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4Ps
Ad cauldron bubbles with ‘change’
“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble…” so sang the Shakespearean Witches of Macbeth. Were they talking of advertising agencies? asks 4Ps B&M’s aditi prasad
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 They were once comrade-in-arms for a common cause. Today, they are simply up-in-arms – against each other. The bubbling cauldron of client-agency relations in business has overflown and come full circle, from a time when advertising agencies were partners in growth for the client, to them being relegated with a tag of mere script-shops in the 21st century marketing landscape. Worse, the client-agency imbroglio seems to be deepening at a time that Indian creativity is winning accolades globally. Indian advertising romped home with no less than 23 metals - a first! - from the prestigious Cannes Advertising Festival earlier this year. Back home, if winning awards are a matter of much back slapping among agencies, they are simply adding to discontent among clients, who believe that the focus for most agencies has shifted from ‘how do I add more value to my client’s business’; to ‘how do I make better ads and win more awards’.
Sample this: Two months ago, after a 15 year relationship, Oswal Woolens Mills’ flagship brand Monte Carlo showed the exit door to its agency JWT India (incidentally, JWT’s metal tally at the 2008 Cannes was the highest among Indian agencies) and hired rival McCann Erickson instead to handle the Rs.20 crore Monte Carlo creative business. The account review set tongues wagging in the advertising industry. After all, through the years, JWT’s creatives had helped Monte Carlo become the market leader in the woolen wear segment. Some cried foul play; others hung their head in silent resignation, certain that this was just another indicator of skyrocketing client ambitions and their sometimes unreasonable ‘ivory tower’ expectations.
Monte Carlo is not an exception. According to Spatial Access, an India-based media auditing firm, just between January-December 2007, over 485 accounts totaling a billing of approximately Rs.5,493 crore came up for review in the Indian advertising and marketing fraternity, with FMCG brands leading from the front (54 reviews), closely followed by media (53 reviews), real estate (38 reviews) and apparel (26 reviews) players. Clearly, something’s brewing. Of course, some key movements are coming from global realignments (Wigan & Kennedy won the global creative account for Nokia, so their Indian counterpart benefited), but overall the rising break-ups in the fraternity, smack of the inherent suspicion and simmering resentment that has scratched away the surface calm of client-agency relationships.
So why was JWT’s creative intelligence not good enough for the Oswals? After all, clients globally die for long-term and mutually rewarding partnerships with their communication agencies. Advertising veteran Jagdeep Bakshi, who has just been elevated as Global Business Director-Unilever in JWT believes that account reviews happen because “clients think that they are getting good ideas, but not great ideas. And that if they change partners they can get great ideas.” But he adds that is not the way to enhance brand communication. “The right way is to motivate your current partner to churn out better ideas,” he explained to this magazine. But clients think differently: “Monte Carlo is now moving beyond woolen wear and we needed to think of something new and different,” a source in Monte Carlo told 4Ps B&M.
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 Another client that recently changed its long-standing relation with its advertising agency is Emami. It shifted its brand Navratna Oil account from Publicis Ambience to Mudra. In a guarded e-mail reply to our questionnaire, Emami spokesperson Harsh Agarwal said that an agency change is sometimes necessary to challenge established mindsets. “Thinking styles and structures need to be broken down and re-invented. This disruption often leads to the genesis of breakthrough thinking,” he says.
The writing is on the wall. Once citadels of creating and nurturing brands together, the client-agency relationship is deteriorating faster than you can say Daag Acche Hain. The developing situation – easily attributable to the fast changing complex business environment – is a far cry from the pre-1992 haydays, when long-term communication strategy meant 5-8 years, and short term meant 2-3 years. Now clients (read: companies, both MNCs and domestic biggies) want results and they want them quick. Long-term means a quarterly review and short-term means ‘get me results this week dude, preferably tomorrow!’ And if you can’t deliver results ‘yesterday’, I’ll just as easily walk over to the next guy in line. Agencies have certainly lost the high-pedestal they once enjoyed, when clients perceived them as creative demi-gods; and didn’t dare de-construct their mumbo-jumbo for fear of hurting their fragile egos and arty sensibilities. “That time is over,” sums up Sushil Pandit, hotshot of The Hive, a Delhi-based ad hot-shop.
Being in one of the world’s fastest developing markets, brands in India are stepping on the accelerator to carve their place in the consumer’s mind, before competition walks away with full glory. In a business world full of heavy-duty jargons like brand equity, fragmentation, shakeout, globalisation, convergence, spiral effect, et al, clients are no longer one-dimensional. And as marketing pressures rise, they have brought most of the brand communication blitzkrieg – including research, data mining, consumer insights, even communication strategy – under their own tutelage, with the result that agencies de-graduated from being marketing partners to first communication consultants, then to advertising consultants. The blast of media fragmentation - has further fragmented even advertising into layouts or scripts or digital campaigns, as clients hire specialised digital agencies for their digital needs now.
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