Sam Balsara, Chairman of Madison World & Vikram Sakhuja, Partner & Group CEO of its Media & OOH divisions, begin their innings; bat for new positioning to get the agency future-ready
BY SRABANA LAHIRI
Sam Balsara, Chairman of Madison World, is happy. The six-month wait to have ‘strategy man’ Vikram Sakhuja on board has ended, and Madison World is just getting used to an equity partner, and the new head of its Media and OOH divisions. When we meet them, Sakhuja is just four days old at the agency and yet to get into the nitty gritty of it all, but the two men share a camaraderie that is visible and both are equally excited as they talk about Madison World’s new positioning, Madison Next, designed to make the agency future-ready and up the level of service it offers its clients. Madison Next rests on four pillars – focus on Digital, empowering youngsters, promoting internal talent to senior level management roles and focus on research, insights and big data.
The first leg of Madison Next has just been rolled out – with Balsara announcing the re-structuring of the Madison OOH senior management team, calling it “natural evolution” through a series of promotions, some shifts from MOMS to Platinum and vice-versa, creating opportunities for growth and new leadership.
Meanwhile, though Madison closed the year 2014-15 on a high, with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s massive media campaign to its credit, it lost Airtel, a big client, soon after. The agency subsequently won many new accounts including Snapdeal, DHFL, Bandhan Bank, Viber, Lenskart.com, Zivame.com, Cricbuzz, gaana.com, MagicBricks.com, Total Environment and Amul Hosiery (JG Hosiery), etc. But last month, it again lost a big client, Mondelez, following a global media realignment by the company, for which Madison was not invited to pitch.
In this backdrop, as Sakhuja takes charge, Balsara’s brief for him is simple - move the agency from efficiency to effectiveness.
‘I will talk the effectiveness game with all our clients’
THE TARGET CONUNDRUM
While Sam Balsara has always stressed that the USP of Madison is to “allow people to work with budgets rather than targets”, Sakhuja has been part of a highly target-oriented MNC culture focused on tangible growth. In fact, Sakhuja’s brief in his previous role as global CEO of Maxus, touted to be the growth engine of GroupM and holding company WPP, was to put in place a plan to fuel further growth. So, does one see a conflict there or assume that there will be a genuine culture shift for either Madison or Sakhuja?
“Obviously, the reason why Vikram is here is to help Madison change. But what I am hoping is that Vikram will not throw the baby out with the bath water. There must be a few good things we are doing now; I hope he will retain those. But there are possibly quite a few wrong things we are doing, quite a few things which we are not doing… and I am hoping that Vikram with his width and depth of experience will introduce Madisonites and our clients to these concepts. It will hopefully be a good mix of old and new,” says Balsara.
Here, Sakhuja reiterates that the “target culture is a MNC-typical thing”. “When there is a global company, they work through all the countries by setting certain growth targets and then the people go about delivering them. Local companies are driven more while trying to build intrinsic value and obviously there is a P&L at the end of it, but the obsessive factor is not the P&L. That is a very healthy approach, to create value within the organization as distinct from an MNC where a person comes with a three-to- five-year horizon and has to take the sales up by so much, profit up by so much and everything is short term. One of the things I always loved about Madison is its client orientation. I definitely want to take that legacy and build on it, besides bringing data, technology and digital into the mega frame,” he explains.
ON TO MADISON NEXT
Balsara’s experience and sharp sense of the media domain, coupled with Sakhuja’s strategic expertise and skill in dealing with clients, promises to be a killer combination as the agency adopts its new positioning. “Madison has a suite of 22 tools. In the last year itself, we have come up with some fantastic new tools specially created for new digital and e-commerce players. Their output is both on Digital and non-Digital, and they tell us what is working or not working, what we can do to make a media plan more efficient and increase our RoI. At the operations level, at the heart of our vast television operations is Adwise, which is now at the fifth level of upgrade, and has been given a Digital link. We are hoping to link it to Print as well, to make our operations seamless,” says Balsara.
“As for Madison Next, I’ll let Vikram take a closer look at what we have planned and I’m sure he will have something very valuable to contribute and maybe modify some of its legs,” Balsara adds.
Sakhuja is all for an integrated approach, and cites the instance of former Print buyers in the UK (where Print is on a steady decline) becoming Digital buyers with great success. “Print buyers are one of the most savvy local buyers, and they understand the tricks of the trade in a number of ways that Digital buyers will never understand. That was a very successful experiment, and a testimonial to the strategy that Sam is talking about right now,” says Sakhuja.
CHALLENGES BEFORE MADISON
“The first challenge is that we are the only Indian agency,” says Sam Balsara. “All our competitors are global agencies. In presentations, there is a certain awe they can bring. They say ‘We are in 136 countries employing 1,50,000 people and our billings and revenues are so many billions. We talk in hundreds of crores’. But frankly, all this doesn’t daunt me. I have always believed that big ideas and clear intent with integrity can beat billions of dollars any day.” Of course, sometimes the billions of dollars get the better of Balsara, by his own admission, but by and large, that is not the case. The second challenge, according to him, is what all other agencies face - client pressure, pressure on remuneration… “It makes us have to do with fewer resources than what we actually need, to offer 100% service. Talent is not available in plenty, though the DNA we have created at Madison has enabled us to generate talent at senior levels. We continuously have people within Madison who are ready to take on more responsibility. But because Madison does not follow very ambitious growth targets, many of our valuable talent have to look outside and they get lapped up very easily,” rues Balsara.
He also feels that the consumer and his media habits have become far more complex, fragmented and possibly more difficult to understand, and to take advantage of it in advertising terms is a challenge for all media planners.
LAUNCHING SOON: A NEW DIGITAL UNIT @MADISON
Talking to IMPACT in April, Sam Balsara had mentioned venturing into a standalone digital agency that would work independently of Madison Media. “It is still work in progress,” he states, “You will hear about it at the appropriate time. Madison is today geared for a certain kind of client; it is a custom shop, not a mass factory, in a way designed for certain large advertisers. I feel that the digital medium will be able to attract a large number of small advertisers too, but I don’t think the DNA of Madison Media is geared to handle this clientele.
Therefore, in addition to having all the prowess of a digital agency, our DNA has to be such that it can successfully handle a large number of small advertisers, of which I think there are going to be an abundance in the years to come, thanks to the Modi government.”
Sakhuja adds that the two of them have already discussed this. “One of the biggest catalysts of Digital growth is going to be development of content. I am not using the word creative, but development of content for all the various platforms - Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn have different content needs. Quite often, we wait for a creative agency or a third party to create content; people are also a little lost in terms of who should be developing content. So as Sam says, there needs to be a digital agency which has some of this content capability. At Madison, the number of creative talent in Digital is arguably higher than it is at most other media shops, primarily because it is to some extent taking the creative as much as taking the media plan which is going to help digital.”
To deliver value to the client, the digital agency must offer an integrated creative and media product, much in the same way that agencies in the 60s and 70s used to deliver an integrated creative and media product, feels Balsara. “Maybe 20 years from now, further specialization will come into digital and then maybe again this may get split, but this is not the appropriate time to split creative, media and Digital. Besides, I think there isn’t infrastructure in this country to provide creative digital to advertisers at a reasonable cost. That’s why people like us have found an easy entry into this area. Clients are looking for a quick and easy solution that meets their communication need, and I think media agencies are better placed to provide it,” he says.
Feedback: srabana@exchange4media.com
