Opinion

Ashutosh Srivastava on the agency of the future, the role of women in media, and rekindling Mindshare’s entrepreneurial spirit

Ashutosh SrivastavaAshutosh Srivastava is the Asia Pacific chairman and CEO of emerging markets for Mindshare, the largest media agency by billings in the region.

In an expansive interview with Mumbrella’s Asia editor Robin Hicks, Srivastava talks about the region’s most exciting markets, the birth of Mindshare in Asia in 1996, the role of women in the agency’s development, and the challenge of rekindling Mindshare’s founding spirit.

You’re said to be one of the region’s most cerebral talents. Don’t you sometimes find media to be mentally unchallenging and a bit dull?

Dull? You must be kidding! More than ever before, this is the most exciting business to be in. We now live in a time where everything begins and ends in media, where creativity and lateral thinking is a 24\7 requirement.

There are challenges and opportunities everywhere – rapid changes in human behaviour and society at large, due to the massive impact of technology on media, the profusion of media devices, the increasing ability to gather data in real time and draw insights into behaviour, popular culture, response to brand marketing, the real time optimisation of campaigns, platforms which take creativity in communication and brand storytelling to a level we wouldn’t have believed before, and the rise of non agency world competition in this business. There is never a dull moment!

If you weren’t in media, what would you be doing?

Probably in one of the consulting businesses. I guess I intuitively find it easier to connect different, unrelated bits of information in my mind and see pattens, trends, things, which are not so often glaringly obvious. And re-organise complex problems though simple frameworks so it’s easier for everyone to follow and solve individual pieces. I like the challenge of solving puzzles, as I find I can’t sleep on an unfinished one, as my mind keeps mulling over it till I have some conclusion in my head.

It’s been said that you’ll be next to take Nick Emery’s job as global boss of Mindshare. Would you take the job if/when it’s offered to you?

To be honest, I’m not sure what my next job would be – and I’ve never focused throughout my career on my ‘next job’, as we are living through a time of great change in our business – changes among consumers, countries, brands, organisations. The speed of evolution in our business is often so quick, that the definition of what’s an aspirational and desirable next role for me today is not the same tomorrow.

So when I started with Mindshare in India back in Jan 2002, I didn’t think we would so quickly have four agencies and that my next job would be GroupM for South Asia –  as GroupM did not even exist as a concept then. Yet within 30 months of starting off with Mindshare, we came up with the idea of GroupM South Asia and my role morphed into leadership of that.

Then we went back to the drawing board and reshaped the GroupM and agency roles globally – and I got the opportunity to lead the development of the most successful agency in Asia Pacific in its next phase. If someone had asked me if that’s what I’d do next when I was setting up GroupM in South Asia, the probable answer would have been no!

When Nick [Emery] took on the Mindshare global CEO role, I got the opportunity to focus on addressing the challenges of other emerging markets and guiding our products/services and talent at a global level – again, it was not a role which even existed when I took on the Mindshare APAC CEO role. At that stage, the conventional wisdom would dictate that I should progress to a global CEO role next. We all have a sense of what shape our sector and the organisations within it will take over the next three years – but looking at the past few years, who knows what disruption can appear next and the impact it has on the shape and scale of the current players, including Mindshare, GroupM and WPP and current and future competitors?

The advice I give to anyone in this business is that you have to be highly adaptive and very comfortable with change… If you do that well, you will be successful in this business as you will see opportunities others often don’t see, or sometimes see as threats to an established world order.

Mindshare is a formidable force in media in Asia. If it has a weak spot, what is it?

Yes, it’s not just formidable, it’s been the trendsetter and a thought leader. We created Mindshare as a startup to challenge the established world order of the big full service advertising agency world then, and it started with a spirit of entrepreneurism, of challenging convention, of doing things never done before. That’s what has made it what it is today.

However, the scale has grown, and more importantly we are now an organisation within an organisation (Mindshare @ GroupM) and that scale has naturally diluted our startup attitude. My biggest opportunity today is to rekindle that pioneering founding spirit of Mindshare. We still do it on businesses like Nike, which shaped our early thinking and development, but I’d like to see us make that happen in every office irrespective of scale and structure and on every brand we work on.

