The Hindu Business Line : The agency that keeps walking

It’s almost the end of a long day for the top brass of UK-headquartered ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH). The next day is the official launch at the Taj Land’s End in Mumbai of the agency, the creator of many iconic ad campaigns, in the Indian market. Sir John Hegarty, Worldwide Creative Director, Nigel Bogle, Group Chairman, and Simon Sherwood, Group CEO, along with their founding Indian team of Subhash Kamath, Partha Sinha and Priti Nair, Managing Partners all, have spent the day in meetings, media interviews and preparations for the big launch the day after. Founded in 1982 – two founding clients, Audi and Levi’s, have been with the agency 26 years on — BBH specialises in brand strategy and creativity across media platforms with powerful ideas, Johnnie Walker’s ‘Keep Walking’ tag line with the image of a striding man and the Axe Effect campaign for Unilever, among them. The three answered questions on a wide range of issues: the agency’s launch timing, new clients, who will be announced in January, undoubtedly many from a global realignment and on the thinking behind BBH’s creative process. Publicis, one of the big four holding companies in advertising, holds a 49 per cent stake in BBH, which has won many awards for its creativity. Excerpts from a conversation with Brand Line:

What’s with the timing of BBH’s entry into India now? Why not earlier?

Sir John Hegarty, Worldwide Creative Director.

Simon Sherwood: We started ten years ago to build our business internationally and being a relatively small and privately-held company we could do only one office at a time. For all sorts of reasons we went to Asia first, then Latin America and back to Asia. We opened in China in 2005, that was quite a commitment in terms of management time, and after that we looked at India knowing it was the last piece of the jigsaw that we had to fit. It’s taken 18 months from the start really to get to this point. We’ve known for quite a while that we would have an India presence sooner or later.

Sir John: You go into a market, get the best intelligence you can, of who’s doing good work. You learn about the market and begin to get an understanding of whom to talk to, whom you should see, it’s a long process.

Nigel Bogle, Group Chairman, BBH.

Bogle: Particularly if you are looking to start an agency from scratch; if you are in the business of acquisitions you get someone to find a company and buy it, it’s pretty straightforward — our model is based on start-ups. The only exception is Brazil which is an acquisition. With that idea it takes time to investigate and get a thorough understanding of the market.

The business environment in India has changed so much since you began that planning, hasn’t it? There’s worldwide uncertainty too. Has that affected your plans?

Simon Sherwood, Group CEO, BBH.

Sir John: I’m older than all of them, you should talk to me first about recessions … (laughs heartily)

Bogle: We’ve been through five recessions since we started; we started at the back end of a recession in 1982! In some ways recessions make you tougher, stronger, because it asks questions of you that are good for your business in many ways even though the economic situation is difficult — what clients are looking for is greater speed, more cost efficiency, greater urgency, those are good questions to ask of your business at any time.

Sir John: When we started in Singapore, there was a huge crash there, when we started in the US, there was the dotcom crash … I think there’s a pattern here …

You want a recession, send for BBH …?!

Sherwood (laughing): But we always begin in a recession, it’s good for us! No doubt, it’s a blip. But this is about the long term, not short term, but there are advantages to it: As a new company you are future forward, you are ready for what’s happening rather than adapting an old company to a new reality.

BBH has done a lot of iconic work for top brands around the world. What do you intend to do in India? Will your global clients align work with you in India as well? Which brands are you looking at in India?

Sherwood: The big MNCs we do work for around the world are Unilever, Diageo, Perfetti Van Melle, British Airways, Levi’s. These are the companies we have existing relationships with but we take absolutely nothing for granted; all those companies have healthy relationships with the agencies they are working with now, but we do have those brands aligned with our agency in other parts of the world so that’s an obvious place to start. The idea of a model for us is to have a mix of global clients and creatively-driven local clients and that’s what will make our business strong and healthy.

At this point of time how do you assess the Indian market in terms of creativity, client spends? Media spends here are quite low compared to other markets so what’s the big picture you are seeing?

Sherwood: If you look at the current world order of ad spend, India comes way down but it’s changing quickly. What’s exciting in the emerging markets is the speed at which they grow. If you see the population profile and the young people under 30 with a taste of buying brands and process of premiumisation that happens in all categories ... it’s a great time to start laying the foundation in markets such as India. So it looks exciting but our business is not one driven by scale – WPP has to chase a share of market, be market leaders as their business is based on growing share, while ours is based on a clear positioning in the market, offering what parts of the market want; we don’t have ambitions to be a big company but be a great brand communications company

How would you do things differently from what is being done now since you’ve done a long reconnaissance of the Indian market?

BBH now uses the Levi’s black sheep and tagline as its motto.

Sir John: When we talk about focusing the company on the future, we are looking to make a digital hire which we will announce soon. We will structure the company for the digital age, but it’s also about bringing the BBH principles to the Indian market, the combination of skills we think is a way of creating great advertising, the strategic thinking, marketing thinking and creativity and putting those three together successfully in making a great company; it’s not about inventing a new way of doing things but it’s about doing what you should be doing and doing it well. For the past 27 years BBH has proven itself by its way of working which has produced great advertising. No doubt the market is changing but the fundamentals remain the same — in the end, it’s about big brand ideas which change the fortunes of the brand as things get more complex and as media fragments, big brand ideas become more valuable.

How does the Indian market compare with China and other Asian markets?

Sir John: The Indian market is, in my view, much more sophisticated, it already has a culture. There is very little of advertising or marketing in China, and very few large Chinese brands. That’s not the case in India, there’s a rich culture here of communication, a great film industry, which has a great conversation with people, and creatively it’s beginning to explode — some of the work coming out of India is very good.

Are you ready to go the whole hog in new media?

Sir John: It’s truly an explosion of media, but we like to talk about interactivity, how the public interact with a brand, the whole relationship and keep a conversation going … understanding how to do that, that’s where the future lies, which, of course, digital technology allows you to do.

Bogle: We have hired a lot of people in the last 12-18 months from non-traditional advertising backgrounds bringing new skills from music to mobile, gaming and digital production, inside BBH. You have to make a decision whether you would want a single holistic entity that has digital skills, mobile expertise or you create silos. We have gone for the former as we believe that in the long run we would be better placed if we have those skills working seamlessly with the rest of the company. So it’s a huge amount of time and investment in getting BBH ready as an agency for the digital age.

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