We need to up our game on Unilever: Joseph George

Interview with CEO, Lowe Lintas & Partners

Barring the initial two years when he was at Leo Burnett India, Joseph George, CEO, Lowe Lintas & Partners, has spent his advertising career at the agency he now heads. With no less than 22 years in it,this alumnus of St. Xavier's College, Ahmedabad, has studied the strengths and weaknesses of Lowe enough to sharpen his outlook to lead the agency for the last two-and-a-half years. It is paying off as Lowe, which has clients from Unilever, Idea,Titan to ICICI Bank and Havells, is seeing a creative resurgence. George explains to Viveat Susan Pinto what the agency proposes to do to ride the creative crest. Edited Excerpts:

While earlier defined by your work for Unilever, this year, all of your brands seem to have raised the bar on your creative output. How did this happen?
I can attribute this to two or three long, heated sessions between Balki (R Balakrishnan, chairman & chief creative officer at Lowe), Arun (Iyer, NCD at Lowe), Amer (Jaleel, NCD at Lowe) and I, where we felt we simply had to do away with mediocre work. Why? Just as good work cannot be hidden, mediocre work too is visible. Don't forget a client spends money for both good as well as mediocre ad campaigns. And, as brand custodians, it is unfair to them when we do mediocre work. We resolved by the of these meetings that we would have to be consistent with our work across brands.

But Idea seems to have replaced Unilever as your key client. It shows in the quality of campaigns you have executed for the telecom brand in the last few years...

We need to up our game on Unilever. We are acutely aware of that. It is one of our favourite clients and also our largest. It is one client that genuinely treats us as its partner. Personally, I have a huge bias for Unilever. Just before I took this role, I was managing the Unilever business for Lowe for five years. Balki and I have both been on the Unilever business for 15 to 17 years. It is a business that we hold close to our hearts. We handle 21 out of its 32 brands that the company actively advertises.

But what are you doing to ensure that the creative resurgence of Lowe is not a flash in the pan? Most creative agencies struggle with that. If in a year they are good, there is no guarantee in the next that the creative output will be up to par.
We will constantly have to keep our objective in front of us. What is the job of a creative agency? To produce good work, right? If we do not lose sight of this objective, I don't see why we cannot be consistent with our work. We are blessed with clients that are actually hungry for good creative work. They know what they want and expect a certain standard from us. When you have clients such as them, your work is half done.

In the light of the recent controversies on the quality of creative content, does that put inordinate pressure on your team?
It does. But isn't that our job? To handle client pressure and produce good work? It is true that clients have become demanding today. And this phenomenon can be seen across both big and small advertisers. It isn't easy because the pressure has shot up, but I view this as part of the evolutionary process. We have to be prepared for this.

It has been 10 years since Lowe has stayed out of the Creative Abbies in India. Do you feel vindicated now, with the problem of scam ads that the latest Goafest got embroiled in?

It is a problem that runs deep. We took a stand, and now the entire industry appears to align with it. It is no irony that our internal awards show is called the True Show. But it is not held as a counter to the Goafest since we have had our awards ceremony earlier too, the last one was in 2008. But we are happy to see stalwarts from other agencies come for our True Show.

At the end of the day, it is nothing but a celebration of good work.