Mindshare is said to be a distinctly ‘Indian network’ just as Ogilvy is said to be very British. Is it a problem for an agency to have a concentration of one nationality, or the perception that it has?

I don’t know about Ogilvy, but I would disagree with this perception about Mindshare being an ‘Indian’ network. But yes in this region we are led by people who have either started or built their careers in this industry from within Asia Pacific – unlike many of our competitors. We see that as a huge competitive advantage.

You have to recognise that Asia is the emotional heartland of Mindshare. Unlike every other global agency, Mindshare was born in Asia – in Taipei in 1996, and the earliest offices were in Asia. This is where we met with early success, and created home grown talent before we spread to Western Europe. This was not by some grand design but convenience, as Asia is generally more adaptable and open to change and we found it relatively easy to get started here. There was a lot of resistance from the established world order in this sector in the west. In fact the biggest office, the US, was among the last places where we got Mindshare going – four years after Taipei.

Mindshare China boss Amrita Randhawa

Mindshare China boss Amrita Randhawa

Our early clients were global companies who wanted a partner to lead the media thinking and implementation in emerging markets. The industry was nascent in most APAC markets other than Australia, India and perhaps the hubs of Hong Kong and Singapore, and to some extent Taiwan. So local talent wasn’t really available on tap in every country, and we had to move people from markets with talent and with English as a business language skill into leadership positions. These included people from Australia, India, UK and specifically for China, from HongKong and Taiwan. India and Australia always had strong home grown talent for leadership, and Southeast Asia has had a number of expats from these two countries in leadership positions. North Asia have by and large had either home grown talent or from within the Greater China region, with the exception of Amrita [Randhawa], who now leads China – but again she has a very strong team of home grown local talent with her at the next level.

Irrespective of what country, and background they come from, you will find that we’ve handpicked our leadership for some common traits – the ability to roll up their sleeves and work hard with their teams, their clients and media partners. Great attention to detail. Doers not just talkers. And fairly strong analytical ability, as we run large businesses in virtually every country, and need people with a real grip on business issues and the ability to manage their P&L.

Katie Rigg-Smith

Katie Rigg-Smith

Probably the most important fact that needs to be known more widely is the role women managers have played in the development of Mindshare in Asia. Almost 60 per cent of the Mindshare talent pool are women and 10 of the 16 country CEOs are women – including Australia where very few women leaders have been able to break that glass ceiling. This is probably a topic for discussion on another day, but I genuinely think we have an enabling environment, where women leaders are able to build successful careers within Mindshare and assume leadership roles.

Which of Asia’s markets interests you the most because of what’s happening in its media scene, and why?

China, because of its different model and home grown players, the pace of growth with the digital media platforms is enormous and is changing our business at an incredible pace. It gives us enormous opportunity for thought leadership, and provides great learnings for the rest of the world.

India, is relatively smaller in scale, but is a free media market that is highly fragmented and has unbelievable complexity, where you have to grapple with three distinctly different markets in one. At the top end is a sophisticated and mature media market with the purchasing power of a market like Australia. Then there’s the growing middle with the scale, complexity and purchasing power a little bigger than let’s say Mexico. And a bottom of the pyramid market the size and purchasing power of Sub Saharan Africa, with a traditional media market where your feature phone is the only digital media device and two-way access point for marketers.

Now, South Korea and Japan. Both show incredible adoption of digital media devices among consumers, but a relatively slower shift of ad dollars to digital platforms thanks to cautious marketers and the dominance of traditional market structures including agencies and sellers. They’re a great learning ground for a young media planner and I think we will produce world class talent from those offices over the next few years if we get our model right there.

Indonesia – where the dominance of traditional media with entry barriers is increasingly getting challenged by the digital media platforms. It’s a market to shape for us over the next five years.

And of course, the massive opportunity coming up in Myanmar. But politics and economic forces have to create an impact first before we start thinking of it along the same lines as Indonesia.

Programmatic buying will replace a role human beings once did in media agencies. Do you think that jobs will be lost in media agencies as a result of programmatic buying? If so, what percentage of the workforce will go?

That’s a difficult one. We still have 75-80 per cent of advertising spend on traditional media, which is still traded in fairly primitive ways, where even remnant inventory does not go to ad exchanges.

