Ramaswamy, ECD, Cheil India agrees that humour is some-thing the brand has not been doing enough of, and the task carved out for this campaign being a serious one, we decided to talk about the superiority in a funny way. After all it is a proven fact that India loves listening to stories and if they are funny, so much the better. The other differentiator has been getting a celebrity on-board. Shahid Kapoor was cast because he brings the right mix of naughty and cool, she says and his youthfulness bolsters the memorability as well as the reach of the campaign. The film-maker Dibakar Banerjee explains it thus, “The ads had to look premium and aspirational, and at the same time desi and rough, and that dichotomy was sought to be resolved by getting Shahid on-board. His appearance is inland and he can speak to the Meerut and the Bhiwandi market and yet he is aspirational and cool.”

About this being a very un-Samsung like ad, with its dose of the earthy hu-mour and celeb-quotient, Dibakar is very clear that product being the hero does not for a minute mean that the ad has to be boring. “The director’s job is to connect and that is all that adver-tising can do in this over-saturated market: to connect.”

Continued on Page 3 >>

BEST KNOWN FOR FEATURE OVERLOAD ADS, SAMSUNG HAS A CELEB ON BOARD AND IS TALKING A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE. FLASH IN THE PAN OR CHANGE IN THE AIR?

SINGING A DIFFERENT SONGBrandWatch

Of Their OwnIn A League Finally, there are signs of life beyond cricket in the Indian sporting universe. But don’t throw out the bat and ball just yet By Delshad Irani and Ravi Balakrishnan

Microsoft’s latest advertisement ‘spreads harmony’ for arch rival AppleMicrosoft’s new advertise-ment has something special

for its rival-Apple. The ad-

vertisement, celebrating the

spirit of the holiday season,

is attracting eye balls for

a reason. And the reason

is that the 60-second ad

shows Microsoft employees

walking towards the Apple

flagship store at 5th Avenue

Road in New York City, sing-

ing carols and calling for

peace. Microsoft employees

wearing the company’s

sweater, carrying candles

walk towards the Apple store,

singing ‘Let there be peace

on Earth and let it

begin with me’. The

ad, which was filmed

on November 16,

ends with Microsoft

employees hugging

Apple workers and

breaking into ap-

plause. The ad was

developed by the

Redmond, Wash.,

software giant’s

advertising partner

m:united, of McCann.

(Source: businessinsider.com)

Advertisers are claiming other sport territory because cricket is just too damn expensive

Stills from the campaign

Shahid Kapoor

It is a proven fact that India loves listening to stories and if they are funny, so much the betterAnupama Ramaswamy, ECD, Cheil India

PHOTOS: GETTYIMAGES

THE ECONOMIC TIMES DECEMBER 09-15, 2015

Product: ETNEWMumbaiBS PubDate: 09-12-2015 Zone: BrandEquity Edition: 1 Page: BEFP User: sandeepd0203 Time: 12-04-2015 01:31 Color: CMYK

Hero Indian Super League (ISL)Duration: 3 months Teams: 81st Season: 2014 Sponsors include Hero Motocorp, Maruti, Samsung, Flipkart, Puma, PepsiCo, Amul, VoliniBroadcaster: STAR India Marquee Players (MP): Nicolas Anelka (coach), Sunil Chhetri, Robin Singh, Roberto Carlos, Flourent Malouda, Adrian Muttu, Lucio, John Arne RisseStar Quotient (SQ): Ranbir Kapoor, John Abraham, Hrithik Roshan, Sachin Tendulkar, Abhishek Bachchan, Sourab Ganguly

Pro Wrestling League (PWL)Duration: 18 daysTeams: 61st Season: 2015 Sponsors include Thums Up and Jaguar LightingBroadcaster: MSM (Sony Max, Sony Six, Sony Pal)Marquee Players (MP): Sushil Kumar, Yogeshwar Dutt, Adeline Grey (USA)Star Quotient (SQ): Dharmendra

@HotStarTweets: Hot Star is the top most engaged brand on the twitter advertiser in-dex this week and for good reason. Hotstar has a great content model where they have a clear commu-nication plan around a couple of key commu-nication themes that they tweet around. More importantly they use rich media and vid-eo specifically to en-gage with their TG. Last week we saw HotStar talk about the AIB show, the ISL and their flagship show Is Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon.The most retweeted tweet was a short form video tweet. Given the format users loved to share the content and the tweet saw 1.3k retweets.

@GioneeIndia:Gionee India cre-ated conversations around the Sunburn festival in India around the hashtag - #GioneeRoadToGoa They ran contests around the festival to get interested audi-ence to engage with them. With VIP passes and the opportunity to meet headlining acts there were enough incentives for users to get involved and they did. Gionee saw tre-mendous engagement

on the back of this.

@BajajAllianz: This Bajaj Allianz handle seeks to help you live a better and more secure life. Under the banner of #DontBeABooBoo and with a set of fun cartoon members of the BooBoo family, Bajaj Allianz shares fun stories that seek to educate people about living a safer life in general. This week in particular they ran a dubsmash contest which asked users to get involved and create dubsmash video for them. Winners stood to win a smartphone. Users loved the idea and rewarded Bajaj Allianz with loads of engagement.

@MotorolaIndia: Motorola launched the second generation Moto 360 smart watch and garnered a lot of engagement on Twitter.

Apart from run-ning a contest the cam-paign also included a peri-scope live streaming launch and unbox-ing of the product. This re-ally helped

build a lot of good engagement for the brand. Motorola also included rich media from the launch event which drove great user engagement.

@MotherDairyMilk: Mother Dairy has had a very engaging and impactful week on Twitter last week. The occasion was the birthday of Dr Kurien and on this occasion Mother Dairy wanted to start a conversation to celebrate Farmers in India with the hashtag #TweetToFarmer. This gave people the op-portunity to share their feelings for the farmers. A lot of us-ers got involved and gave Mother Dairy a lot engagement. Their top tweet was also the most retweeted tweet of the week.

