MEC’s Global CEO, Charles Courtier and CEO Asia, Peter Vogel talk about their India focus, expectations from T Gangadhar, MD, MEC South Asia, the recently launched Wavemaker platform and what living the agency’s philosophy of ‘Don’t Just Live, Thrive’ means in the real world
What happens when the Global CEO, the APAC CEO and the South Asia MD of GroupM’s media agency MEC get together? No prizes for guessing this... they thrive! Charles Courtier, Global CEO of MEC, Peter Vogel, the agency’s CEO Asia and T Gangadhar, MD, South Asia, MEC believe in living the agency’s philosophy of ‘Don’t just live, thrive’ to the fullest. During a recent visit to India, Courtier put it on record that the world’s gaze on India is more pronounced just now, because growth in China has slowed down. Vogel spots a huge opportunity in India, and Gangadhar is not about to disappoint, already having carved a high growth trajectory for the agency in India.
SPOTLIGHT ON INDIA
Courtier declares that the overall view around India is very optimistic and global leaders continue to have faith in India as a fast growing market, more so, because growth in China has started to slow down, making the gaze on India more pronounced. On digital, Courtier believes it is just a matter of ‘speed’ at which digital takes over the Indian market, when comparing it with global markets like the US, Europe and even China to some extent, rather than ‘when’ it will take over.
MEC’s APAC leadership is fairly new, but highly promising. In July 2015, Peter Vogel was named CEO of MEC Asia Pacific. Vogel had successfully helmed MEC Australia for five years before that, doubling the size of the agency and infusing it with a thriving culture. In his new role, his stated intent is to develop MEC’s framework in Asia Pacific and to drive real change and growth in the region, including India. “India is absolutely key to APAC. There are two markets our clients look at for growth globally - India and China. I feel really excited about India as a potential market and see a lot of opportunity here. Though the digital space in India is lagging when compared to other players in the region, with the amazing growth of mobile, and the growing importance of mobile in the digital area, India is at the tipping point of high growth. Once that growth in digital starts, it will be an exciting opportunity for us,” says Vogel, on the importance of the Indian market for the agency.
“India has been on a fantastic growth trajectory for the past two years with great leadership from Gangs,” adds Vogel. T Gangadhar aka Gangs, who joined MEC as Managing Director in August 2008, reports dually to Vogel and to CVL Srinivas, CEO of GroupM South Asia. His mandate is to build and manage the MEC brand, with overall responsibility of P&L, clients, talent and new business development.
On MEC India’s contribution to MEC APAC, Vogel says, “We are in 16 markets of Asia Pacific, because that’s where our clients want us to operate. Four markets, i.e, Australia, India, China and Taiwan, make 70% of our business. Of the 70%, I would say India contributes around 20%. China and India are absolutely important for us and have unwavering growth potential.”
“The good thing is: India has done a great job in bringing clients that are operating in this new digital world, the likes of Flipkart, Uber and Netflix. So, it’s great that we have a head-start in working with all those clients in India,” he adds.
THE WAVEMAKER WAVE
MEC recently made news for its specialist content offering Wavemaker, launched last month. MEC Wavemaker is positioned as a platform which brings together for the first time content strategy, social, partnerships and experiences, SEO and creative services expertise, all in one place. It was launched simultaneously in 10 countries (including India) last month, with more than 750 people on board. In India, MEC Wavemaker is led by Kumar Deb Sinha who reports to T Gangadhar, Managing Director, MEC South Asia.
The objective of MEC Wavemaker is to improve a brand’s performance by embedding content into the consumer purchase journey, driving maximum exposure through optimum distribution and finally measuring effectiveness of content through the lens of clients’ business goals.
“It is about understanding when to deliver content, at what point in a customer journey. In almost all journeys, content should be different, depending on what point of the journey you are in. And that I think is fundamentally different. Most people talk about content, like ‘I have got a nice piece of content, what should we do, shove it through Facebook, Snapchat, what are we going to do? This is not our approach. Our approach is: it is a customer journey, so you need to decide the platform first and then the content. If you just decide the right platform is Facebook or Snapchat, those two should not have the same content solution, they should be completely different. So, it is really designed around making business happen and bringing out actual outcomes,” explains Charles Courtier, Global CEO, MEC, talking about the working of MEC Wavemaker.
