Sumita Vaid Dixit
Interviews

The Dew ad is doing very well for Thums Up

Five years ago, Arvind Sharma, chairman & CEO, Leo Burnett, in an interview with agencyfaqs!, had said that Burnett's best was yet to come! Sumita Vaid Dixit of agencyfaqs! caught up with Sharma to find out how close was the agency to achieving this goal. Having restructured the agency system two years ago, and passionately practicing the art of integration in communication, Sharma says glimpses of that goal are beginning to get visible. Excerpts.

Edited Excerpts

The Delhi branch of Leo Burnett recently made quite a splash at the Delhi Ad Club awards. Does the industry at large regard DAC as a serious award?

All local, national, and international awards are of importance to us. The Delhi Advertising Club Awards is important as a benchmark for clients to know which agency is doing good work.

We are pleased about our performance in Delhi, especially in the view of the fact that Delhi, in terms of revenues, is going to overtake Mumbai in the next three to five years. The Delhi market is, I would tend to think, about Rs 3,500 crore, which is one-third of the national advertising market. It is, therefore, strategically important for us to do well in Delhi. Moreover, Delhi is growing twice as fast as Mumbai.

In a market that is large in scale and in many ways the future of the Indian advertising industry, it is important to make a mark for ourselves. The Delhi office has been doing quite well. It had won a Cannes Bronze for Senso Restaurant last year. That’s something not too many agencies in Delhi can boast of.

Leo Burnett did not do well at the Abby’s this time. Except for the Art director of the year, Leo Burnett managed to win just two Silvers. This year, it is at number eleven. But last year, the agency was at the number three spot. However, going by the Campaign Brief Asia 2004 rankings for India, Leo Burnett, Mumbai claimed the number three spot. How do you react to this anomaly?

This has been an unusual year. We were the agency of the year at the AAAI. Yes, O&M was not there. But other than O&M, every other single agency was there. We won about 27 awards. At the Abby’s, we won two awards. That degree of dichotomy is not common. It lends some credence to the issues raised about the judging standards of Ad Club.

For years and years, we stayed out of the AAAI awards because of its jury composition.

The awards had a lot of people from client servicing and media space sellers as judges. Now AAAI has cleaned up its act, but the Ad Club, to an extent, is guilty of continuing that practice.

At the moment, my worries are about the Ad Club jury, and particularly – the Campaign and Campaign of the Year jury. The jury consists of people who were never in creative, or have retired from advertising.

Having said that, let me add that in any six month-period, work production goes up and down. We are very proud of McDonald's home delivery campaign winning at international awards. It was a finalist at Ad Fest, and a certificate winner at the Media Awards. It is a finalist at One Show.

Ultimately, in today's environment of media clutter, you get a far bigger bang for the buck, if the ads are fresh, make a new connection with the consumer's heart and mind, and is remembered even after the newspaper or the TV channel is shut. Awards then become not a goal in themselves, but an external benchmark for knowing how exciting the work is.

Talking about the work that comes from agencies, work from the top agencies generally bear a distinct creative stamp. But in Leo Burnett’s case, there does not seem to a creative identity. Your comments, please.

That is a question we have discussed over the years. And most of the young people who have joined our agency say the answer to becoming the most famous agency in town is to have a creative style.

I have consistently resented the idea of having a creative style because I think the work should reflect the personality of the brand and not the personality of the agency.

If you look at our award winning works over the years, each is different from the other, as each ad faithfully projects an image of the brand. If a Thums Up needs to be macho and cool, our work is macho and cool. If Tide needs to be depicting a mass culture, then that is the kind of communication we come out with.

An agency that is honest to brands is able to produce breakthrough work which reaches out to a diverse population of consumers. I do not think consumers want O&M personality wrapped around their brands.

It would be a pity if both McDonald’s and Complan reflect an O&M personality when both the brands target very different consumers, even different geographies. Complan is a very East and South-centric market brand and it tends not to respond so well to the Indian heartland idiom.

Brands create roles for the agencies.

So has Leo Burnett been able to render those roles faithfully?

Our mission is to build large brands through enduring ideas rooted in the hearts and minds of people. That is what we have done for Tide and McDonald’s. Media, in the past few years, has become far more fragmented. It is no longer about TV or print. It is about below-the-line, sponsorships, events, promotions. So, the challenge is to have an enduring idea that can be leveraged across all media.

Thums Up’s ‘Hai Dum’ is one example of true integration. It is a thematic. The brand’s on-ground promotion is on right now. It had 15 lakh people participating on-ground and that does not mean people were stuffing crowners into envelopes, but people testing their endurance on the ground.

We have achieved similar success with McDonald’s as well. Traditionally, the theme and the price elements have been separately dealt with in the McDonald’s advertising. The sales of McDonald’s, after it came to Leo Burnett, went up by 30 per cent. That I think we have been able to achieve by integrating our message.

Integrating is not about having a separate theme commercial, a separate promo commercial or banners on the ground, but a single campaign where every element of the communication is working in an integrated manner. That is true integration.

Any agency, which is keeping the game of advertising, promotions, public relations, and below-the-line separate, must know that clients will not have the budgets for these individual pieces to be visible. Today, there is virtually no brand with a Rs 40 crore plus budget.

The nature of brand ideas has to change. ‘Hai Dum’ and Happy Price Menu are two great illustrations of this change.

Today, we do not look at TV or print, but at ideas that can travel into various media, address a variety of issues – thematic, tactical, segment tasks.