Source: Twitter

Twitter AdvertiserIndex

1 @HotStarTweets2 @GioneeIndia3 @BajajAllianz4 @MotorolaIndia5 @MotherDairyMilk

BRAND ENGAGEMENT INDEX

The weekly Twitter Advertiser Index lists the brands which have gener-ated most engagement with users on the platform

BRANDRANKS

As on 2nd Dec ‘15

The index looks at the live list of all advertisers on the platform and measures the total number of user engagements with all the Tweets that they sent out that week - specifi-cally this is a sum of all the replies, retweets and favourites across all tweets that week.

Recently, Marriott announced that it was buying Starwood in a $12 billion deal that would create the world’s larg-est hotel company, with over 5500 hotels and 1.1 million rooms spanning 100 countries and 30 brands. Naturally, the effect of this new mega corp will be far reaching in the global hospitality busi-ness and will change things for consum-ers as well.

In India too, the impact of this deal is significant. Together, the com-bined room inventory of the Marriott-Starwood hotels will make it the largest of any hotel chain in India. And for the first time in 113 years the Taj Group’s preeminent position as India’s largest hotel brand will be surpassed.

This article is not about the nuances of the deal and its financial implications, but what it means for Indian travellers and for Indian hotel chains.

From a traveller’s perspective, the big-ger combine of hotels from Marriott and Starwood means:1. Easier access to more choices:While the individual brands will con-tinue to have their identities and sepa-rate web properties, most consumers look for hotel options at a city level. And that’s where they will be delighted to find a wider choice across brands and price points and locations, all in one place. Without having to go to differ-ent sites. The Marriott-Starwood com-bine might well rival some of the better known hotel aggregator portals. 2. More attractive Rewards pro-gramme: Worldwide Marriott and Starwood would now boast a combined 75 million members across their loy-alty programmes. In India too, mem-bers of one loyalty programme would now have a wider choice of rewards to redeem, across a much larger array of brands and locations. One more reason for travellers to opt for these brands while booking their next hotel stay. 3. Cheaper prices for a better qual-ity experience: The efficiencies of scale that the combine will bring to all brands in the Marriott-Starwood fold will help the hotels offer better ‘deals’, either in terms of direct room rates or in terms of value-added services that travellers crave. This rate advantage is also likely to translate into smart upselling opportunities for the hotels

that consumers lap up for their greater perceived value.

From the perspective of other hotel brands in India, this new hospitality landscape will mean:1. Greater pressure on filling rooms and for achieving room revenue targets: Not only would the costs of acquiring guests go up in terms of marketing and advertising but also the pressure on dis-counting to win a customer would increase. Thereby affecting the profitability of the hotel chains. 2. Customer retention would become a bigger challenge: The enhanced power of the Marriott-Star wood loya lty pro -grammes would make loy-alty more ethereal for the other hotel chains. Guests would rather choose a ho-tel where every stay gives them something in the fu-ture, perhaps in the form of holiday stay offers. And life-style experiences that they can redeem against points earned.

But adversity is the best opportunity to do things differently. And the smart Indian chains are likely to take on the 800 pound Marriott-Starwood gorilla in several ways: 1. Look to create more distinct offer-ings: Focusing on what is unique in their offerings whether in terms of lo-cation, hotel design, service ethos, and destination offerings will help these chains stand out from the new big com-

bine. And also attract the consumer who is jaded by the sameness of hotel of-ferings over the years. Taking on specif-ic brands from the Marriott-Starwood portfolio more aggressively would help rather than trying to compete at a gen-eral level.2. Focus on new lodging segments :AirBnB is a great example of a brand that disrupted the global hospitality business even without owning a single hotel room of its own. There is no rea-son smart Indian hotel brands cannot rethink their businesses. And focus on growth from new lodging segments that address the needs of the millen-nial travellers, rather than the guests of yesterday.3. Innovative loyalty programmes: It will be very hard for Indian chains to compete with the Marriott-Starwood rewards programme on their own steam. But smarter tie-ups with other global service providers like airlines,

credit cards and even big ecommerce brands will allow them to offer their guests a wide array of re-demption opportunities way beyond the footprint of their hotels in India and abroad. 4. New reservation chan-nels: The time has come to look beyond hotel web-sites and travel interme-diaries as the key booking channel. An aggressive focus on selling through experiential and commu-nity-focused channels like social media can help Indian brands side-step the giant shadow of Marriott and Starwood, and create new ways of reaching and wowing po-tential customers.

No doubt, the coming months will see a lot unfold in the Indian hospitality landscape. As a long time hotel marketer and observer of the busi-ness, I am very excited at what’s ahead. And watching closely, who will win.

(The author is a digital & market-ing advisor and tweets at

@ashoklalla. Earlier, he spent 12 years at the Taj Group.)

MARRIOTT-STARWOOD COMBINE & WHAT IT MEANS TO TRAVELLERSIS A LARGE MERGER IN A SEGMENT YOU OPERATE IN MORE OF A THREAT OR MORE OF AN OPPORTUNITY ASKS ASHOK LALLA

Brand Equity profiles a few of the most promising among the greenshoot sporting leagues

ASHOK LALLA

It will be very hard for Indian chains to

compete with the Marriott-

Starwood rewards

programme on their own

steam

GETTY

IMA

GES

US-based ad tech startup

Undertone has been ac-

quired by publicly-listed

Israeli marketing software

company Perion in an all-

cash deal worth $180 mil-

lion. In acquiring Undertone,

Perion will have a bigger

presence in the US - the biggest digital ad-

vertising market in the world. Undertone

specializes in serving what it

calls “high-impact ads.” It dif-

ferentiated itself by focusing

on the creative, media, and

tech needed to allow big-

spending advertisers to pay

for video and other forms of

interactive digital ads that

work across all different sizes of screens.

