Mike Cooper, CEO, PHD Worldwide, has had a great year 2014 with the agency winning a large array of awards. He lauds the momentum in the India market, stresses on hiring right and tells us why media agencies need creative technologists for the future
By Priyanka Mehra
Mike Cooper, CEO, PHD Worldwide, has always been a big believer in India. He has been coming to India since the early 1990s; his first job in Asia was working with Saatchi & Saatchi where he was responsible for India and frequently visited the country. Cooper has had a great year 2014 for PHD worldwide; it was the most successful media network at the 2014 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, winning more Gold Lions than any other agency. A total of four Golds and one Bronze were awarded, with a further 43 awards as the credited media agency, bringing PHD’s tally of awards to 48. Apart from this, the most recent feather PHD has added to its cap is the Brand Culture Grand Cristal for Kan Khajura Tesan (KKT) at the recently concluded Cristal Festival 2014, along with two Saphhires and one Emerald. In all, PHD has won almost 85 awards for its work in 2014.
Cooper became CEO of PHD Worldwide in 2007, responsible for growing the Omnicom-owned network, which today has over 80 offices in 66 countries. He started working in advertising at Saatchi & Saatchi in London in 1984. He joined the media department and was transferred to the Hong Kong office as media director in 1989 and the following year he became regional media director. In 1991, he was appointed CEO for Saatchi in Hong Kong and in 1993, was put in charge of North Asia. He then moved to CNBC Asia in 1995, in charge of sales, distribution and marketing before joining Omnicom as CEO for OMD Asia Pacific in 1997.
Cooper was the driving force behind OMD’s expansion in the region, which grew to 26 offices and became the No. 2 media specialist in Asia Pacific as well as one of the most awarded media agencies in APAC.
Today, PHD is one of the world’s fastest growing and most awarded media agencies, with over 3,000 staff working for global brands like Unilever, Bentley, GSK, Elizabeth Arden, Canon, Porsche, Hyatt, Starbucks and Mondelez. PHD was named Global Media Agency of the Year 2013 at the Cristal Awards and also received Agency of the Year accolades in the UK, New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Shanghai, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Sweden for the same year.
Q & A: ‘Being a challenger brand forces you to be more innovative’
‘Both OMD and PHD will build success stories in the future’
‘Our people are our game-changers’
Getting the right leadership
“We were slightly late to the marketplace here in India with OMD and later with PHD. We knew we had to hire the absolute best person in the marketplace. Look at what we did around the rest of Asia; wherever we were operating we tried to hire the best leader in every single market. And with Jasmin Sohrabji, we got very close. I am a huge fan of Jasmin’s. Talent is so crucial. Hiring the right person at the top of the organization, who’s got the courage, the relationships, and who can inspire people, who can win clients, is so important. When I first met Jasmin, I knew she was the right person for us,” says Cooper.
Setting up a new system in a new geography is all about getting the right people, as Cooper sees it. So after all these years, does he have an instinctive approach while hiring? Cooper agrees that after setting up OMD all over APAC, one does develop a sort of sixth sense for these things. “You have a certain kind of chemistry with somebody. And from Day 1, my instincts told me Jasmin was the right one, we also had very good chemistry; we still do,” he says.
With both OMD and PHD having grown from strength to strength over the years, the trust seems to have paid off, especially since Omnicom made a pretty late entry into the India market. “It’s great coming back and seeing the momentum they’ve got going on. If you look at OmnicomMedia Group, both OMD and PHD have won a lot of business; they are winning a lot of awards, making great progress. It is a very high quality operation, in terms of the people they hire, the management and the work they do. It’s fantastic, you can’t ask for more than that. Considering that we came to the market late, we’ve seen amazing progress,” adds Cooper.
Launching at the right time
After an unofficial existence during which it handled clients like the digital leg of Hindustan Unilever's business, PHD was officially launched in September last year. “We could’ve started PHD two or three years before we did, but it wouldn’t have had a great story in the marketplace and we didn’t feel we had the right leadership at that time,” explains Cooper.
Winning Unilever’s digital business and getting associated with the largest advertiser in the country was a key moment for PHD, he adds, calling it a game-changing moment and one that ensured PHD got off to a great start.
“They (Unilever) are the most admired advertiser in India. Certainly, globally they are the most admired. Growing the Unilever relationship as we do the global communications planning work for Unilever out of London and Singapore and now New York as well, was a game-changing moment for us. You got to have an anchor client. Unilever is probably the best one to have. It has certainly helped us a lot and given us a lot of attention in the marketplace,” he adds.
Disadvantage becomes advantage
Coming late to the market has advantages and disadvantages, says Cooper. One of these advantages, he says, is that you can learn from other people’s mistakes. The other, according to him, is it enables one to adapt to the constantly changing media environment. He gives the example of how Indian media has evolved in the last 10 years due to progress in technology, the rise of smartphones and wireless technology and the penetration of broadband and mobile in the country.
“Technology is what drives changes in media. We took our approach to the market based on a lot of those changes in the marketplace. So we are more digitally-focused. We are more mobile-focused. We are more communications planning focused. We try to position PHD as a media agency for tomorrow,” he says. “This attitude has led PHD to turn into a media agency clients go to when they are focusing on the future. The work that we have done here is just outstanding.”
Training creative technologists
What does the road hold for PHD going forward? One thing Cooper is focused on is the increasingly important role that technology will play in media. According to him, the ‘big value’ in the future for media professionals is being creative technologists. “You’ve got to be very familiar with technology and you’ve got to be creative in terms of its applications. And finding those right kinds of people who can do that is quite difficult. That’s what we need to do,” he says.
So what needs to be done to ensure that the right talent pool is available in the future? The most important thing, says Cooper, is to foster people who understand technology and its application creatively. “We need to train people to think this way; to look at the opportunity with technology. And doing it in a creative way to engage with consumers,” concludes Cooper.