The big idea is what portrays the soul of the brand in as many forms. And this requires defining the idea at a broader level.

In a lighter vein, it looks like the Thums Up model of integration has inspired Pepsi...

Imitation is the best form of flattery. The Mountain Dew ad is doing very well for Thums Up. Thank you Pepsi for the additional GRPs!

In the age of integration, how is the fee-system going to be affected? More and more clients are expected to opt for a fee-based system in the time to come. How exactly is this likely to change the way an agency does business? And, what are the more long-term implications for the industry and the client-agency relationship?

Much has been said about this issue and we have been successful in persuading clients to work with us on percentage of sales basis.

Fee-based system is a bit of a trap. Even if you make the company grow, you do not get paid for it. While the fair thing to do is if client’s revenue grows, your revenue should grow as well. That is an arrangement we have with some of our clients.

As we push for this model of earning revenue and to ensure that we keep making a difference to the quarterly sales of our clients, we have moved to a model of competency. Which is, we pay for the skill sets and not for experience of our employees.

We have defined those competencies and arrived at a model where the competencies can be measured and a monetary value is attributed.

In the old days, the assumption was that motivation was available in short supply. So if you are more motivated, the output will be more.

But in the last few years, internal compensation systems have changed dramatically. However, the sad part is that advertising agencies are not reflecting this change. Which is why so many clients are complaining. While clients want agencies to nurture their brands and monetise them in terms of healthy quarterly sales figures, the agency fails to deliver because of lack of the requisite skill sets.

If that is a skill not available in the agency, you first need to acquire it. Then, you begin to reward the skill sets first, assuming that they will be productive. Ours is a system where 85 per cent of employees are paid for acquiring those competencies and 15 per cent for results.

Let us move on to the activities of Leo Activation and Leo Entertainment. Both the divisions have been very active. How are you leveraging these two divisions to provide better brand solutions?

Cricket and movies are two of the biggest passions of India. When no one was talking about it, we had, some four years ago, started creating powerful synergies between brands and Bollywood. It is only now that the market has begun to wake up to the power of synergies. Today, we are working with the top production houses – be it a Yash Chopra or a Ram Gopal Verma.

And mind you, when I say using Bollywood for brand promotion, it is not just in-film placement. Most of the people are missing the point when the think only in terms of in-film placement. They are so obsessed with in-film placements that they try to negotiate to make their brand appear seven times in the film whether it is appropriate or not.

Besides, in-film placement, joint merchandising or joint promotions are great brand promotion opportunities.

The most recent example for us was the Baghban Tide tie-up. In the song, 'Hori Khelat Raghuvira', Hema Malini emerges wearing whites and right at the time when she is about to be dabbed in colours, the stripe runs across her. She is startled. Now that scene was used as a trailer for the song as well as a television commercial for the Tide brand. People may see Baghban twice or thrice but that TVC, which is part of the film, ran for eight months. So the value of being able to take the song trailer and air it as a commercial for the brand Tide for eight months brings tremendous amount of value to both the film and the brand.

And, the good part is that Tide’s brand idea, which is startling whiteness, can be executed across many vehicles of media.

Some feel that the function of client servicing is now redundant because finally, it is the creative guy who delivers, and client servicing is reduced to mere co-ordination. On the other hand, an agency such as Everest is doing away with these traditional roles and creating multi-disciplinary teams. How does it really work? What are your comments?

At Leo Burnett, we actually restructured two years ago and I am glad that other agencies are following in our footsteps. Around here, we have brands teams.

The value-added services of an agency include understanding the client’s business plan, marketing and the brand. And thus, contribute to that plan, which means, understanding the brand from the perspective of how to evolve the marketing plan.

We call this process a brand partnership function. It involves the agency looking at opportunities for the brand in the context of its business plans and help it realise its business goals. Finally, this understanding gets translated into the core advertising campaign idea.

We are adding a third piece to the brand team called the ‘contact planners’. It is not a given for every brand that there is going to be print or TV. The other habit we have to break is, clients saying, “Let us get the print campaign out first and then we will see what to do later.” A contact planner brings the basic issues of what is the best way to contact the target audience upfront. If word-of-mouth works best for the brand, then the campaign idea will drive word-of-mouth. And it may have a big impact on the campaign idea itself.

When you judge a campaign idea by its ability to go into the public domain and create a buzz, it leads to interesting possibilities. I see around the world, global creative directors and regional creative directors struggling to break the popular TV commercials, or print campaign format, and think of cracking the integration challenge. This is where the contact planner comes in handy. A contact planner will bring upfront the issues that we take on board when judging the campaign ideas.

It is a little immature to talk about it, but during the course of the year, ideas will recognise word-of-mouth as a more important form of media than mainstream media. This will happen for a few of our brands.

We are excited about the work we are doing, we have been change agents.

What are your future plans for the agency?

We would like to be recognised as an agency that delivers the most interesting execution but more importantly, as an agency that comes up with the definition of campaign ideas in the industry.

In fact, we plan to broaden our range of services outside of print and TV. That means you will see us going into services well beyond Leo Entertainment and Leo Activation.

Could you elaborate on this point?

What we plan to do is expand our below-the-line activities dramatically. At the moment, we are not doing enough in the area of direct marketing, CRM, shopper marketing and promotions thinking. While we are coming up with the innovative ideas, we are not spending much time and effort in the other functions. And, clients see value in these services.

One of the routes for executing this plan is acquisition.

When is that likely to happen?

You will hear from us very soon.

Have news to share? Write to us atnewsteam@afaqs.com