Undertone was founded in Ney York City

2001 and has around 275 employees

across eight offices. It generated $89

million in net revenue in the first nine

months of $104 million and reported ad-

justed EBITDA of $14.6 million. Ahead of

the acquisition, the company had raised

$40 million in funding, and as part of the

deal Perion will take on Undertone’s $50

million in long-term debt. Combined, the

two companies are estimated to gener-

ate $350 million in net revenue this year

and will have 660 employees across

seven countries.

(Source: businessinsider.com)

NYC ad tech company Undertone acquired by Israel-based Perion

Riding on the increasing popular-ity of football among city-slickers donning Rooney, Ronaldo and

Messi jerseys, due to exposure to profes-sional English and European leagues like the EPL, La Liga and Champions League, the ISL launched in 2014 with much fan-fare and a line-up of A-list ce-lebrities and foreign players past their prime. The key to the ISL’s success how-ever lies elsewhere.

Season 2 indicates that the popularity of the league has seeped into to markets beyond the top metros. ISL has wit-nessed high traction in rural markets

where TVTs (television viewership in thousands) almost match ur-

ban TVTs with 47% of total TVTs com-ing from rural markets. (Urban: 237 million TVTs. Rural: 210 million TVTs) The average time spent by viewers has also increased by 36% this season as compared to last season. And season 2 saw a 77% stadium fill during the first 52 games as compared to a 72% stadium fill in Season 1 at the same stage.

The ISL is backed by broadcaster Star Sports which co-owns the IP and is cre-ating the proposition instead of merely showcasing. Industry folk say because the IP is owned, the league can be suc-cessful or fail, but it won’t go away. That’s perhaps not the attitude brands

like Puma which are inherently linked to the sport, would like to endorse.

F u r t h e r m o r e , says Puma India’s managing director Abhishek Ganguly, brands associating with the league need to think of the sport in the long term. “We made

early investments and continue to do so without thinking of ROI.” In order to sustain the league, any sport league for that matter, what’s of the utmost importance is quality of play. And let’s just say there’s much room for improve-ment in the ISL.

Expected to be the runt of the litter when it comes to sporting leagues by most external observers, the

Pro Kabaddi League, over just two sea-sons, has become one of the big dogs. It clocked in a cumulative viewership of 435 million, making it the second most watched sport in India according to Star. And far from being a purely small town phenomenon, Sanjay Gupta, COO, Star points out, “Metro contribution in the first two weeks of Season 2 was 65% to overall television viewership demon-strating that urban, millennial audienc-es have a strong affinity.” It even scored big online with viewership of Season 2 increasing nearly 20%.

Helping the homegrown sport along are its desi antecedents. Better foot-ball than the ISL is easily found; better kabaddi than the Pro Kabaddi League, not so much. Credit is also due to the packaging and filming: far from the lazy camera angles and play being ob-

scured by layers of dust, the memories that most Gen Xers have of the sport on Doordarshan. Instead, as Gupta points out, “The sport is high on intensity, en-ergy, fitness and skill and this guided everything from the marketing and campaign to a global best in class pro-duction team sourced with experts from full contact sports like soccer, wrestling, rugby etc.”

As Karthi Marshan, senior EVP and head – group marketing, Kotak Mahindra bank, puts it, for any league to succeed it needs to have ingredients that go beyond the sport. Kabaddi has that in backers like the Bachchans and industrialist Anand Mahindra. What it also has (at least thus far) is a regula-tory body that’s not at loggerheads with the league promoters. And so kabaddi appears on its way to becoming some-thing that appeals to the core youth de-mographic while also drawing in family audiences.

Promoters of the newest member in the league of leagues are hop-ing the following factors take

this newbie to IPL heights; 1) India’s long heritage of practicing the sport 2) The medals and attention Indian wrestlers have received on the inter-national stage, and might again at the Rio Olympics in 2016 3) The inclusion of women in the Pro Wrestling Leag ue 4) The buzz around two Bollywood movies about wrestling starring Aamir Khan a n d S a l m a n K h a n which are slated for re-lease next year 5) The might of a broadcaster which, in MSM’s Neeraj Vyas’ words, has given the league the same stature as IPL 6) 600,000 seconds of airtime spread across two weeks before the kick off. 7) And innovative features like the Force Meter that measures the force players exert and

the heartbeat monitor that measures the beat of team owners’ hearts dur-ing a match. While cast in the same model as the IPL, Vishal Gurnani, director, ProSportify, the promoters of the league that was put together in less than 60 days due to an open-ing in the sport calendar, believes

interest in any league will wane if it’s just about entertainment. “Yes, we have t he Bollywood entertain-ment quotient but that will never dilute the sporting quotient,” he says. Observers b e l i e v e P W L h a s al l the makings of a sustainable sport

property, largely due to the qual-ity of talent. As one insider quips, “They have the wrestling equivalent of a Messi and Ronaldo. There are no David Beckhams here playing for LA Galaxy.”

Pro Kabaddi League (PKL)Duration: 35 to 40 days Teams: 81st Season: 2014 Sponsors include TVS, VIP Frenchie, Bajaj, Thums Up, State Bank of India, Department of Atomic Energy, Flipkart, Mahindra JeetoBroadcaster: STAR SportsMarquee Players (MP): Ravinder Pahal, Kashiling Adake, Anup KumarStar Quotient (SQ): Abhishek Bachchan, Salman Khan (featured in a promo)

The Little Leagues

In order to sustain the league, any

sport league for that matter, what’s of the

utmost importance is quality of play

They have the wrestling equiva-lent of a Messi and Ronaldo. There are no David Beckhams here playing for LA Galaxy

Continued from Page 1 >>

THE ECONOMIC TIMES DECEMBER 09-15, 2015 2

Product: ETNEWMumbaiBS PubDate: 09-12-2015 Zone: BrandEquity Edition: 1 Page: BEPER1 User: sandeepd0203 Time: 12-04-2015 02:21 Color: CMYK

Theory of Relative-ityAfamous daily soap of yesteryears rightly

explained in its title track – Rishton ke bhi roop badalte hain – which roughly means that your relations evolve with time. Only for Sandip Tarkas, president of consumer strategy at Future Group, his relation with his relatives changed from that of affection to suspicion in 1995. This was when he moved to media planning with Fulcrum from an easily-comprehensible sales job. “Initially I would be enthusiastic about explaining to them that we’re the ones who put ads in the paper. Then they’d ask if we “print” them. I’d tell them we decide which ad goes where in which paper and at what frequency. Their next question would be: ‘What does the paper do then?’ I think after a point they started wondering if I had a real job at all. My parents either got it or let it be. My father had once told me I should do whatever I want to. Guess they didn’t bother enquiring as long as they knew I was happy at work.”Takeaway: One sales-pitch to sell yourself at the job, one for your family members to buy your job description.

