Prem Kamath, Vice President, Marketing & Communication

IIPM : EXECUTIVE EDUCATION

Prem Kamath, Vice President, Marketing & Communication, Star India agrees wholeheartedly and says that Star India has three different agencies for its various brands viz. O&M for Star Plus and Star Gold; JWT for Star One and Star Movies and even an on-site agency Bettercom to handle their BTL communication activities. “We (Star India) draw up our own communication strategy, do research and draw conclusions. Then agencies are called in and told – this is my communication plan – now give me a script to match this. And if you don’t give me a good script, I’ll simply ask another person to write me a script,” he explains, adding that having multiple agencies exacerbates the need to concentrate a majority of the communication strategy planning at the corporate HQs itself.

But if agencies are simply shops for churning out advertisements (for awards or otherwise!) - as they are now, sooner or later they are gonna be hit because declining advertising effectiveness, media clutter and changing consumer habits (thanks to disruptive technologies such as the Internet and TiVo), will make mass-media advertising redundant. This is already happening and is reflected in the fact that clients and their marketers have started taking more ownership of brand communication strategies.

In fact, over the last few years, most of the real, cutting-edge stuff – Surf, Idea, Airtel, Vodafone, Lead India, ICICI Prudential, Cadbury, Perfetti, Coke, Pepsi, et al – have come from a solid collaboration with the client, concurs BBDO’s Exec. Chairman, Josy Paul, “Ask Balki, Aggi, Prasoon or Piyush and they’ll all agree that marketing teams of these brands have contributed up-front, shown imagination and intelligence to make a difference.” Reliance Communication, one of the fastest-growing telcos in India and therefore understandably one of the largest advertisers is riding a similar horse. With three agencies on its panel – Mudra, Leo Burnett and Cartwheel, Sanjay Behl – Reliance Communications’ branding chief stresses that “more creative ideas emanating from multiple perspectives of different creative teams gives (them) a huge flexibility to choose the best rather than settle for the ordinary.” He admits that multiple agencies “raise the bar on creative quality.” In fact, sources in RCOM admit that nearly 80% of the advertising brief is now strategised by the in-house marketing team, while agencies work on just the balance 20%, read: executing the client brief. Admits Mahesh Chauhan, the strapping President of Rediffusion, “The agency game has not really evolved in India. We’ve become mere vendors of creative wares.”

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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