By SRABANA LAHIRI
Within a year of his appointment as CEO of IPG Mediabrands India, Shashi Sinha has streamlined operations of the company’s agencies, made the most of existing talent and brought digital to the core of the business, while consolidating his position in the media agency space with big account wins such as Reckitt Benckiser, Samsung and Sony to garner 21% market-share
Shashi Sinha is a happy man. A little over a year after his appointment as CEO of IPG Mediabrands India, he has achieved what he set out to do - consolidate operations of the company’s various agencies, make best use of the existing talent and put digital at the core of the business. Add to that big client wins such as Reckitt Benckiser, Samsung and Sony in 2013, taking the company’s market-share to 21%, and things probably couldn’t get any better for Sinha. But he is still very far from being No. 1 in the Indian media agency space, with WPP’s GroupM continuing its reign at the top. Sinha admits this, but also makes it clear that he is not in the running for the No. 1 slot, at least not now.
EMPHASIS ON QUALITY
Immediately after Sinha took over, industry-watchers waited to see how he would make IPG Mediabrands India stand up to the hegemony of GroupM; and a few months later, there was the additional threat from the newly merged Publicis Omnicom Group (POG), another contender for the No. 2 slot. But Sinha has not been chasing Group M. “I have no desire to become No. 1, nor am I looking over my shoulder to see who will become No. 2. Chasing volumes alter your mindset, make you take decisions in a particular way, perhaps taking attention away from quality,” he says. While it is one business strategy to chase volumes, another way is to deliver quality and let the wins come when they do, believes Sinha. “We were lucky that we won the recent big accounts, but at least 6 to 7 times at various stages of those pitches, I would have said ‘let it go’. That’s my strategy,” he adds. “I have never chased size. Growing marketshare is a byproduct. My bosses too have faith in me and never push me.”
Meanwhile, Sinha is confident that POG can’t catch up easily. “Talking of our acquisitions, all the three big businesses (Sony, Samsung and Reckitt Benckiser) we won have come from the Publicis Groupe. I have gained, they have lost. I did not plan it that way, but that is what has happened. It is very easy to say ‘We will catch up, we want to be Number 2’; in reality, it is not. Just by putting the companies together, they can’t become No. 2. They have to do something dramatically different,” he states.
GETTING TEAMS TOGETHER
When Sinha became CEO, the group’s agencies – Lodestar UM, Initiative and BPN – functioned as completely separate entities, competing in the market. His first objective was to get the teams together. “It took me a lot of effort to bring them together. Now, we have a four-member board with the agency heads aided by the CEOs of Interactive Avenues and Reprise, and they work wonderfully as a team,” says Sinha, who preferred to focus on key people who were already in the system rather than bring in talent from outside to shore up operations. He realigned people in key positions, appointing Nandini Dias as CEO of Lodestar UM, Anamika Mehta as CEO of Initiative and moving Delhi boy Premjeet Sodhi to head Initiative, Delhi. In Bangalore, where there was a churn, he brought in Vaishali Verma, familiar with the Bangalore market, to run both Lodestar UM and Initiative. He even brought back people who had worked with the company earlier – for example, Mukti Kumaran, formerly with Lodestar, who had gone on a sabbatical and joined another company – with great success. “Mukti and Suresh (Balakrishna) have done a great job of the Heinz pitch for BPN,” says Sinha, adding that his efforts have paid off and now the agencies help and support one another, and believe they are a team.
DIGITAL AT THE CORE
Sinha’s second objective was to build strategic capability in Digital, and with the acquisition of Interactive Avenues (IA) in March 2013, it became a reality. Aligning IA along with the company’s existing Reprise under Mediabrands Audience Platform (MAP), he made full use of the array of data-driven digital services and technologies to reach mobile, social, video, applications and e-commerce. IA continues to run independently, while being aligned under MAP, and helps agencies find, buy and engage their most valuable audiences in real time. All this allowed Sinha to add scale to the company’s digital functions. “We went ahead of many other Indian agencies, only matched perhaps by GroupM,” says Sinha. “Our Digital capability played a key role in the big account wins. Today, most conversations at pitches are around Digital.”
