Contract India is back in the reckoning, with new leadership, new business and an A-Team drawn from senior management that unifies the agency across offices
By Saloni Dutta
Walk into the Contract India office on the 15th floor of India Bulls Finance Centre near Elphinstone and you get a bird’s eye view of Mumbai’s local trains chugging by. Like the always busy railway, the Contract office too is a hub of activity, bearing out their credo of ‘Work, not Words’. We are meeting RanaBarua, CEO of Contract India, along with Ashish Chakravarty, National Creative Director, and Rohit Srivastava, Chief Strategy Officer, and they tell us that since the new leadership took over, this is the first time the three of them are talking together.
With Rana Barua taking up the CEO’s mantle in February 2013, the last 18 months have been eventful for Contract India. The agency has been at the centre of conversations with 20+new client wins and a closely orchestrated leadership team. “We have come together as a very unified team with a lot of mutual trust and respect for each other’s capabilities. It is very difficult to come together at a difficult stage, but we have,” says Barua. What has also caught on at the agency is the system of enhanced accountability to clients by way of a variable working model. “Most of our clients have very clear parameters of results that they want and we work on clearly defined and mutually agreed parameters to deliver solutions,” explains Barua.
The top management team claims to have a very granular sense of what is going on and the work happening at the agency. “That shows not only in the output but in conversations too because clients like to have confidence that the seniors aren’t people whose faces they see only at pitches, or who make the right words at the right fora and then are not really clued in on the nuts and bolts of the process. It is intense stuff,” says Srivastava.
The Winning spree
Contract worked hard and added to its business with a number of account wins over the last year. “When this team started out, about a year back, there was only one way to look, which is up. Like Alexander who would walk ahead and burn the bridge behind him, we inherited a place with a burnt bridge, so to say, so we had only one way to go, which is forward. So we went that much harder, faster and thankfully we all had our equations pre-set, and the determination and energy was even,” says Chakravarty.
Srivastava calls the trio of him, Barua and Chakravarty an “interesting combination”. “I have been with Contract for 25 years, Ashish has spent a good few years in Contract and then he went out and came back, so he had a bit of Contract in him and he has a fresher perspective, and then we have Rana who had been out of the industry, so he came with no baggage, and to me the combination has been wonderful. The other thing I feel is that some parts of our DNA have actually been unchanging over the years, and we have a very hands-on and work focussed approach to doing things,” he observes. Therefore, for a lot of the new business wins, “clients are sensing an agency which is really in the trenches with them and trying to sort out the issue - not just thinking of the next campaign but seeing the challenge and trying to find a solution”, he says.
Meanwhile, one hears whispers in advertising circles about undercutting being at the root of many of Contract’s business wins. Taking his detractors head on, Barua says, “People making these allegations should try and speak to those clients who have come on board. These are large and respected clients and get upset by conversations like these. So I can either brush it off or I can just laugh. If you look at our growth - people hired, office spaces grown - nothing comes for free.Everything is accounted for in the systemin a WPP company.We can’t grow just like that, and you won’t have Sir Martin Sorrell mentioning Contract in that case like he did recently.He said that there is massive organic growth still left in India, and the proof of the pudding is Contract.”
Barua also adds that big clients who moved on for various reasons earlier are re-engaging with Contract on various fronts like Design, Digital, etc. Also, a few of them are apparently in talks with the new team to hear about the changes that have happened and the new investments, and want to understand who are the people on board. “Some of them would be with us by early next year,” states a confident Barua.
Adding to the A-Team
Contract India is powered by its A-Team – made up of 36 odd people drawn from the VP level or above,well amalgamated across the three offices and different agencies. “An interesting pay-off of the concept is that they are a bunch of people across functions, across disciplines, across geographies and that kind of takes away the silos,”comments Srivastava.“The A-Team holds client relationships, taking all the angst from us, they can understand the pressures and how we work as a system.”
Plans are afoot to build the A-Team to a larger entity, calling it the A-Plus team. It is a mentorship programme, wherein each member of the A-Team takes on two or three people across disciplines who they feel are the potential stars and works very closely with them. “The A-Plus team is the next bunch of key people we are mentoring without any biases, and that builds another 90 odd people who are working very closely with the A-Team. They start feeling the accountability and responsibility and that is the new reinforcement that we are trying to build into the system,” says Barua.
“The good thing about the A-Team is that there are no boundaries. It actually works absolutely independently and seamlessly. So on a given day when there is a lot of demand or pressure at the Mumbai office, an A-team member from Delhi will come down and work here and people are absolutely fine with it, which is very unlike what you see in a lot of agencies,” he adds.
Right now, the agency is gearing up to meet the challenge of the festive season coming up with a lot of campaigns going on air, and to keep up with the momentum of growth scaled in the last year-and-a-half.
Feedback: saloni.dutta@exchange4media.com