Father of the BrideIt’s one thing explaining your profession

to your father. But you need special luck-supplements when you have to do the same explaining to your father-in-law. Ashish Bhasin, chairman & CEO of Dentsu-Aegis Group South Asia, had to go through this or-deal. “My father-in-law was in the Merchant Navy. In the late 80s, when I told him I’m an account executive at Lintas, he asked if I handled the agency’s accounts. I’d done an MBA in marketing and I was neither doing marketing nor sales. He was pretty convinced I was doing some sort of a con job. His logic was: How is an account executive not manag-ing the books of accounts?” So, when Bhasin moved to the media side of the business, he knew it was in everybody’s best interest that he didn’t say anything at all.Takeaway: Remember the Shakespearean extension – ‘What’s in a designation?’ Explain what you do instead of throwing its one-word substitution at Uncle Scrooge.

The Prodigal DaughterJasmin Sohrabji’s dad was a marine

engineer and knew very little about the world of advertising. He’d often ask her what she did that required her to spend so many hours at work if she wasn’t really creating any ads. One day, Sohrabji had a Eureka-

esque moment and came up with a one-line-description of her job: “I spend other people’s money,” she told her father. “I used to have a shoe-fetish at that time among many other things. There couldn’t have been a better thing for him to hear from his young daugh-ter. He was cool with whatever I was doing thereafter, as long as I wasn’t spending his money,” she quips. Currently CEO of South-East Asia and India at OMG, Sohrabji uses the same one-liner as an opening slide for her presentations in various colleges to explain the role of a media planner.Takeaway: This one line is all you need to satisfy the curiosity of every pestering family

member; except your father-in-law, of course.

Begani Shaadi Mein Abdullah Deewana

For the longest time, Sonali Malaviya’s par-ents couldn’t fathom why she had to spend

days on end in her office when she was neither creating ads, nor working on the brand/chan-nel’s side. “In 1999, when I was a media plan-ner with HTA (on Pepsi) it was a standing joke in my family circuit that I was the quintessen-tial Begani Shaadi Mein Abdullah Deewana.I just couldn’t explain why on some days I had to spend 72 hours at work just to make sure

my TV spots went on-air. After a point, they concluded this was a ploy for me to stay out of home and party all night. If only it were true!” Malaviya is marketing lead for Twitter India now. The trending jokes in the family have changed. We’ll keep them for another day.Takeaway: Occupational hazard of being a media planner: Folks presume you’re burn-ing the dance floor when you’re actually burning midnight oil at work.

The Middleman SyndromeIn 1995, when M A Parthasarathy(Maps),

chief product officer – South Asia at Mindshare, joined advertising, his family’s first question was whether he takes a hydrau-lic crane to go up and paint billboards. What made matters worse was that he was in client servicing. Once his uncle said: ‘There are two kinds of people — those who make things and those who sell things. What’re you doing in the middle?’ By the time he moved to me-dia planning, a fresh set of questions had ar-rived. “If you’re the one making sure there’s an optimum usage of client’s money, then what is the client doing?” they’d ask him. At this point he wasn’t sure if it was better when they’d assumed he paints hoardings. Takeaway: Only your family can dare to question your client’s purpose of existence in the work-chain.

The Media MisnomerCVL Srinivas was a products engineer with

TVS Group in the early 90s when he left to do an MBA at XLRI Jamshedpur. A desperate attempt to get a summer project in home-town Bengaluru landed him a job at Lintas, thanks to Fali Vakeel who thought Srini’s engineering background would ensure his comfort with numbers. His parents never got into the details of what he was doing to earn a living as long as he loved it. His extended family, friends from the science circle and neighbours had their issues though. Some thought he must be hanging out with celebri-ties because of a job in media, which wasn’t the case at all. Others thought he was actually a journalist donning some fancy designation because, well, media. “I too got an occasional ‘So, you’re painting those hoardings is it, I never knew you were a great painter’ from the neighbours,” recalls the current South Asia CEO of GroupM.Takeaway: If you have anything to do with media, you’ll be associated with all the myths around it.

shephali.bhatt@timesgroup.com

Is It a Mad Ad World?

What My Parents Think I Do—2

Got any funny emails floating around your office or at home? Seen a scam in someone’s portfo-lio? Please send them to us at bawdy.copy@timesgroup.comWe’ll dish all the dirt you dish to us

Who’ll Buy This One?We hear that this eCommerce brand, known for its prolific television and print spends, has put its media duties up for a review and the pitch has been underway. Our moles peg its annual spends at nothing less than `200 -`250 crores and its loss could be a severe blow to the agency network handling the current mandate. The buzz is that the account could be moving to the big daddy of the media-industry, which is sitting tight on chunk of the plum brands, but continues to remain hungry (and not foolish) for more business.

Not All Men Are EqualBizarre are the ways of the adver-tising world. This

creative power-house agency, keeps mak-ing news – good or bad. Murmurs of how a former creative head of this agency has been allowed to continue to be on a fat con-sultancy for select clients has created much angst amongst its ranks. This even as the agency’s finance department sharpshooters keep tracking the annual targets of the regu-lar employees has added salt to the wounds. The decision-makers at the agency were in deep and intense parleys not too long ago, on whether there should be a freeze on the increments this year going by the not so healthy state of the business. Really and we thought these guys were flush with funds going by the awards, metals and glory they keep adding to their bank-balance.

