We are one happy family

It’s not often that a CEO can claim that he’s never sacked an ad agency in his entire career. And when that person happens to be Shiv Shivakumar, Chairman and CEO - India Region, PepsiCo, then the entire advertising world sits up and takes notice.

At the INDIAA awards ceremony to celebrate “real work with real budgets”, Shiv, as he’s popularly known, was chairing the awards jury. When he was called upon to speak, instead of the usual chairman of the awards jury address, he took the audience by surprise when he said that he would make a 41-slide presentation.

One would have expected a large part of the audience to stroll out for a break. But in this case, Shiv, who has held senior roles in organisations such as Hindustan Lever (now HUL) and Nokia, received complete attention from the crowd consisting of senior marketing and advertising practitioners on how one could enhance client-agency relationships. The essence of his presentation was based on market research feedback received from 50 of India’s marketing and advertising leaders who had sent their responses to an SMS from Shiv.

The T-20 fable Calling his address the T-20 fable, where it’s the familiar story (clients versus agencies), Shiv used the popular sport of cricket to illustrate how both sides went about their advertising strategies. According to him, the two teams consisted of the “agency spinners” and the “client hitters”. Some of the people Shiv spoke to from the agency’s side included Sam Balsara of Madison World, Shashi Sinha of IPG Media, Srinivasan Swamy of RK Swamy BBDO, Piyush Pandey of Ogilvy and so on.

On the client’s side, Shiv had respondents such as Suresh Narayanan of Nestle, Gopal Vittal of Bharti Airtel, Godrej Consumer’s Vivek Gambhir and Sangeeta Pendurkar of Kellogg India.

According to Shiv, the agency side thought of themselves as a team of bowlers that would be content bowling only on flat pitches. The client’s team was of batsmen who liked to cut, hook, slice pull and never play straight.

As in a game of cricket, there was sledging here from bowlers (off the ground) and from batsmen (on the field). Here’s what some of them were saying about the other side. Swamy of RK Swamy was quoted in the presentation as saying “You don’t understand creative and you are out of touch with reality,” while Sinha of IPG said, “no budgets but they want larger than life ideas”. Pandey of Ogilvy’s quote brought a smile from the audience: “You can take a horse to the pond, but what can I do if it wants to drink piss?”

Among the clients, this is what they were saying. Narayan of Nestle was quoted as saying, “I want something that goes viral.” Vittal of Bharti Airtel was saying, “This is my most profitable brand, so the stakes are high”, Kellogg’s Pendurkar said, “Will this get me an immediate sales lift? Otherwise, it’s useless,” while Gambhir of Godrej used a line that’s normally used by agency folk: “My job is on the line”.

Power of talk, time and trust While these statements were only to illustrate the discord that illustrated two sides of the marketing coin, Shiv amplified it by saying there were three things that clients could do better to improve their respective agency relationships. One of the easiest but often underestimated things in the world is the power of conversation.

When things are not going as planned, they could be sorted out with a clear conversation with the other side, said Shiv.

For that to happen, agencies had to be given adequate time by their clients.

The third and the most important factor was that the client-agency relationship had to be a game of high trust where each stakeholder placed a lot of trust in the other’s commitment to the brand.

When these three things fall in place, then the match would be over.

Because, according to Shiv, both these opposite sides would then merge and create one team.

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