LIVING THE PHILOSOPHY
It is great for an agency to have a lofty philosophy, but practising it across cultures and regions is a very different ball game altogether. Explaining the thought behind the MEC philosophy of ‘Don’t just live, thrive’, Courtier says, “It essentially means that our purpose is built around growth. So, growth of our people is not about just career development, but it is also important that they lead happy lives. And the role that we play in that is very important. Growth of our people is one part of our purpose. The growth of our client’s business is the other integral part; it’s obvious if we stay focused on that, our client’s business grows. If the market grows, then we will benefit as well. And lastly, the growth of the industry... that’s really about innovation, that’s about breaking new ground.”
He adds, “We want to pioneer, we want to do things that have not been done before, there is a professional pride and eagerness in that. We have this as the core of our purpose and we try to push it within the organization locally, regionally and globally to deliver against this purpose.”
“If you distill it down to its absolute basic, I want MEC to be an agency that produces and develops the best work in the industry and is the best agency to work at,” reaffirms Vogel.
Echoing their sentiments, Gangadhar says, “It is a great challenge for us to actually live the philosophy of ‘Don’t just live, thrive’ and really push the edge to say what can we do for the client. I think MEC Wavemaker gives us a great opportunity to do that. We had a conference recently, the theme was ‘Fail Harder, Fail Faster’... and that encouraged people to try something where it doesn’t matter if they fail, the agency will be okay with that. Steps like these really inculcate and encourage us to live our philosophy.
‘We see a growth rate 2x that of the industry’
T Gangadhar, Managing Director, MEC South Asia, talks to Priyanka Mehra about sustaining MEC India’s 40%+ growth record for two years in a row, importance of a diverse talent pool, being a communications outfit (not a media agency) and more...
Self-confessedly media shy and one who prefers to stay out of the limelight, T Gangadhar aka ‘Gangs’, Managing Director, MEC South Asia, has led the agency to achieve more than 40% growth for the last two years in a row.
Some of the agency’s big clients - Flipkart, Colgate Palmolive, Britannia, Honda Motorcycles and Scooters, Zee Network and Mercedes Benz – have been key to this growth. Says Gangadhar, “In 2015, we were among the Top 5 agencies in India. That was a big thing for us. We have grown on the back of a fantastic client portfolio, a very strong organic growth and a very strong new business growth. So, it is all coming together.”
The agency is clearly on a growth trajectory and Gangadhar plans to sustain this growth with a strong focus on new business development and growing existing business. On sustaining this growth rate in 2016, he says, “We would love to maintain the momentum; it becomes harder as you grow bigger. But having said that, we definitely see growth which would be at least 2x the rate of growth of the industry.”
THE GAME PLAN
“We are not a media agency, we are a modern age communications outfit; media is something we also do,” says Gangadhar, describing MEC India in his distinctive style. What is important for him is that growth does not come from just media billings, but from additional services. The agency is doing a lot of work in digital and e-commerce. Content too is MEC’s big strategic play for the year; this in turn adds to the growth of the business, the number of services offered by the agency leading to revenue growth in the most natural way. Another ‘massive’ focus area for the agency in India is its latest offering, Wavemaker, launched last month.
“For us, an idea is brilliant, if and only if the right audience responds to it and behaves in ways that lead to the right outcome for our clients. Wavemaker is not an agency, but a specialist content solution provider. I don’t think there has ever been anything of this nature; what gives us intellectual satisfaction is that we are really doing some interesting things for the client. Wavemaker further enables us to serve content to the right person at the right time and deliver outcomes,” explains Gangadhar.
Content is going to play an integral role in influencing purchase decisions, going forward. The agency also has ‘Momentum’, its proprietary approach to understanding and quantifying how consumers make purchase decisions. It is one of the largest global studies ever undertaken into the shopper journey and psychology of choice.
Understanding the consumer psyche and building equity with the consumer even in a passive stage plays a significant role in building brand affinity and goes a long way in influencing purchase decisions when it matters, believes Gangadhar. In fact, there is growing importance of the passive stage of the consumer journey. ‘Momentum’ indicates that people with a strong passive stage bias consider fewer brands, spend less time in the active stage, are less concerned with price when making their choice and are happier with their decision after purchase, he says.
DIVERSE TALENT POOL
MEC India made some key hires last year, taking on Mukti Kumaran as West Head, Rajesh Kumar as Chief Strategy Officer and Debarghya Mitra as head of its Bengaluru office.