‘‘It started with us won-dering if we could get a sexy woman to sell our boxer shorts,” says a Leo Burnett staffer who

wishes to remain anonymous, tongue firmly in cheek. Not the most impres-sive of origin stories but the result is an ambitious project from Leo Burnett.

Make Your Mad Ad is a platform that allows users of classifieds site Olx to create a film for products they may want to sell. They can choose from 10 characters — including an as-tronaut, a crazy scientist, a guru or a hawker — enter details about the product that’s up for grabs like colour, price etc and then sit back and watch as the site generates a hu-morous video sales pitch.

It took nine months to put together. Leo Burnett worked in concert with its digital shop Indigo and Perfect Ten Films and shot 210 hours of footage. Leo Burnett claims no two ads will be the same, and the platform can gener-ate a billion different films.

Sites like Olx have always had to overcome inertia and the instinct to hoard. From the days of craigslist, the interface on online classifieds has been fairly simplistic: great for a less ambitious low bandwidth era, but an anomaly when other content has grown far more engaging. And so the need to create a platform that consumers find exciting, simple and something they keep coming back to. And which helps them create ads they’d be eager sharing with friends on social media: films that double up as entertainment.

Olx had its own ideas of how this ought to happen. Says Gaurav Mehta, CMO, Olx South Asia, “We are all about user generated content. People post ads, write their own stories etc.” The second paradigm at play was consumers viewing more video con-tent, particularly humour. Finally

Olx wanted something that would tap into pop culture. And so according to Saurabh Varma, CEO, Leo Burnett - South Asia, the question before the agency was, “If everybody could find an interesting exciting way of putting

up products and have their own TVC or 10, what would that feel like?”

Through the project, lines blurred between Leo Burnett, its digital shop Indigo and the team from Olx who were at the agency watching the

product take shape. Characters in the films, archetypes or exaggerations of people most consumers are familiar with, were trashed out in various plac-

es including chief creative officer Raj Deepak Das’s home. The videos had to be quick to load considering low bandwidth is

still a problem in large parts of the country. Different in-puts on product type, colour and price had to result in a differentiated ouput. After

working on a prototype for three months, Leo Burnett took it to Olx. Mehta confesses “I had to step out of my comfort zone.

Very frankly, I didn’t have this in mind when it came to pop culture.” But finally Leo Burnett’s conviction won an

approval. And then there was the price tag: while reluctant to get into specifics, Das assures us it cost a lot less than a big budget TV commercial.The site went live a week ago

and it remains to be seen if its mix of bespoke content from Olx’s

sellers, with pitches being made by an assortment of strange characters catches on. Mehta doesn’t expect “A 90 degree or 180 degree shift. It em-powers the ethos of creating content in an interesting way. If the content quality goes up, it’s a good success.” Varma himself is pushing for a larger number of transactions on Olx “and not just affinity or how people talk about it.”

Joono Simon, who founded digital specialist Brave New World is a tad sceptical: “Some ideas that work very well on paper don’t necessarily trans-late.” He believes the demo films don’t end with the clear message of ‘use the

Olx filmmaker to sell your own prod-ucts.’ The exaggerated humour could also do more harm than good. “When you make it too over the top, it’s far removed from the audience’s life and looks contrived.” The big barrier re-mains participation, usually the do-main of simple ideas like shot on an iPhone 6, he concludes.

We’ve lost count of the time agency CXOs have, with the air of impart-ing a great truth, deemed themselves ‘total solution providers’. Usually followed up with “Who knows? The final output need not necessarily be a TV commercial.” And then have gone on to shoot several hours of TVCs. Or done a film which lasts three min-utes instead of 30 seconds and plays on YouTube. Of course, TV ads are still relevant, effective and very easy to sell, but agencies feel compelled to pay lip service to “going beyond” them. Make Your Mad Ad has made the leap, not particularly bothered about whether what its got is a para-chute or if it’s likely to open. It is user generated content for a world that’s gradually realising that most us-ers are better at consuming content than ‘generating’ it. If nothing else, Leo Burnett and Olx deserve props for bravery and ambition. ‘At least they are doing something different’ as the age old justification for off-kilter creative endeavours go. But is ‘something different’ the same as something right, something good or at least something good enough? The answer lies in whether the characters like Bomb Bomb Bole and Astronaut Nasa Musa are appealing enough to get a nation that holds on to any old crap for either sentimental or vaguely utilitarian reasons, to start selling

ravi.balakrishnan@timesgroup.com

BAWDY COPY

Olx and Leo Burnett burn bridges with TV commercials for their latest project. How did ‘Make Your Mad Ad’ come about and will it work? By Ravi Balakrishnan

Here’s how different generations of media planners tried to explain their job to their family. In vain

Future Group’s Sandip Tarkas with his father

Dentsu-Aegis’s Ashish Bhasin posing next to a Maruti 800 on his first work-day at Lintas. His starting salary was `23.80 post tax.

Mindshare’s Maps with his parents (in the back-ground), aunt, wife and daughter

CVL Srinivas (second from top-left) did hang around with some celebs after all. With his child-hood hero Sunil Gavaskar, HTA Fulcrum’96OMG’s Jasmin Sohrabji with her father

Twitter’s Sonali Malaviya with her parents

SHEPHALI BHATT

Commission notwithstanding, creative admen always had it easy when it came to explaining their job to their fami-lies. “I make those ads you see,” was all they needed to say. Slowly, people started understanding the marketer’s job as well. Media planning, however, never managed to completely emerge from obscurity. We bet there’s some millen-

nial in an ad agency wondering what those media agency guys do, sitting in plush offices all day. In trying to convince their families they had proper legal jobs, a few of media folk have had career-epiphanies. But in most cases there was hardly any light at the end of the tunnel for these number-crunching mediawallahs. In our issue dated Nov 18, 2015, we brought to you

five stories of marketers explaining their job to their parents. This time, BE curates six such stories told from the point-of-view of media planners.

