Anupriya Acharya, Group CEO, ZenithOptimedia, talks to Srabana Lahiri about her outlook for the agency, shoring up business post loss of the Reckitt Benckiser account and what consolidation of services within the group and rejigging the talent structure has meant at ZO
Q] Give us your progress report on ZOG since you took charge last year, the agency has seen quite a few ups and downs... what according to you have been the pluses and minuses?
It has been a very exciting year, both in terms of organizational growth as well as personal growth. From the charter which I had set out for ourselves, we have been successful in consolidation of resources, restructuring for client delivery, expanding service offerings where relevant and most importantly, generating trust in all our key clients and retaining them. The support from all our key clients like Nestle, OLX, Micromax, Honda cars, Rocket Internet has been exceptional and I am very thankful for that. It’s a pretty decent scorecard on new business too. At an overall level, we have been able to improve on the numbers quite tremendously, largely on the back of expansion of current clients, new business wins and putting in better cost structures through consolidation of services within the ZenithOptimedia Group. Now, with mobile marketing coming to the tipping point, we decided to launch Performics Mobile in-house, to provide end-to-end solutions across all platforms of mobile such as Display, Search, Social, SMS, MMS, videos, etc.
We also launched ‘Audience on Demand’ to scale up our display solutions for performance and catchment buys, as well as deliver customized interactions in content, entertainment and experience. It is seeing exceptional growth.
Meanwhile, as it is difficult to find the right talent at the right time, we’ve initiated an offshore talent hub in India that helps support several markets in our Performics network, including Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, the US and UK. We were also able to refresh Newcast, our content marketing offering. Bringing in a new, well qualified lead like Prasanna Kulkarni as Chief Creative Officer and integrating the offering with the mainstream is rejuvenating Newcast. I am excited about where we are positioned for the future.
Q] Your mandate was to oversee the integration of all the network's companies: ZenithOptimedia, Resultrix (digital marketing), Performics (Performance marketing) Ninah (Analytics), Newcast (Branded Content) and their services into a seamless offering. How far has this materialized?
Creating a strategy for integration, and within that crafting each brand's role description was relatively simple and quick. But success almost always lies in the execution of the vision. Some clear decisions we took were that we would continue to maintain Resultrix as an independent brand in India - it is one of the most respected shops in digital marketing and almost all our business comes from client referrals. On the back of the strong client referrals, trust and scale, we were also able to create a very strong Performics. Ninah, which is a high end business analytics offering, had so far largely been doing projects for US and Europe markets. We focused this year on the Indian market and saw good traction. So in 2015, we will be increasing our people and offerings in this area.
However, the biggest change was in ZenithOptimedia. We have restructured the teams to give more integrated services to our clients. Media buying on individual client portfolio, that was resting centrally in Vivaki Exchange earlier, has been brought in-house in ZenithOptimedia. This helps planning the buy in line with the client requirement and at best efficiencies. The focus is on ‘right’ buys at the right price rather than just ‘cheap’ or distress buys. Our philosophy on buying is of complete transparency across both mainline as well as online, including AOD. We saw one of the highest scores on Nestle.
Q] What is the outlook for Performics, Resultrix under Tanmay Mohanty?
Tanmay took over as Managing Director for this business in January this year and has had a very successful first year. Our vision is to bring the level of digital leadership that Performics enjoys in the US and Europe to India. Quite a bit of progress happened in that area under his leadership with the launch of AOD, Performics Mobile and expansion of off-shoring hub for multiple markets across the globe. On the new business front, it has been a stellar year, with consolidation of Airtel, Star TV, OLX amongst others. There have been 27 new wins in a span of just 10 months and more importantly most of these businesses have come through existing referrals – it speaks volumes of the delivery on our current clients.
As we approach 2015, our action plan is ready. Our focus will be on Planalytics (data-driven communication and planning practice), Webanalytics, and building a media technology and innovation centre in India. Our newest innovation is a special partnership with Adobe, creating ‘Always On’ solutions for our clients. We already have clients such as Airtel and Tata AIG, and some more are in progress.
Q] We hear of content-led solutions in conversations around ZenithOptimedia. What are the specific focus areas for ZO?
We have seen quite a lot of success with Ninah. Forrester rates it Number 1 and the econometric offering is very high end. Fortunately, the Indian market is ready for it and we are getting traction with more and more clients. Interestingly, the maximum requirement comes from our dot com clients, to measure real time efficacy of campaigns across online and mainline.
Q] How does Live ROI work? Could you give us examples of how it has worked for some of your clients here?
