Shavon Barua, Managing Partner, PHD India, talks to Samarpita Banerjee about bringing two decades of creative agency experience to a media agency, and the Volkswagen win validating the fact that PHD is not just about digital, but a full-service media agency
Printed on the reverse side of the visiting card of every employee at PHD India is the company’s ethos: ‘Finding a better way’. And that’s something Shavon Barua, Managing Partner, PHD India, swears by when it comes to her work at PHD of the Omnicom Media Group, where she has spent just over a year now.
For both Barua and PHD, the year has been an exciting one. The agency has been a front-runner at most award functions. Among the big wins, PHD won two golds at the Cannes Lions in 2014 for Hindustan Unilever Limited’s Kan Khajoora Tesan, and a Bronze Lion this year for the ‘Lo Kar Lo Baat’ campaign for HUL’s Active Wheel Detergent. Closer home too, the agency has had a good run at almost all award functions, including the Maddys and EMVIES.
In August 2015, Barua was roped in to work closely with Jyoti Bansal, Managing Director, PHD India, and given the mandate of handling HUL’s digital business. While overseeing all work being done on HUL, Barua also leads the team that looks after the Volkswagen account. Talking about the agency’s consistently good performance over the years, Barua says, “Innovation is an important part of PHD. This is a place that encourages you to think differently and to think a little audaciously. And that shows in our work.”
Having put in two decades in various creative agencies, how different has it been for Barua to work at PHD? “As PHD is a media agency, when I came in, I was expecting it to be more number-centric, as media agencies are eventually about Excel sheets. But it’s quite different here. Initially, there were a few days when I wanted to bang my head against the wall. However, innovation lies at the core of PHD’s ethos with a strong belief in imbibing technology and new age ideas, which I honestly wasn’t expecting. Every year, we release a book at Cannes, which very few media agencies do. Even the people here are very young and belong to diverse backgrounds – some are from creative or technology backgrounds, some are strategic thinkers. I’d say I am really blessed to have found an agency which has a lot of creativity in its approach which keeps my creative side ticking too. Also, a year back in my career, I wanted to do something dramatically different, and was looking at dialling up the Respect Quotient of my life. I am really glad that PHD has helped me do just that,” explains Barua.
When asked what winning awards means to the agency, Barua says, “Awards are very important and it’s one of our calling cards. But unlike a lot of our competitors who release articles about their wins every week, we aren’t very loud about it. A lot of people keep talking about how they are investing big on data. We have been investing in data from the very beginning and it’s one of our largest offerings. Our mobile offering is arguably the best in the country. Our clients swear by our search and social skill. And if anything has to be of scale in India, it has to be Unilever, right? The most important validation is when your client says it. Yes, we have the awards to prove it, but as a culture, we are a little quieter about our wins. We don’t walk with trumpets and drums because it’s nice to be sophisticated.”
While the agency’s work has been recognized through awards, the recent Volkswagen win (albeit a global win) has added another feather to its cap. Barua believes that this win will help change the perception towards the agency, since a lot of people believe that the agency’s primary focus is only digital. “Winning the Volkswagen media mandate has been one of the biggest things for me. Despite being a full-service media agency, our digital work gets noticed more, thanks to the larger-thanlife status of HUL, especially in India. Many people think we specialize in digital, which we do, but we are still a full-service media agency. Come January 2017, we will be managing the entire media mandate of Volkswagen and with that, we are looking forward to establishing ourselves as a big player even in the mainline space,” she adds.
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