In any case the smartphones are becoming a very challenging category and the two largest markets – India and China – are seeing different challenges. With China hitting saturation, most players are now looking at India. Shares Karthik J, senior market

analyst, client devices, IDC (International Data Corporation), an American market research and advi-sory firm. “As more Chinese players enter India and have bigger focus on India’s smartphone market, global players will continue to face severe competition espe-cially at entry and mid-level segments.” (See the Market Share Chart)

One big shift has been consumers who are increas-ingly giving preference to smart telephony rather than smart phones. Says Shashin Devsare, executive direc-tor, Karbonn Mobiles (and a former Samsung-man), “Consumers are going to prefer brands that give them both the hardware and soft-ware experience and that is going to be the differen-tiator.” He views this cam-paign as a localised market-ing effort which would help the Korean brand broadbase and connect with more con-sumers. Something it needs to do fast.

Agrees and adds Girish Trivedi, co-founder of Monk Consulting, a Gurgaon based research and ad-visory firm, this more

“Indianised” and local rendition shows the importance the company is giving to the local market. However, he feels that while this approach may be a good entry to 4G space, in the long term they may have to revert back to product power where companies like Xiaomi, Micromax and Apple are knocking them hard.

amit.bapna@timesgroup.com

The director’s job is to connect and that is all that advertising can do in this over-saturated market: to connectDibakar Banerjee, Director & Film-maker

Singing a Different...Continued from Page 1 >>

Smartphone Vendor Market share — India

Source: IDC AP Quarterly Mobile Phone tracker 2015 Q3

others

Samsung

Micromax

IntexLenovo

Lava

34.2%

24%

16.7%

10.8%9.5%

4.7%

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If nothing else, Leo Burnett and Olx deserve props for bravery and ambition. Mad Ads For You is user generated content for a world that’s realising users are better at consuming content than ‘generating’ it

THE ECONOMIC TIMES DECEMBER 09-15, 2015 3

Product: ETNEWMumbaiBS PubDate: 09-12-2015 Zone: BrandEquity Edition: 1 Page: BEPER2 User: sandeepd0203 Time: 12-04-2015 01:32 Color: CMYK

DELSHAD IRANI

Brands, it seems, are su f feri ng from an acute case of FOMO (fear of missing out).

That would, to some extent, ex-plain Pepsodent’s curious, out of character tweet; “Pepsodent Germicheck #Intolerant only to germs”. It was the Unilever-brand’s cheeky reaction to the tragic hilarity that ensued over Aamir Khan’s comments at a public event. Social commen-tary is a territory generally occupied by Amul (see picture of Amul’s take on the Khan con-troversy). FOMO coupled with the need for brands to partici-pate in dominant “narratives” aka trending hashtags in yet another bid to be perceived as human, has created all man-ner of dilemma for marketers. (This year ShopClues deep dived into a politically-charged controversial subject when the brand redefined ‘ghar wapsi’ to advertise its 6PM to 9PM sale.) Today, however, the most cru-cial predicament it seems is not how to hijack conversa-tions rather which ones to participate in and which public discussions to avoid like the stalker-y new Airtel girl.

The alarming existential crisis brands, across catego-ries and countries, are going through has resulted in rather abnormal and often outright preposterous marketing ma-neuvers. It involves hijacking everything from news to what-ever cultural topic dominates virtual-watercooler conversa-tions. Just consider the tripe, not even adequately masquer-ading as true women empow-erment movements anymore, that’s being dished out by mar-keters and agencies who fancy themselves the lovechild of Rosie The Riveter and Benedict Cumberbatch. Frankly, a pan-dering ad with the brand’s logo and tagline slapped on to im-ages of women, and sometimes a Deepika Padukone pummeled by studio generated gale-force winds, is not what feminism looks like.

And before marketers began laboring under the foolish mis-apprehension that they could

peddle feminist rhetoric to amass public goodwill for their brands, it was corruption that kept them up at night. A few years ago they were on a mission to make Bharat swachh again, figuratively speaking. More of-ten than not these high-decibel attempts amounted to nothing more than tokenism, adulation from friends within and outside the industry and some metal, for good measure.

Never short on injustice, our world has provided again. This time it’s #IntolerantIndia. But this is not just any other cause du jour to unthinkingly latch onto for marketing mileage. Marketers must think twice be-fore superimposing their brand messages on the ‘intolerant or not’ discussion, although one

can hardly deem it so consid-ering the total lack of civility. For brands who wish to inter-ject here, there’s more at stake than just the danger of being labelled an exploitative, corpo-rate phony. We’re no longer talk-ing about relatively innocuous subjects like the environment, women empower ment and anti-corruption. Nobody was or is on the side of corruption, in the sense that people vehe-mently arguing India is ‘100% Corruption Free ! ’ Nobody, in their right mind that is, is against making the world safer and better for women. There are, however, many who believe India is becoming increasingly intolerant and an equal number, if not more, who think that’s complete hogwash. Perhaps that’s why the debate over India’s credentials as a secular, liberal and tolerant nation is un-like the trending topics brands have appropriated in the past.

And while we, and the industry (read BE’s story ‘Brovertising: A d s d e p i c t i n g b r o t h e r -hood in troubled times’ on ETBrandEquity.com) are all for brands taking a stand, if done in a meaningful way; marketers must also prepare to incur the wrath of countless who might, and well within their sovereign rights, disagree with that stand. Our two cents: pick your battles. There’s no shame in opting out of a fight. Because, as Bokonon tells us, “Sometimes the pool-pah* exceeds the power of hu-mans to comment.”

delshad.irani@timesgroup.com

If you’re a GenY adwallah, you should know that in the 70s and 80s, Calcutta (Kolkata) was a bigger advertising market than Bombay (Mumbai). Don’t be-

lieve us? Ask DDB Mudra Group’s group CEO & MD, Madhukar Kamath, who started his career with Clarion McCann Kolkata in 1976. He’ll tell you what it was like to have Satyajit Ray (yes, the legend himself) on the agency’s board.

