The Hindu Business Line : Shock & awe ... the future's now

Varied perspectives: (Top row, from left) R. Gopalakrishnan of Tata Sons, Dr Jagdish Sheth, Alok Nanda of Alok Nanda Communications, Sujata Keshavan of Ray + Keshavan Design, Kiran Khalap of Chlorophyll (Above, from left) Sam Balsara of Madison, Asit Mehra of Omnicom, V. S. Sitaram of Dabur, Ramanujam Sridhar of Brandcomm, and Arvind Sharma of Leo Burnett India

A foot-stomping beat from a short film made by Bootleggers Island, a creative hot shop, was the leitmotif that kept the adrenalin flowing between cerebral sessions at Advertising's Future Shock, a convention organised by the Advertising Club Madras just a little over a week ago. With an array of visuals plucked from various sources, including an intimidating one from Jim Carrey's The Mask, depicting the abstract theme `integrated communication, disintegrated agencies' in myriad ways, the booming music readied an audience — especially in that post-lunch stupor — of advertisers, agencies and marketers for what was coming next. Now in its third edition of Future Shock, the Ad Club has kept the theme as provocative and thought-provoking as the earlier two editions.

In 1998, the first Future Shock took off from the bestselling book by management guru C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, Competing for the Future, with a convention fashioned around the same theme. That meet brought to light the fact that the advertising industry was on the edge and that technology was going to change the rules of the game. It sought to define the core competencies of the ad industry. The second convention in 2001 built on the earlier one with a theme of `reinventing advertising in the ICE age', focusing on the advent of convergence of different media and sectors and its impact on advertising agencies. The third in the series, held after six years, as part of the Ad Club Madras' golden jubilee, took the debate forward, albeit in a business environment that has changed quite drastically.

With brands proliferating and media fragmenting with the mushrooming of both TV and print media, advertisers are seeking one-point solutions to communicate to the consumer while, on the other hand, several advertising agencies have splintered from the one-stop shops they were earlier. With only a handful of large full-service agencies around, media buying and planning have gone their separate ways while creative hot shops and brand consultants have emerged, making life doubly difficult for the advertiser. As N. Murali, Managing Director, The Hindu group, said in his opening remarks, conventional brand building methods have outlived their role. "Use of technological advances will be the key to the future," he said.

With this as the background the Ad Club kicked off the third edition of Future Shock featuring an array of speakers from agencies and top marketers. Tata Sons' articulate Executive Director, R. Gopalakrishnan, kicked off the debate with his address, not so much on the theme but on how marketing and business people have to cope with the changing nature of the world around them. He coined a phrase, `market entropy,' derived from the laws of thermodynamics. This, he said, states that energy flows from a state of greater organisation to a lower one and needs special energy to achieve the opposite. It is the same in the context of a market as well, he said. "Someone creates a great new market, the forces of entropy start to drag it down into a commoditised category. The market degrades and special energy from new entrants or new offerings is needed to fight this entropy. That's what good marketing is about," he explained.

Gopalakrishnan said entropy similarly affects advertising. "The development of the full-service agency, the emergence of boutique shops, the fragmentation of media are all live subjects," he explained, setting the tone for the rest of the sessions.

Dr Jagdish Sheth, the well-known professor of marketing from Emory University, and the keynote speaker, fleshed out the theme further. He talked about a fundamental shift in client-agency relationships: from a situation of disintegrated communication and integrated agencies, the reverse was happening with agencies disintegrating. Dr Sheth outlined the forces that were responsible for integrating communication at the client end of the business: the digital media revolution, the growth of new media, too many agencies and suppliers forcing companies to become more focused as transaction costs increase, decentralisation of marketing, the growth of CRM practices and the emergence of a chief marketing officer in corporates who is catalysing the fusing of all the elements of marketing and communication together. However, advertising agencies are splintering due to a host of reasons: the emergence of media specialists, cross-subsidies in the agency fee structure, clients unhappy with agency creative work, the acceptance of movie directors who are open to advertising work instead of experts in the 30-second commercial, and a basic inability of agencies to serve their clients globally as the multinationals expand into new territories. "Marketing as it is known today is not sustainable," said Dr Sheth. Agencies, he said, are stuck in the middle in an untenable position between being a vendor of services or a business partner to their clients. They, or their clients, need to choose at which end they will be.

More Stories on : Advertising | Insight | Events

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Shock & awe ... the future's now