Hours after it emerged that Ashish Bhasin, Chairman and CEO – South Asia of the Dentsu Aegis Network, would take overall charge of the network in India and South Asia, he spoke to Pradyuman Maheshwari on the advantages of an integrated agency network and his plans for the next few years.
Other than you getting overall charge of the Dentsu Aegis Network for South Asia, what does this development mean for your business?
What we’re actually trying to achieve is have just one P/L for the country. We believe we can service the needs of clients seeking special help – be it digital search or social media, in outdoor etc, without the work being done in silos. The legacy creative agencies, each about 100 years’ old, aren’t able to move talent freely. With Dentsu Aegis Network, we are able to do that.
It’s been in the works for some six-odd months now, right?
These things do take time. We are a large organisation now, with 1700 staffers, 700 of who are in digital alone. We have15 standalone companies, four of these being in digital.
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Rohit Ohri is looking forward to regional role as CEO, Dentsu APAC (excl Japan)
Rohit Ohri who has moved out of his role as Executive Chairman, Dentsu India and CEO, Dentsu Asia Pacific (South) to a more regional one as CEO, Dentsu Asia Pacific, spoke briefly to MxMIndia.
Having worked 26 years in India, he says this is an opportunity that will help him “see regional brands and look at greater challengesâ€.  “The agencies in India have turned around, we have some strong CEOs handling each agency and the next step was to build a strong regional network and get on board non-Japanese clients,†he said
Ohri moves to Singapore this month, but will be at Cannes Lions later this month and will also take a short vacation. Although he didn’t indicate it to us, most likely he will settle into his new role in July.
As CEO, Dentsu Asia Pacific, Ohri will continue to oversee the five creative agencies currently under him, the head of which will also report to Bhasin.
The reporting of the Dentsu-branded agencies will be quite like the individual agencies at GroupM. Dual reporting – one to your agency regional head and the other to the GroupM head in the country.
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Dentsu is known to be a full-service network.
That’s right. The difference between 50-100 years ago and now is earlier it was a bundled offering now, it’s no longer that because we want specialisations. Media and everything is unbundled, each of those businesses have to be standalone. You can’t go to a client and say, just because it’s part of my network, therefore you should use it. You have to go and say because this is the best in class, as it so happens it’s also a part of my network. That whole thing, we’re able to bring it together by this one P/L and that’s the idea of bringing Dentsu Aegis Network together under one management in every country.
Yes, one figured your structure was a lot complicated when we interviewed Rohit Ohri some months back.
For historical reasons, they were two different businesses. No doubt about it. The Aegis media business which I’d brought in to India and the Dentsu business which Rohit was looking after. Now with this merger, we’re going through the entire process of bringing it all together. When a client is talking to us, we will be able to satisfy his/her entire communication and marketing communication-related needs, whether it’s creative, media, outdoor, digital, retail, whatever.
Isn’t there a flipside to the building of the group image given that it’s critical to build each of the individual agency brands to attract competing clients?
It still is the same. They are standalone individuals, separate agencies. Each with their own front-end managers, planners, creative folk. There are some areas where you can take advantage of the collective. For example, in the media area, wherever it’s feasible, we try to bulk up clients together so that our clients get benefit of larger volume. Wherever a benefit can be drawn for our clients, we bring it together. Think of it as a garden with many gates. A client can enter into this garden with any of the gates that they want. Obviously, we try to cross-sell and upsell all our services in the group. But a client has the option to choose one service or several or three which are most relevant to him etcetera. That’s the advantage it gives us. We make sure there are complete Chinese walls between each of the businesses. There’s no commonality on the front end of each. Each has its own managing director.
What are the targets you have set yourself post this integration?