Ask FCB Ulka’s Satbir Singh how he began his Advertising ka Safar with Trikaya Grey, for a monthly salary of `2000. He’ll agree no watering hole in Gurgaon, Mumbai or Bengaluru can ever be to the ad frat what Oly Pub (erst-

while Olympia, Kolkata) was to these mad men. Ask Dentsu’s (soon to be Ulka’s) Rohit Ohri about his blue Vespa scooter on which he and Grey’s former CEO Jishnu Sen used to carry artwork during their HTA Calcutta days. Equus’ Swapan Seth, BBH’s Subhash Kamath, Ogilvy’s Sumanto Chattopadhyay, sev-eral senior creatives/suits in your agen-cy — all of whom started off in Kolkata — have a Calcutta tale of their own.

They’ve seen the Calcutta that was once host to all big brands of that time — Bata, Britannia, Lipton, Brooke Bond, Shaw Wallace, Tata Tea, Kwality Ice creams, HMV, Exide, Dunlop, you name it. They’ve seen a time when HTA (now

JWT) and Clarion McCann (now McCann) used to be neck-and-neck, and Ogilvy

used to be a distant third, nationally. They’ve also seen the time when brands left the City of Joy one after another and when they themselves moved to other metros for bigger, better opportunities. They’ve seen how Calcutta slowly got erased out of the advertising map.

What’s wrong? What was once the biggest ad market in the country has roughly 100 people in its biggest agency office (JWT Kolkata) to-day. The largest spending clients left in the city are ITC, Emami, Tata Steel and Exide. Brain drain is massive because as Harsh Agarwal, director of Emami Group, explains: “People from Bengal are very creative. And they go for better opportunities elsewhere because there’s no demand here.” No wonder all his brand work is handled out of agencies based in Mumbai. There are lots of SMEs

but they obviously can’t afford network agencies. “Budget is always an issue,” says Sujoy Roy, senior CD at Ogilvy & Mather (Kolkata). Smaller clients have no structured departments and it’s dif-ficult to convince them to invest heavily in marketing. In addition to that, “They expect world’s best quality from you but pay peanuts in return, that too after in-cessant pestering,” says Anurag Hira, a veteran adman (ex Bates) who now runs his own design shop One by One Design in Kolkata.

All’s not lostYes, all’s not hunky dory. But there’s good stuff happening out of Kolkata that shouldn’t be overlooked, we feel. Ogilvy Kolkata handles a major chunk of Vodafone work which includes four circles — Bihar, Jharkhand and the sev-en sisters. They did the Bachendri Pal fame Tata Steel campaign back in 2011. The Greenply national campaigns are handled by their team. They handle re-gional work for clients like Titan, Tata Sky, Eno, design for Asian Paints and much more. “There’s no dearth of work here,” Roy says. People have just turned a blind eye to them, he feels. “But we’re treated as equals on every new opportu-nity within the agency. Sumanto shares

all briefs with us,” he adds.

Want to talk num-bers? Check t his : JWT Kolkata makes the same in terms of revenue as JWT Bengaluru, says Ayan Chakraborty, VP and director of client ser-vicing at JWT India (Kolkata). Contrary

to perception, says Nitin Kumar, a recent OgilvyOne Bengaluru migrant to Ogilvy Kolkata, there are a lot of opportunities to do good work in the city. That should explain why a non-Bengali is treating this stint not as an experiment but a se-rious investment in his advertising ca-reer. It’s an interesting city, Kumar, says. One that inspires his writing and keeps it dynamic. He finds the pitching scene heavier in Kolkata than Bengaluru and teams generally more energetic and seri-ous. Cal-vertising doesn’t sound all that near-defunct now, does it?

How to Korbo Lorbo Jeetbo Re?Kolkata is a great place (and cheap also) to come for a few years and make a good portfolio, says Ogilvy’s Roy. It’s a place that gives you a bigger canvas than your network’s headquarters, allows you to work on more brands thereby taking some of the category-led fatigue away, says Raji Ramaswamy, SVP and manag-ing partner, JWT Kolkata. Ramaswamy (who speaks conversant Bangla now) was in JWT Mumbai since 1995. Seven years ago, she was offered to head the Kolkata office and took it as a challenge. “You have to be entrepreneurial when man-aging a local office. It is great learning. We are going to scale up by focusing on our strengths — mid-level businesses, design, activation and digital,” she says.

Exide has come back to Kolkata, may-be more clients will revert to the city in some time. Maybe they won’t. What Cal-vertising can do in the meanwhile, says Hira, is raise the bar of its own cre-ativity and find newer symbols to rep-resent Bengal in the communication. Maybe that’ll put the city back on the ad map, sooner.

shephali.bhatt@timesgroup.com

ANIRBAN BORA

Anurag Hira (One by One Design) feels Cal-vertising has been at the cusp far too long. The thakaan needs to move out

Ayan Chakraborty (JWT) feels tech boost and more Exide-like returns will reverse Cal-vertising’s fate

Nitin Kumar left hometown Bengaluru to explore the “ad scene” in Kolkata three months ago and is loving it so far

Sujoy Roy (Ogilvy) works in nativeland, on national brands, and doesn’t spend four hours in traffic to reach home

Raji Ramaswamy thinks JWT Kolkata can give adfolk a canvas JWT Mumbai cannot: multiple businesses

Kolkata: Missing From The Ad Map BE trams its way through the streets of the City of Joy to figure out how to revive Cal’s glorious ad past. By Shephali Bhatt

Pick YourBattles

For brands who wish to interject here, there’s more at stake than

just the danger of being labellewd an exploitative, corpo-rate phony

I have been part of the “advertis-ing” industry for over two decades. Have sat in seminars and confer-ences pointing towards the need for redefining the practice. The only change I witnessed is the in-flux of super specialised verticals set up by most agencies, resulting in incremental noise by market-ers to “sell” their products/service to consumers and agencies “up-selling”/“cross-selling” those spe-cialisations to clients.

