Somewhere along the way, the survival strategy for the marketing and media business changed. The time now belongs to the most adaptable. As technology forced the pace of change, global media agency Mindshare went right along with it. Three years ago, it set itself on the path of ‘adaptive’ marketing globally. The new adaptive approach enforced by a new leadership team in India has taken the agency’s proposition to a realm beyond conventional media planning and buying; it includes more specialist and forward looking mandates.
Mindshare is closing 2016 as another strong year globally but one of its strongest in India ever.
THE HIGH For Nick Emery, global CEO of Mindshare Worldwide, 2016 has been a good year from a global market standpoint. The weaker regions picked up, and the agency posted growth in its important markets. It helped that Mindshare had begun the year with some big wins carried forward from 2015, including the likes of General Mills, Booking.com and Unilever, an existing client who just expanded into 60 new markets
“We stuck to our strategy of focusing on clients, people and differentiators,” says Emery.
The agency’s growth in India has been good. In 2015, it topped in RECMA, a global media agency ranking service, and won 176 awards. “The objective was to make 2016 not just bigger, but better,” adds Prasanth Kumar, chief executive officer of Mindshare South Asia
THE INDIA PROMISE The perfect storm is brewing in India. The rise of mobile devices, an increased appetite for content and a new-found appreciation for data & analytics are the new pillars for many businesses – Mindshare being no exception. But its early entry and global best practices have begun converting what are still investment areas for some companies into revenue streams and opportunities for executing award winning work.“Everything stemmed from the work that we have done in the year, not only for our core services but also across various new services that we believe will help our client brands,” notes Kumar.
The agency’s focus on product, digital, data and content started coming together in late 2015. The result of which was evident in 2016. The team scored high on every parameter. In RECMA, it became a dominant agency, leading with a significant margin over others. “The United States continues to be our biggest but in Asia, India is our fastest growing market,” says Emery, pointing to the growth the agency has seen in India.
The agency has won 215 awards this year so far, including a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions and Agency of the Year at the Festival of Media APAC, both being a first for any media agency from India. At home, it scored big at Goafest and became the first ever agency to score 395 points at EMVIES. “We did not just win awards, we won good quality awards,” says Kumar.
NUMBERS & TRENDS Earlier this year, GroupM brought down its global ad expenditure forecast for 2016 from 4.5 per cent to 4 per cent. Numbers may be everything in business plans, but Emery advocates the importance of understanding patterns in trends. “Numbers fluctuate in response to changes in the marketplace or the global economy, but the general trends do not deviate much,” he says. TV, for instance, is still the largest medium, though the fastest growing medium is digital, driven by mobile. There is significant conversation around programmatic and driving efficiency. Agencies and marketers are juggling between newer forms of technology, while tackling challenges emanating from embracing the likes of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality or automation. “Ultimately, it is about how we convert media into virtual shelf space, which is a constant process,” says Emery.
The co-existence of legacy and new media, and the demand for a higher form of sophistication in media services has increased expectations from agencies. “On one hand, there is channel-based, aggregated brand planning, and on the other, we need to understand the rise of commerce, addressability and micro-targeting. For agencies, it is about bringing the two together. We understand brands, both iconic and new media, and how to talk to consumers,” says Emery.
Marketers’ demand for technology-led solutions such as programmatic necessitates agencies to plan in a more agile fashion. “As a result, we are moving into newer areas of content, machine learning and creating very focused and sharp solutions,” says Emery.
EVOLVING, BUT CONSISTENTLY Sharp solutions don’t just require new thinking, but evolving consistently. All other aspects involved in the journey of converting media into virtual shelf space, cannot be at a standstill. Emery explains this with the example of Loop and FAST from Mindshare. “Loops drives integration and brings everyone — CRM, packaging and social — together to one place so we can act quickly and plan in real time. We have ‘Loop in a box’ that clients can have in their offices, ‘Loop on the go’ and ‘Loop in everyone’s desktop’ — we keep perfecting it.” There are four Loops operational in India at present – two in Mumbai, and one each in Delhi and Bangalore.
Similarly, FAST (Future Adaptive Specialist Team), which consults data and data-led technologies, has grown. Mindshare brought FAST to India earlier this year.
“Many of our clients have tasked us with these mandates. These are very different areas of growth for us right now but they all are in the vein of being inventive in the nature of the service we provide. Our adaptive positioning is paying off and guiding us in what our initiatives need to be,” says Kumar.
In India, Mindshare adopted a combination of home borne and co-creation offers to further its adaptive way of thinking. “Ideas and solutions to stay atop the game comes from market ingenuity. Part of my job entails working with our best leaders across markets, and taking some of their local solutions to our global offer,” says Emery.
NEW BONDS Mindshare struck news relationships, such as the co-created ‘Content Lab’ with Culture Machine and a product called KYVE (know your video effectiveness) with Vidooly, which is a video analytics tool, in India this year. It invested heavily in content, embarking on different content- related initiatives and projects. “In many ways, it is interesting that we are not only looking at media planning and buying but a lot more. We signed on for creating content hub for a client, which is akin to building a content engine. We are managing the ecosystem with content creators and production houses working with us,” says Kumar.
Data is another area, where it upped its game. It picked up analytical work projects, set up data marts and organised a first time ever Data Day for its clients.
Aside all conversation around uncertainty and the whole new world that 2017 would bring, the biggest future trend for advertising and marketing would be around the marriage of brand and performance. “Digital companies want to become big, iconic brands on a world stage, and traditional businesses want to embrace the digital future. Underneath it all, is the need to plan for programmatic and a data-led world. Everything flows down from there, and that is what you will continue seeing us do — we are the company that never stops experimenting because that is the only way to survive,” sums up Emery.
Read interviews: Nick Emery | Prasanth Kumarnoor.warsia@digitalmarket.asia; @NFWarsia
