“There are too many things happening in the advertising world today. So choose the areas in which you want to specialise in and persist with it. Do not aim to be a full service agency.” This was the advice of Arvind Sharma, Chairman and CEO of Leo Burnett (India Sub-continent) and president of Advertising Agencies Association of India, to advertising agencies.

Addressing representatives of advertising agencies here, he dwelt on how Leo Burnett had been picking out areas in the large spectrum of advertising world and specialising in them by developing the right team.

He harped on the point that agencies, especially the smaller ones, should not get distracted by the “5000 things happening out there in the (advertisement) world.” “It is clear that I cannot do it all. So I make my choices. We need to pick what we want to be good at tomorrow.”

Sharma illustrated the point with the path that Leo Burnett had been following and the success that the strategy delivered. He pointed out how the agency’s focus on the four areas of social, mobile, shopper and design had yielded results. In its social media advertisements, he gave out the example of the firm’s association with Samsung and Coke. The Coke Studio that subsequently emerged had more than 70 lakh downloads in the first phase of the campaign.

In the mobile segment, Arvind picked out the Tide campaign for P&G. This was based on the popularity of ‘missed calls’ in India then—the campaign urged mobile users to give them a missed call and it would call them back for a feedback. “We received 250,000 missed calls in just 45 days,” he said.

He saw increasing opportunities for advertising agencies in the retail segment. “Not only brands want a better place on the retail shelf, but retailers themselves want better positioning.”

He however felt human talent would be a challenge for the advertising world, stressing on more on-line training to meet the future requirements.

amitmitra@thehindu.co.in

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