However, the other 25 per cent (and growing) on digital media has a huge benefit from programmatic buying – from simplifying the I/O process (currently very inefficient) to better targeting. Today, a lot of resource in the agencies is spent on ad ops and data cleaning and reporting. This will help eliminate the time spent processing information and focus it on value creation and new ideas. So I don’t see it as a workforce reduction opportunity, I see it as an opportunity to invest in expanding and diversifying the talent pool in this area.

The workforce reduction would eventually come in the traditional media buying area, as that part of the industry in Asia has never invested in automation on the buyer or seller side.

It however requires a significant shift in mindset from media owners. Markets where traditional media licences are not controlled tightly (Taiwan, India, etc) will probably change market practices faster. Others where media are government controlled, oligopolies, or in the hands of a lot of middlemen and brokers will be highly resistant to change.

What is your view of the media agency of the future?

Let me warn you that this will change if you ask me five years down the line. Just as this would not have been my answer five years ago!

Today, I genuinely believe that media agencies are the best placed to be the marketing spine for their clients – simply because they have access to the platforms, data and tools to guide brands on sizing up the opportunity, understanding the consumer journey within a category, identifying the most attractive consumer segments and the platforms to engage with them as they are navigated through the journey, and create an overall strategic direction for the entire marketing story.

They’re also able to understand what content is working, what’s not, on which platform, at what stage of the journey are people dropping off, is the brand content likely to be shared and commented upon, how to facilitate that, and what will the marketing ROI be. All this in near real time, and with hard metrics drawn from millions of real consumers – not an ‘intuitive feel’ of a bunch of content creators, or conclusions from some focus group. This can be a real game changer for marketing.

The ad agencies are great storytellers, but don’t live in the world of data and content so it’s often hit and miss for them. I think the biggest missed opportunity for ad agencies is that they continue to see media agencies as people who are just meant to execute their strategy and buy the media – when the media agency could actually be an invaluable partner in helping craft their strategy, because of its access to data and insights, and guide them in real time on what’s working in the campaign and what’s not.

We were recently appointed by a global health and wellness major to work with this approach for their brands in emerging markets. The first question from the ad agency on the brand to us was, “What are you doing in this meeting? It’s our role to create the ‘digital strategy’ for the brand, your job is just media buying and execution, what do you know about strategy?” I think it’s one of those ego and power play things where people are afraid of losing ‘control’ and it will only change with a new generation of talent on both sides.

We are trying to change this with our own small steps. The first step is to help marketers and their various agencies see the benefit of working together, using data as the glue. To this end we have recently created ‘Loop Rooms’ in some of our bigger offices. This is a room with a number of screens, with visualised data from over hundred data sources, for the brand, for the market and for key competitors. There’s campaign data and there’s contextual data. It shows the paid media side by side with the owned and earned media.

We can use in it strategy planning mode, along with the brand marketer and their various agency partners, to pull out relevant insights about the consumers, the brand, its competitors and their connections, from the various data sources. We can use it in campaign mode to course correction and do real time optimisation and trading.

More importantly, this is not just a physical room for data trawling. It’s about a change in work practice and culture, as it attempts to bring together the brand owner, the media agency, the ad agency and all other specialist partners, including media partners like Twitter, Facebook or Google, or data and insights partners like Kantar and Unruly to work in a more integrated fashion.

We have already started off using this for clients like Unilever, Jaguar/Landrover and Yum Brands, and hope this will bring more understanding to the role we can potentially play in improving the overall effectiveness of marketing and helping clients get the best out of all their partners, in an open source collaboration.

If you could change one thing about media, what would it be?

If you mean the media agencies, then I’d say its our inability to create value for our own brands, and getting pulled into transactional relationships with clients in the commodity end of the business.

It’s quite ironic that we work with clients to help strengthen the value of their brands to consumers, but are woefully inadequate at establishing the value of our own brands. In general the ad agencies do a better job than us and we would like to at least catch up with them to start with.

If you mean the media owners, I’d go down a similar path. Our relationships with media owners tend to be about trading and transactions. In reality even the traditional media owners are going multiplatform, and we can use our expertise with data, technology and brand marketing to help create a more strategic and value driven relationship with the media owners.

So far we have only gone down this path with the big digital media owners like Google and Facebook, where we are attempting to separate the trading relationships from a broader strategic partnership.

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