New age companies are replac-ing fundamentally strong long-running companies, largely based on two factors, A) Their investors’ willingness to wait for long-term returns B) Brand love by consum-ers. While the shareholder mindset on returns from the already profit-able companies cannot be changed overnight, brand love and a pos-sible impact of the same on the bal-ance sheets can surely be a reality.

How can there ever be “love” if transaction is the only motive in an interaction?

Almost 250 million people have installed paid applications to avoid advertising. YouTube just introduced a subscription model for watching videos without ads. A survey from the UK says only 4% of ads are seen and liked by consum-ers, 7% seen but not liked, 89% nei-ther seen nor liked.

I think the age-old theory about the money spent on advertising being wasted should now read as “80% of my advertising budget is wasted and I clearly know this is that 80% I bombard consumers with, asking them to “buy” my brand”. Yet 30 seconds sermons are still produced!!

For any impactful change, we need to embrace disruption. We need radical thinking and ac-tion; a mindset that allows brand owners and agencies to look be-yond algorithms. In my piece in the Internationalist Magazine in 2008, I had written “without a good measure of creativity in its

application, no media specialist can initiate inspiring media plans purely from computer hard drives loaded with magical mathemati-cal algorithms”

The only real disruption that I see possible is to stop “Advertising” a n d s t a r t “ T r u e V e r t e x i n g ” t h e b r a n d s . T r u e Ver t ex i n g i s t o share the true vi-sion and purpose of a brand with consumers for the brand to reach the Vertex, the highest point it can go to, with con-sumer empathy. Purpose is not about tactical ideas developed for a season. Purpose will have to be based on incredibly rich human insights, not from researches done to validate an already existing hy-pothesis, but by real understanding of what people seek.

Insightful story-telling, understand-ing how brands can become a tissue be-tween consumers and technology and how data can play an overarching role are the need of the hour.

In my opinion, size will stop making any difference in the foreseeable future. Clients will look for sma r t solutions. O r g a n i s a t i o n s , which are able to navigate the clients through this landscape with the ability to stitch together content data technology in a meaningful manner will overtake even the large communication companies.

Philips’ global marketing head, Eva Barret, commenting on her company’s content-driven mar-

keting strategy says “I’m look-ing for real creativity. We work directly with our media partner in developing content, as opposed to through the agency. If our part-

ners understand what we do, they can write better stories.”

Harley-Davidson’s chief marketing officer Mark-Hans Richer says his company works with a lot of shops and takes a “boutique” ap-proach. “We have not had a lead agency in about five years,”

Brad Jakeman, presi-dent of PepsiCo’s global beverage group says “g loba l a l i g n ment agency is a dinosaur concept” and he ques-tions the level of in-novation. “I am really worried that this model is not going to bend -- it’s going to break if we don’t really think about how to innovate”

I d e a s d e v e l o p e d around the purpose theme must be able to deliver multi-sensory impact through wonderful execu-tion, most telling the consumers what’s in it for them. Love will begin here!

For this new way of consumer connection to succeed, agencies

need a mindset of brand success, not just in theory but practice rath-er than profits for their specialised verticals. Money will follow.

The mindset needed at the brand owner side is to actually under-stand that each of the consumers are brand ambassadors compared to the highly paid celebrities who would never perhaps even use the brand once in their lifetime.

I’m not for a minute debating or doubting that some endorsements work. But most of that’s in the uni-dimensional, transactional brand-consumer relationship world. But the new world needs some brave hearts to start looking at the meaning of brand building a bit differently. Else, all of the top, long running companies of the globe will be replaced by new age ones. It is, then, not surprising why an Air BnB is valued multi-ples times higher than Hyatt

The brand love and positive sen-timents, when the True Vertexing is practiced will also have a bear-ing on how those companies get viewed and consequently on the balance sheets and soon the impact of True Vertexing can be really tracked. This is my dream!.

(The author is managing director and co-founder,

triggerbridge, a newly launched,disruptive model,

that he calls the unagency. Views expressed are personal)

WHEN ADVERTISING NO LONGER CUTS IT

S YESUDAS

In my opinion, size

will stop making any

difference in the

foreseeable future. Clients

will look for smart solutions

AFTER HAVING SPENT OVER TWO DECADES IN ADVERTISING,

S YESUDAS BELIEVES IT’S TIME TO REINVENT THE WHEEL

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Regional work for Vodafone by Ogilvy Kolkata - Sarees folded to make a calendar

Campaign for Atletico De Kolkata (an ISL team), by JWT Kolkata

Still from Greenply TVC, by Ogilvy Kolkata

Work for Turtle — a local fabric brand, by JWT Kolkata

Ogilvy logo in Bangla,by Ogilvy Kolkata

Rotary International work, by JWT Kolkata

Regn.No.MAHENG/2002/6711 Volume 14 Issue No. 49Published for the Proprietors, Bennett Coleman & Company Ltd. by R. Krishnamurthyat The Times Of India Building, Dr. D.N.Road, Mumbai 400 001 Tel. No. (022) 6635 3535, 2273 3535, Fax- (022)-2273 1144 and printed by him at (1) The Times of India Suburban Press, Akurli

Road, Western Express Highway, Kandivili (E), Mumbai 400 101. Tel. No. (022) 28872324, 28872930, Fax- (022) 28874230 (2) The Times of India Print City, Plot No. 4, T.T.C. Industrial Area, Thane Belapur Road, Airoli, Navi Mumbai-400708 and (3) TIMES PRESS, Plot No. 5A, Road No. 1, IDA Nacharam Ranga Reddy District, Hyd-

erabad-500076. Editor: Ravi Balakrishnan(Responsible for selection of news under PRB Act). © All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of the Publisher is prohibited.

THE ECONOMIC TIMES DECEMBER 09-15, 2015 4

Product: ETNEWMumbaiBS PubDate: 09-12-2015 Zone: BrandEquity Edition: 1 Page: BEPER3 User: sandeepd0203 Time: 12-04-2015 01:34 Color: CMYK