No yes men please: Advertisers to ad agencies

What began as an experiment last year is now becoming de rigueur at India's answer to the Cannes festival of creativity, Goafest. Advertisers, for whom ad and media agencies toil day in and day out, are increasingly becoming an important part of the knowledge sessions at the festival. Gone are those days when Goafest was simply an agency-only show.

If the advertiser brigade was led by Hindustan Unilever, Amul, Panasonic and State Bank of India last year, this year belonged to executives from Marico, Britannia, PepsiCo, Toshiba, Kotak Madindra and HDFC Standard Life, who took centre stage at the advertising conclave on the second day of Goafest.

Five speakers, five presentations, but three key points. First: Push back. There is no place for yes men where brand communication is concerned. Clients would like to see their agency partners stand by their ideas and not continue to be guilty of "short selling" themselves as Anuradha Narasimhan, director-marketing, Britannia Industries, said.

Sidelights

• Crime genre gets booster shot: Discovery Channel chose Goafest to announce it was launching three channels in India. Two of these, TLC HD World and Animal Planet HD World, are likely to give a booster shot to its HD presence in India. The third, Investigation Discovery, would mark the broadcaster's entry into Hindi entertainment.
• Happy to be here: One who seemed ecstatic to be at Goafest was Anuradha Narsimhan, director, marketing, Britannia Industries. She loves her agencies and more important, loves visiting their offices. She has promised to convince her agencies Lowe Lintas, McCann and Grey, which have decided to sit this one out, to come next year.

Macroeconomic factors may have been the lookout of the clients traditionally but that's expected to change. With an uncertain global economic environment and increased interdependence on several markets for business, clients expect agencies to empathise with their suffering and help improve profitability with ideas that work in the marketplace.

Flexibility and a plan B approach must seep through creative and media strategies, too, to reflect the external environment's challenges now, was the second message from the advertisers.

The last message, of poor talent availabilty and management on the agency side, may have been delivered in a good spirit by the clients, but it in a way boomeranged in their direction during the panel discussion. A question taken from the audience by the panel moderator Karthi Marshan, head-marketing, Kotak Mahindra Group, pertaining to remuneration strategies for agencies left most advertisers ducking for cover. The panel was asked if better remuneration strategies wasn't the need of the hour. Can agencies be rewarded for ideas and not just execution. "How can creative minds be paid hourly rates like factory workers?"

While most clients side-stepped the issue citing it "too complex to be responded to in two lines," Deepika Warrier, vice-president, PepsiCo, gave the example of an alternative model the company was trying to work out. "At PepsiCo, we have two main businesses, beverages and foods. While food is a round-the-year business, beverages are seasonal. Our agencies see a massive spike in their workload from January to April-May and then there is a lull. We are discussing with our agencies the possibility of getting variable resources, where the team would be strengthened during the season and resources will be eased during the rest of the year," said Warrier.

Awards galore
Abby Awards for eight categories were declared on the second day of the festival and there were Grand Prix winners in two: Design and direct marketing. The design Grand Prix went to Mumbai-based Alok Nanda & Company for India Bulls, while ad agency JWT picked the Grand Prix for direct marketing, executed for Mumbai-based music group Bay Beat Collective.

In all, there were a total of 190 winners across design, direct marketing, public relations (PR), outdoor and ambient, print craft, brand activation, branded content and broadcaster. Broadcaster, PR and brand activation were the three new categories added to the Creative Abbies this year. Winners of the publisher category were declared on Thursday.

Of 190 winners, there were 35 gold winners, 69 silver winners and 84 bronze winners besides the two grand prix winners. Judging standards were particularly high in direct marketing, where there were only 13 metals given in all, Ajay Chandwani, chairman, Creative Abby Awards said. Other categories where jurors were not liberal with awards included brand activation, 18 metals, and branded content, 21. The rest got between 24 and 33 metals, Chandwani added.