Gangadhar believes that the right talent is a key driver of the agency’s success. He says, “It is a complex and chaotic world and we need diversified talent to be able to navigate this. In fact, in two years, the talent requirements will be drastically dissimilar to what they are now. There is a huge influx of talent coming from outside our industry like advertising, broadcast, digital, technology, behavioural sciences, data sciences and journalism.”
The days of just hiring planners is long gone, observes Gangadhar, and diversification of talent is the only way forward. He believes this diversification of talent is going to accelerate more than we have ever seen before.
‘Growth of talent is equal to growth of the business for us’
MEC’s global CEO Charles Courtier gets candid about not playing the under-cutting game, why more regular pitching is the new normal after the ‘Mediapalooza’ of 2015, take-aways from as well as focus areas for MEC India
Charles Courtier, Chief Executive Officer of MEC Global, is responsible for overseeing 5,000 people in 90 countries in which the agency operates. Under his leadership, the agency has grown its diversified offering into an industry-leading business model, launching specialist services in digital, mobile, social, search, content, data and analytics, including MEC Access (sport and entertainment) and MEC Bravo (multi-cultural).
Courtier launched MEC in 2002, and took charge as its global CEO from Day 1. Since that day, his sole aim has been to create growth - for clients, people and the industry. He also strongly drives the MEC philosophy of “Don’t just live, Thrive.” No wonder then that since celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2012, MEC has tripled in size from both a revenue and profit perspective. In 2014, MEC won significant new business, including Vodafone and Tiffany & Co, both globally; BGL/Comparethemarket in Europe, Daimler Benz in APAC and Nestle in Australia. Currently, Netflix is one of the agency’s fastest growing clients globally.
The agency globally saw a double digital growth last year (above 10%), which in 2015 was a very good performance, feels Courtier, even as he says that it is a bit early to comment on the agency’s performance this year. Here are excerpts from a conversation Charles Courtier had with Priyanka Mehra:
Q] Are we done and dusted with the craziness of last year's ‘Mediapalooza’ wherein an extraordinary number of big clients put their accounts up for global review at the same time?
I don’t think it is done. But you are right... it was crazy, and if I were a big client, the last thing I would do now is pitch my business, because how on earth would I get the best out of any agency when they are drowning in these enormous pitches? Having said that, I think much more regular pitching is the new normal. And I don’t think it started in 2015 - I think we are quite used to pitch and re-pitch of businesses on a very regular basis and that’s going to continue. It might not be 2015 every year, but I think we will continue to see a lot of media pitches every year.
Q] What are the possible reasons for this, in your view?
I think there are two key reasons. One is procurement, because companies and businesses are all under tremendous pressure, and the media number on the balance sheet is a very big one in most clients’ businesses. So, procurement is a fact of life, it is very important for these companies to get the best efficiencies and value that they can for the money they are spending. Procurement is competitive from a pricing point of view. The other side of it, to some degree, is fear in the sense that the communication business is changing so massively, that I think clients want to test if the agency has the right skillset to navigate them strategically through the chaotic, difficult and fast-changing media world driven by changing consumer preferences. Marketing is changing so fast; if you are a CMO in a big company, you know it’s hard to keep up with everything that is going around. The way the consumers are buying your goods or entertainment is changing so fast that the CMOs in that situation need to know, and they want to check that the skills they need are there.
Q] How do you deal with under-cutting, especially given the added pressure of significant global pitches and a cut-throat competitive scenario?
The only way to deal with it is responsibly. We have to be competitive on price. Yes, there are situations where somebody does something crazy and you get under-cut; yes, everybody has a story of when that happened. But honestly, if you get into that game, it’s a very short-lived game; don’t think you are doing your client any favour because you can’t sustain under-cut prices. In the end, you have to be responsible in terms of pricing that you are putting forward; you have to deliver it over a long-term basis. So to answer your question, we won’t play that game.
Q] What are your focus areas for India from a global perspective?
Digital is key, because I believe it is the tipping point and India is on the cusp of that. It is all about ensuring we are ahead of competition in terms of our digital and our data capability. So, absolutely that is the priority, because we can see the wave of opportunity about to come so we have to be ready for it. The business has grown fantastically over the years and has great opportunity. You have to have talent to manage that growth and also to sustain that growth. The development and diversity of talent is another key focus area; growth of talent is equal to growth of the business for us.
Q] What would you like to take from MEC India to MEC globally?
India is a very entrepreneurial country. When we look at MEC here, in comparison to MEC globally, there is a real tough entrepreneurial spirit in India. And if I could take that, box it, move it and export it around the world, I would.