‘Live ROI’ is a dynamic, real-time approach to assessing how well your marketing is working, and how and where your money can be best spent. The framework has three key pillars - Active understanding (up-to-the moment information about how consumer behaviour is changing); Dynamic engagement (applying a range of specialist skills to turn the raw information collected into usable knowledge and content) and Real time performance (using live tracking and analytics expertise to see how well the plan and programme is working). A very good example is of one of our dotcom clients. We handle complete end-to-end media for them including TV, OOH, performance marketing, mobile and even content. Here, the results are available live as site visits and downloads are trackable real time. As more and more clients are getting serious about ROI and Live ROI, we get more and more traction on our product.
Q] Talking of clients, we saw the Reckitt Benckiser account going to IPG’s Initiative in December last year... and your recent wins like Viber, indiahomes.com... how do you see the agency performing in the matter of winning new business?
Well, RB moved out right after I joined and hence some immediate attention had to be given to restructuring. Fortunately, some restructuring was already on our cards given the new vision we had put and so we were able to move quickly with it.
We have made decent progress on new business and expect it to gain momentum in 2015. On Performics and Resultrix, as I mentioned, it was a phenomenal year with 27 new businesses and counting.
So in less than a year, we have made up for the loss of RB. Expansion of our existing clients has also helped a lot. It was a good year overall, but given our ambitions; it could always have been better.
Q] Which would you call your stronghold - you have clients in the luxury space like LVMH, as well as MaxBupa, ICICI Bank, Standard Chartered Bank in BFSI, Yatra in travel, and Star India in media besides tech clients…
We do have expertise beyond FMCGs in areas like BFSI, Travel, Luxury, Media, Automobiles, Mobile phones, Telecom and new age tech clients. But more importantly, it is our approach that sets us apart. One of our widely acclaimed studies is TouchPoints, which measures the influence across Paid, Owned and Earned media on the consumers' purchase decisions and this study is category specific. This, coupled with Live ROI tools, gives us a clear starting point on any client deliverables. Expertise in digital and mobile media enables us to stitch seamless understanding of the consumer behaviour across online and offline. Added to it, advanced econometric models from Ninah help decode quantifiable inputs and outputs. As we move ahead, partnerships on technology will be the single biggest differentiator for us. We truly believe that as consumers generate more and more trackable data, ability to harness this at scale and seamlessly across platforms can be done only through leveraging technology. And for that, there is urgent need to train and retrain talent. Little time and much to do!
Q] There has been a people churn at ZenithOptimedia. You have roped in Hari Krishnan as Managing Director, Dnyanada Chaudhari as managing partner along with Prasanna Kulkarni, as chief creative officer, while CEO Satyajit Sen and managing partner Navin Khemka have left. What have these movements meant to the agency?
We need to bear in mind that ZenithOptimedia is still a very young brand in India. Launched in 2005, it did not have the heritage of agencies that have existed for multiple decades or any pre-existing client relationships or alliances. It has still gone on to grow to the top 5 positions as per Recma in less than 10 years. All of this growth has come on the back of an excellent new business momentum and lately acquisition of Resultrix. Satya and Navin have contributed immensely to the ZO journey and we thank them for it. So have a lot of other people who are with ZO still - like Yoginder, Rajesh, Mayoori, Shibu, Deepak, Soumak, Parmodji and many more. We have reached a stage where we have a very good set of diverse clients. Now, it's the next phase of growth and expansion. So we have used all the natural attritions in a planned manner to bring in new leadership and increase our bench strength to both consolidate the existing and cast plan for the next level of growth. Wherever possible, we have also used attrition to diversify the talent pool. Hence, talent like Hari, Dnyanada and Prasanna – all with sound and established credentials, yet somewhat diverse backgrounds - were hand-picked. Hari has held leadership positions at Cheil and set up Blue-Hive/Team Ford in India where he led teams across JWT, Mindshare as well as Wunderman. Dnyanada too has had three successful stints on the client side including media management at Marico and HUL. Prasanna Kulkarni has a digital creative background. That helps us to provide content solutions to our clients as one of the key deliverables of performance marketing is also performance content. Similarly, getting on board Santosh Ghosh and Pradeep Lamba has also helped us in strengthening our team.
Q] Can you give us an idea of the revenues from digital for ZO Group in India?
As I talk today, our contribution from digital is already 50%. It is in line with our global Publicis Groupe strategy of moving into digital stream faster than competition and I guess even in India our disproportionate presence on digital is well established.
Q] Is there any talk of launching ZO’s Sponsorship Intelligence in India at this time, especially with so much riding on sports?
We do have an offering in this space globally, but I am not in a hurry to launch it in India. We will look at it only when we have a clearly differentiated product.
Feedback: srabana@exchange4media.com
