The Hindu Business Line : The power of one

Providing integrated marketing solutions is easier said than done. Ad agencies are not specialists in certain fields; the latter lack the wide-ranging experience agencies possess.

"The specialists know their verticals well ... but do not understand the consumer or the brand as well as the ad agencies do. The agencies do not understand the new media space as well as they understand the traditional area of TV/press/outdoor." _ Tarun Rai, JWT

Pranesh Misra, President & COO, Lowe India

Integrated communications is what industry has been demanding and ad agencies have been furiously trying to integrate to offer media-neutral solutions. The reason is not far to seek: in a cluttered mass media scene, traditional communication methods are becoming redundant and most agencies and their clients are trying to look beyond.

While most have been beefing up their below-the-line functions, bringing them together in the creative process to provide holistic brand building solutions to clients may take a while.

Recently, Lowe Worldwide chose India to roll out a new Strategy Planning Toolkit to help in providing integrated communications packages. On the occasion, Pranesh Misra, President & Chief Operating Officer, Lowe India, said, "Lowe Lintas plans to respond to client needs for integrated, media-neutral solutions by adopting best practices from around the world. The Lowe Strategy Planning Toolkit will feature a whole range of strategy planning, channel planning and integration tools, and has the potential to transform the way we will do business."

In India, while agencies have already realised the importance of giving integrated communications packages to its clients, implementing them has been an issue.

According to Madhukar Kamath, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, Mudra, "Integrated communication isn't a new idea. It was as relevant yesterday as it is today, and will continue to be, going forward. The challenge for marketing communications agencies has always been to find a way to not just conceive but deliver ideas as part of the big marketing picture."

Madhukar Kamath, Managing Director & CEO, Mudra

Considering the market place has changed over the years and traditional methods of communication are no longer relevant and effective, agencies have been trying to adapt.

Observes Pratap Bose, CEO, O&M: "We see integrated marketing as a natural evolution of creative as well as media functions, considering the market place has changed, the consumer and the choices she has in the market place have changed. With a cluttered mass media scene, increasing clutter on the shelf and micro-segmentation of consumers, integrated marketing is the only way out to reach the consumer and make her choose your brand."

At the same time, agencies have not been able to offer an integrated offering and this has led to the spurt in specialists in the new media areas.

"While no one is questioning the importance of integrated communication solutions, advertising agencies in general have not been quick to develop skills in many of these new media areas. The gap has been filled by a host of `specialists' who are experts in their verticals. It has led to a curious situation, which is sub-optimal from a client's perspective.

"The issue is that the specialists know their verticals well, and are, therefore, good at executing a creative idea. However, they do not understand the consumer or the brand as well as the advertising agencies do. On the flip side, the agencies do not understand the new media space as well as they understand the traditional area of TV/press/outdoor. As a result, the clients are forced to work with many outfits to carry one brand message to one target consumer. There is, therefore, a real danger of the message getting diluted since there is no one single communication custodian," observes Tarun Rai, Senior Vice-President and General Manager, JWT.

Ad agencies, in spite of repositioning themselves as marketing consultancies offering complete brand solutions, have not been having a smooth ride. Clients continue to resort to different agencies for creative and non-traditional media options.

Explaining the reasons behind this, O&M's Bose says, "Clients choose different agencies for different functions because most of the agencies have paid lip service to integrated marketing. They have neither invested in knowledge nor in talent. It has just been one-man units shifted from within the offices. Each of the disciplines requires specialist talent, tools and infrastructure to be in real business and add value to the brand." It is the client's prerogative to choose, depending on the needs of the brand.

Giving another insight into this, Kamath of Mudra says, "We need to ask ourselves - both agencies and marketer - what is the best way to make the most of the resources a business has at its disposal. No one-size-fits-all formula will work. There are arguments in favour of working with separate agencies depending on the kind of skill, no doubt. But in my view, clients must judge the long-term impact of shopping for the cheapest agency partner. It is, frankly, an awful waste of the client's time to coordinate and manage multiple agencies. The onus is on the agency to find a way to deliver better performing ideas/ solutions to their client's businesses."

On clients opting for specialists, M. G. Parameswaran, Executive Director of FCB Ulka, says, "Clients have been needing this level of integration for a while, but not all agencies have been reading the signals well enough. With the pressures on revenues and bottom lines, most agencies have cut back on all services except creative. So clients have been resorting to unbundling their requirements and parcelling it off to specialist shops."

While it may be the clients' prerogative to choose depending on their brand's needs, they may be also losing out in the process of trying to appoint different specialist agencies.

Explaining the pitfalls, Misra of Lowe, says, "The client is doing the right thing in going to where the expertise is today. But there is a gap. The client is wasting a lot of his time in effecting integrated thinking around his brand but there are the other pay-offs of integration that he is missing out on. So, we are responding to this need gap. The clients will buy our concept if we are able to bridge this need gap without sacrificing the quality of expertise in media and through-the-line offerings. We are creating a new option for the client to choose in the future."