PROFITS BUILD MORALE
The third thing that Sinha wanted to ensure when he became CEO was profitability for all the agencies under the IPG Mediabrands umbrella in India. Some agencies such as Lodestar UM and Initiative were profitable, but BPN and Rapport were not as they did not have critical mass. “I made them all profitable,” asserts Sinha. “Whenever you say you are working for a profitable company, it builds confidence. The morale goes up and people feel empowered. That is what happened, and I believe it was key to our big wins.”
Also key is the fact that Sinha’s bosses gave him a free hand, never putting pressure on him. “My international bosses let me be, and that’s why I could implement my strategies,” admits Sinha. “Finally, winning business is an outcome, often luck of the draw. We happened to win, but it was more of the trust factor, about putting systems in place and believing in people.”
CRM, THE GAME-CHANGER
Sinha believes that if he makes a success out of the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) business, it will be a game-changer. “CRM is the future, an end-to-end service from lead generation to making the sales call to going to the dealer. It will be a big differentiator and give us the cutting edge. However, it may take time. For a media agency to offer CRM with its scale, clout and insights is a deadly combination. But we have not got a model which is scalable, so of the few pilots we have done, some have failed and some have done well, but overall, we are very confident,” he says. Meanwhile, sharing revenues and optimizing resources are extremely important in the scheme of things for Sinha - if there are group resources, they should be utilized to the hilt. For example, Lintas had a rural wing called Linterland, and Sinha says he actually took them to a few pitches. “IPG is a big group though people don’t realize its leverage potential. I have great collaborative relations with Draftfcb, Lowe and McCann, and they work. Clients often miss a collaboration between creative and media agencies. Our Matrix tool allows it,” says Sinha who is known to get along well with people.
Q & A: ‘Any global company would want to have our talent’
One of Shashi Sinha’s biggest worries is dilution of quality as the company achieves scale, and his main expectation is to export talent from India to the global level. Excerpts from a conversation with Srabana Lahiri
Q] What are the big challenges for you in 2014?
To wrap up the CRM mechanism that I have been talking about and make it big, and probably launch Orion Trading which is one of our global companies and which we don’t have the bandwidth to launch right now. On CRM, I have done very successful pilots and experiments to check the mechanism. Any client we have approached has shown interest in it. So far I have not figured out how to wrap it up and scale it up, but I have confidence in the team that we will make it successful.
I also worry that with scale, we may tend to lose quality. You are in the business of understanding consumers and insights and mining that data, but because you have such a wealth of data, you need extra capability and there is a bit of a mismatch in this. This is one of my key focus areas for 2014 - to ensure that even if we add Rs 1000 crore business in 7-10 days like we did in 2013, quality and process do not suffer.
Q] How does IPG Mediabrands India contribute to the company globally?
We won Heinz, even as the global pitch was happening. Any global company would want to have our talent. Now we are just building critical mass for ourselves to export talent; there are standing instructions from IPG allowing me to go wherever I want to go. A lot of stuff that we are doing is very important globally, for example the CRM project, which is the first of its kind, and is showcased all over the world. Even Matt Seiler showcases it wherever he goes.
Q] What are your investments in technology and tools?
We have Hero and Matrix, and Blackbox is a global tool - all the process analysis happens in the US, but we invest in it and refresh data every 18 months. It is tailor-made for clients. As we start picking up more businesses, be it soaps or health drinks or mobile phones, we can catch those audiences, as the tool is
specific to a category. For Coke we do a special teenage panel. If we start tailoring it for multiple clients, investment would rise. One investment is training all our people to run it.
Q] You wanted a creative identity for Mediabrands in India while differentiating the standpoint of each agency. Have you been able to achieve that?
I am not fully there. I still have a long way to go. Mediabrands is only a 19-month old entity. There are lots of legs still missing.
PROGRESS REPORT
Reviewing his first year as CEO of IPG Mediabrands India, Shashi Sinha roots for his leadership team, says he can fully leverage the synergies of scale of IPG while each CEO takes care of his or her own brand
“I am very happy to have built a leadership team of Nandini Dias (CEO, LodestarUM), Anamika Mehta, (CEO, Inititative), Suresh Balakrishna, (CEO, BPN) and Amardeep Singh (CEO, MAP - our digital unit which comprises Interactive Avenues and Reprise) along with Shantanu Sirohi (CEO, Interactive Avenues) and Anjali Hedge (CEO, Reprise). This leadership team has worked together to not only leverage their own brands, but quickly help consolidate IPG Mediabrands in India. We were always Number 2 in the market, but never behaved as such. But with the coming together of this team, we are fully leveraging the synergies of scale of IPG while each leader cares for his or her brand, its quality, its clients and its people.
