Ready for a new relationship?

There is only a remote chance that you could have heard of Nikita Deshpande. For this consumer from Mumbai, life changed last weekend after she emerged as the first winner of “Crash the Pepsi IPL” campaign. The advertising film she created had beaten over 400 other entries submitted by consumers from all over the country.

Deshpande’s film went on air last weekend, as the official Pepsi television commercial during the match between Chennai SuperKings and Sunrisers Hyderabad.

To be sure, this was the same weekend when the advertising industry was celebrating its work at their annual jamboree in Goa, unaware, or not paying heed, to the dangers that consumers like her can pose to the future of the advertising business.

Just two weeks before that, when cat.a.lyst decided to set the agenda for Goafest 2015 by inviting Vincent Digonnet, Chief Growth and Transformational Officer, International, Razorfish, to speak about how adland can transform itself to meet the expectations of the changing world, he pointed out that the problem with clients resorting to crowdsourcing for their advertising ideas was that “the advertising system has not integrated with the digital age, but the digital infrastructure has altered the value chain. Crowdsourcing is making some of the things that were priced at a premium 20 years ago into a commodity. They are pricing their creative resources far too high.”

The other thing he believed was that ad agencies take a long time to shoot a TV commercial (TVC) and expect it to last for a year — that’s their model. But in the digital age, nobody wants content that lasts for more than 24 hours on their site. To be sure, Deshpande is but one face in the crowd that threatens to disrupt advertising.

When Shiv Shivakumar, Chairman and CEO, PepsiCo India, spoke at Goafest 2015 on the inaugural day, one of the first questions posed to him was on the same topic. Shivakumar said that even in a model of crowdsourcing ideas, the agency personnel become a part of the jury.

“The agency ensures that consumers follow the brand guidelines. Sometimes consumers can get too liberal with their ideas,” he said.

Shivakumar, however, added that brand custodians cannot take nine months to develop a re-launch campaign. “Technology brings speed to the table,” he said, adding that sometimes clients need to take the blame for decision-making. “If the client is unclear, the agency will not bring clarity,” he said, much to the relief of the advertising gathering in Goafest.

Anand Kripalu, MD & CEO, United Spirits Ltd and Member, Diageo Global Executive Committee, said that the high employee turnover at the agency has challenges for brand stewardship. He added that changing agencies frequently was also not the solution. “There is a lot more flirting happening. Philandering leads to brittle relationship as the agencies and the agency personnel do not understand business enough,” he said.

Not willing to take clients away from the blame and the credit, Kripalu said, “Clients and agencies are part of the ecosystem. Clients get the advertising and agencies they deserve.” He suggested five themes for agencies, going forward. First, not changing is the biggest risk of them all. Second, agencies should push the envelope from being mere generators of creative to content. “If we did it the old way, you will miss the consumers completely. You cannot do a classical media campaign and get them anymore,” he said. Third, agencies cannot have video that adapts to the multi-screen environment. They need more creative ideas that are media agnostic.

Fourth, they need to move from accountability for inputs, to accountability for output.

“It’s time to build more aligned remuneration systems. Why cannot rewards be linked to performance? Buzz and advocacy must be measured and agencies rewarded accordingly. Value is only created when there is a goal alignment,” he said.

Finally, Kripalu went back to where he began saying that a true partnership can only be founded on mutual trust. There is real value in having a long-term agency partner, he said, and added that Cadbury has been having a relationship for more than 50 years with the same agency.

True, there were so many moments when the agency was not delivering, but changing the agency was not the option they took. “We had a fundamental belief that it’s marriage. Have a commitment to make it work,” said Kripalu, who earlier headed Cadbury in India.

Speaking about the need to create a multi-disciplinary talent profile, Kripalu said, “For too long people have underinvested in talent. The attrition rates are high and engagement is poor.”

Calling it a high rate of “infant mortality in talent,” he said it was time for agencies and clients to take lessons from the past. To create new paradigms to engage talent, he suggested ideas like swapping talent between agencies and clients, something that happened in the past between ad agency Lintas and consumer goods major Hindustan Unilever. But all this can happen only if advertising agencies feel the urgent need to change. But as another speaker at Goafest said, “It is hard to shift perspective when everyone feels safe with the obvious.”

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