We are focused on attracting local business: Melanie Varley

Interview with Chief Strategy Officer, MEC

Melanie Varley, chief strategy officer, MEC, is a key GroupM global resource. She is in India to take stock of operations at the Indian unit of the agency. She was also a keynote speaker on the second day of the Goafest. In this interview to Masoom Gupte and Viveat Susan Pinto, Varley threw light on the positioning of MEC, the work it is doing and how she proposes to strengthen it. Edited Excerpts:

Within the Group M universe, you have the more famous siblings, Mindshare and Maxus. What does MEC bring to the table?

We call ourselves a challenger brand. Everyone sees these big agencies (Mindshare and Maxus). But there are clear areas of distinctiveness within the group as far as individual agencies go. Two key areas for us - first, strategy and innovation. We are extremely creative and focused on bringing out-of-the-box ideas to every piece of work we do. The second difference is collaborativeness as far as our relationship with clients are concerned. I know most other agencies would be saying the same. But, we simply focus on these two attributes and tie them back to volume and scalability. In terms of the business we attract, MEC is strongly focused on attracting local accounts. Like in India, Flipkart, one of the biggest e-commerce players, is on board with us. We are signing more. That's also what sets us apart from our siblings.

As a global lead, what is your key focus while interacting with your team here?

Training is a key area for me to look into. For instance, on Monday, that's all I would be doing. I am training my team here in a new strategic approach. We are calling it the T5 approach, where T stands for thrive. It's our way of saying we want our brands, our clients, our consumers to thrive. I also have a colleague in Singapore, the chief strategy officer for Asia-Pacific. He interacts very regularly with the chief data lead or chief digital lead in India.

We have a major training programme coming up in Singapore, focused on digital. We just concluded one in Kuala Lumpur and will have one in India, one of our top-10 markets.

How relevant is data-driven planning in India?

Data-driven planning is gaining prominence across markets as clients demand better return on investment. In India, it is in its infancy at the moment. I don't think the skill sets are as well-developed for the field either. More important, the quality of data itself in India is quite poor, which explains why it hasn't picked up yet here.

Can social media be used to launch ad campaigns or is it merely a medium to amplify what one has launched on traditional media?

First, digital campaigns need to be scalable with sufficient penetration available, at least 15-20 per cent. That is not the case in India yet. However, there could be pockets of audiences, the urban, educated, upwardly mobile, for whom digital could certainly be used as a launch medium.

Media and creative increasingly appear to be merging. Do you believe media agencies are taking on the role of what was traditionally done by creative agencies?

I don't think we are going back to what we would have called the full service agency model. I think it's a very different world today. The four key elements to it are data, content, technology and media. That means we have to work a lot more collaboratively with our partners or provide additional services like mobile, social or branded content. For instance, we are working more with our digital and PR partners when executing campaigns. More so with PR partners for our social media campaigns. As we come up with ideas that are focused on consumer engagement, we need to work with PR, to bring the piece of work alive and gain visibility.