“I am particularly excited with our digital unit MAP which is contributing 30% of our revenues. Considering that our mainline agencies like Lodestar UM, Initiative and BPN are already very big in the market, for MAP to achieve a 30% contribution to the overall kitty is very remarkable and gives me the confidence that we are extremely well-poised to tackle the future. I am also excited with the launch of Cadreon in the last quarter of 2013. It is a digital aggregation platform and holds tremendous potential for our clients. We really worked hard during 2013 to ensure that we behaved as one leadership team with a common culture, values and alignment of objectives, which resulted in the huge client wins at the end of the year.
“As we move into 2014, I am strengthening this leadership team by elevating Manoj Vinchoo, CFO, Interactive Avenues as CFO of IPG Mediabrands India to join the leadership team.”
‘STRONG STRATEGY, NOW MORE CLOUT’
NANDINI DIAS
CEO, Lodestar UM
THE LAST YEAR UNDER THE IPG MEDIABRANDS UMBRELLA:
Currently, all the four agencies under IPG Mediabrands - Lodestar UM, Initiative, BPN and MAP - operate independently, but with a common understanding on basic principles. Hats off to Shashi Sinha - as always, he functions in his inimitable style – being fair to everyone, doing what is best for the company and for the individual, never doing anything that would make his leaders feel uncomfortable, working with a lot of care for each individual to get the best output and the best outcome. All of us are happy to work alongside each other; in fact we are all great friends in a comfortable, happy relationship - and that is a huge advantage for the entire business.
The high points
Lodestar UM’s expertise in strategic thinking (validated by the number of times we won the Media Agency of the Year or runners-up title at the EMVIES) got acknowleded in the kind of tools and techniques we have been bringing in, for example, RJ Matrix, Sponsorship Evaluator, Mastermind 360, TVGraphics, etc, By default, the general impression used to be that because we are strong in strategy, we may be not be equally strong in buying. With consolidation under IPG Mediabrands, that doubt vanished and we established our credentials in procurement.
The low points (and challenges):
None so far.
Size of the agency:
Approximately Rs 4,200 crore. Lodestar UM is the third largest media agency in the country as per the last published RECMA. We have added 7-8 new businesses this year, including Samsung which is among the top five businesses in the country. The agency has only grown bigger. I am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that I will see it as the No. 2 agency in the next RECMA.
TOP PRIORITIES
Lodestar UM is a well-run agency; the vision is to further excel in strategic thinking, thought leadership and innovation. So the entire agency has been designed to take this agenda forward.
‘A STORY OF SELFBELIEF, BIG WINS’
ANAMIKA MEHTA
CEO, Initiative
THE LAST YEAR UNDER THE IPG MEDIABRANDS UMBRELLA:
‘Initiative 2013’ is not just a story about business pitches, big hires, awards and rates... It was a defining year for Initiative and IPG Mediabrands as a whole. Challenges aplenty at the start; we rallied together as a team, creating an army of believers from inside (Premjeet Sodhi in Delhi and Vaishali Verma in the South) to lead the charge; driving a shared goal in a strategic fashion. It was about resetting Initiative’s rhythm for tomorrow and successfully leveraging the strengths of the newly formed IPG Mediabrands to advantage. Our industry-defining 16000+ ‘Connections Panel’ with its sophistication, accuracy and bespoke quantitative and qualitative insights that a universal desktop survey would never allow, set the foundation for creating strategic value with our clients. Some fast, some bold, some decisive, some simple stuff made all the difference in the end. We successfully defended and retained existing businesses, and also won new ones - retaining and consolidating the Sony AOR to bagging Amazon, MRF Tyres, KRBL, Intuit, Gates Foundation, and rounding it off on Christmas with India’s second largest FMCG marketer Reckitt Benckiser... 2013 for Initiative thus is a story of selfbelief, instilling and reinforcing faith in clients and teams alike; with zero talent loss in the last 10 months.
The high points
• Pulling together as a team; believing in a “We-Opic” culture
• Uplifting our strategic product and ‘value proposition’ to clients across offices with success
The low points (and challenges):
A singular low point and that’s a challenge our industry faces: talent crunch. Another challenge would be to keep the momentum and energy going in 2014.
Size of the agency:
Rs 2700 crore; 40% revenues from new business
TOP PRIORITIES
The year 2014 is set to witness gigantic shifts changing the media narrative. We need to be bold, creative and responsible businesspeople to stay ahead of the game. Hence the fivers for that Mojo moment in 2014:
• A happy and fun team
• A deep focus on the strategic product, culture of creativity
• Leveraging Mediabrands scale and clout for success: IA, Reprise, Cadreon, Magna, Rapport, Lodestar UM, BPN
• Awards for clients’ and ourselves too!
• Be the thought leaders in everything we do!
‘CLIENTS BENEFIT FROM MEDIABRANDS INVESTMENTS’
SURESH BALAKRISHNA
CEO, BPN
THE LAST YEAR UNDER THE IPG MEDIABRANDS UMBRELLA:
The year 2013 was the first full year for the youngest and fledgling brand in the Mediabrands portfolio- BPN. We couldn’t have asked for a better start in India. While we have been able to maintain our Lintas Media Group legacy and values of trust, credibility and professionalism, we have been successfully able to amalgamate the new values of the emerging brand – BPN. We have had one of our best years financially as well. Also, our clients have benefited from the tools and techniques that we have acquired, thanks to Mediabrands investing heavily in these worldwide.
The high points
We have successfully launched the BPN brand in India. We have been able to smoothly integrate into the Mediabrands system both in India and internationally. We have defended our business (Union Bank of India, Camlin, etc) against some aggressive competition. We have attacked and won some major new business (Heinz, Finolex, Milma, OCL, Green Ply, etc). Most importantly, we delivered to all stakeholders, i.e., our clients, our people, and our shareholders.
The low points (and challenges):
The year has been particularly good; so difficult to pinpoint low points, but one area where we could have done better was in the area of winning awards for innovation and creativity, which we had set as an objective for ourselves, but weren’t able to achieve much headway.
Size of the agency:
We are a Rs 900 crore agency, including all our new business wins. Our largest clients are Bajaj Auto, Heinz, Malaysian Airlines, JG Hosiery (Amul Macho), Union Bank of India, Bajaj Electricals.
TOP PRIORITIES
• Keep our people happy, engaged and motivated
• Deliver high ROI on our clients’ investments
• Leverage the IPG Mediabrands size and expertise to add value to our clients and our media partners
• Build BPN as an honest, credible and cutting edge brand in India.
‘30% OF THE REVENUES COME FROM DIGITAL’
AMAR DEEP SINGH
CEO, MAP India
THE LAST 11 MONTHS:
The last 11 months have been the best so far in our journey of eight years. Firstly, Interactive Avenues became part of IPG Mediabrands and in them, we’ve found the right partner to see us through our next phase of growth.
The high points:
The formation of Mediabrands Audience Platform (MAP) with three operational companies - Interactive Avenues and Reprise, which are full service digital agencies, and Cadreon, our programmatic buying platform launched in October 2013. The MAP agencies work very closely with IPG Mediabrands’ agencies Lodestar UM, Initiative and BPN and are able to provide a completely integrated offering or specialized solutions depending on clients’ requirement.
The low points (and challenges):
Touch wood, no low points, and there are a few challenges. The digital industry on the whole has a talent crunch for mid and senior level positions and we expect that to ease a bit by 2016. The one thing that has worked in our favour is that we have a very people-oriented culture and this has helped us attract and retain good talent. We have the best team in the digital business because of this continued focus on training and development of our people.
Size of the business:
We believe that IPG Mediabrands has the largest digital set up with close to 300 employees. For IPG Mediabrands, 30% of the revenues come from Digital.
TOP PRIORITIES
• Taking some of our services global is a huge focus for 2014; we’ve just made a beginning with the US and UK
• Scaling up our services - creative, social, search, SEO and delivering an integrated offering to our clients
• On the media front, we want to scale up our programmatic buying offering. So Cadreon is a big focus for the year.
• Continued focus on people development & training.
Feedback: srabana@exchange4media.com