In India, we had a very small and late start. We only had Carat on the Aegis side and Dentsu has also been a relative young network. Our competitors have been here for 90 to 100 years. We have a long way to catch up. I have a clear vision that by the end of 2017, we must be the distinct No 2 group in the country. At the moment, WPP is clearly the largest. IPG is quite big and then there is us, Omnicom and Publicis being roughly of the same size. So, we’re at No 3 today and there are other contenders too. We want to be the distinct No 2 in two-and-a-half years. If we have to do that, it has to be a combination of good organic growth, up-selling and cross=selling all our services to our clients. So, if today a client is buying only media services from us, tomorrow we should be able to bring digital services to him or search to him or creative services. Our own clients who we know well and already have a relationship with, it’s much easier for them to trust us for a larger repertoire.
End-2017 is pretty ambitious.
We’ve been the fastest growing agency group for the last two years. We’ve come a long way from where we were and the way I look at it is that there are still competitors who are a long way ahead of us, so we have to make sure that we don’t look back and we just have to make sure that our growth is disproportionate to the market. We’re growing at least two-and-a-half to three times of the market growth rate. If we can sustain this for another three years or so, we’ll be a very clear No 2 in the market.
But some of the biggest media accounts are still with your competitors.
They are, that’s why we’re still not the market leader. If you look on the media side, for the last seven or eight months, we’ve won the Microsoft business, we’ve won the General Motors, Nokia, British Airways, Allied Blenders, Panasonic, Sony and so on. On the media side alone, we’ve won nearly Rs 2000 crore business in 6-8 months. I don’t think any agency has seen this growth. So, we’re not No. 1, clearly GroupM is. But, we’re by far, the fastest growing and now our scale is significant. So, we hope to keep building on it. Jet Airways came in last year, the number of clients that have come are… of course we have our existing clients and now we’re pulling all our muscle together collectively. We’ve got Dentsu Media, Vizeum and Carat… they’ll continue to be independent agencies because they have independent clients and wherever it’s beneficial for us to pool our volumes together, we’ll try to.
Dentsu Creative is headquartered in Delhi, thanks to Rohit being there. Earlier too, it had a large base in Delhi. Will that shift to Mumbai now?
No, Dentsu has four creative agencies. Two of them were headquartered in Delhi. Taproot Dentsu is in Mumbai, Dentsu Communications has been headquartered in Bengaluru. Dentsu Marcomm and Dentsu Creative Impact have been in Delhi. That will continue exactly like that and each of them will have their head who’re already in place. Simi will continue to head Dentsu Communication. She now reports directly to me. I’m going to be announcing a new Executive Council very soon. Each of the representatives of the media as well as creative agencies will also be members of that and collectively that executive counsel will run the full country.
Are you looking at any second-in-command or a COO for the network?
No, our model is slightly different. We have a managing director or a CEO for each of the businesses and all these heads will all form the Executive Council.
And will you have a centralised buying arm like the CTG of GroupM?
We’ve appointed a trading head in Harsha Joshi and we’ve already started seeing the benefits and our clients are already getting the benefits. Yes, we’ll have a centralised trading. It won’t be a company, the buying and trading will keep happening in the companies but it’ll all be brought together.
Any acquisitions on the anvil. One hears that the Dentsu Aegis Network is hungry for more!
Yes, we are. See, the thing is I’m 90 years late in this market
Dentsu Aegis Network has been slow on the awards front. We don’t see a Carat or Vizeum winning big at the Emvies or the Media Abby
If you notice for the last few years for most of the places, we didn’t really have much of a business in India so our focus was on building the business. Two years ago was the first time when we started entering awards and we said we’ll focus on international rather than the Indian awards. Campaign Asia, we won the agency of the year, South Asia, not just India. The same year, Carat won Gold, Vizeum won Bronze, Isobar got…
So only international awards for you?
Well, all awards matter and Posterscope has won more than 45 or 50 awards already in this year. They’ve swept every award function.
Hmmm, Posterscope is active and so are your digital arms. But your media agencies aren’t
We’re very new to the game. so to speak. It’s only in the last year or two that we’ve even started of entering into awards. We’re so busy building the business and getting it. Going forward, we’ll concentrate a little more. It’ll be on a selective basis. It’s not that we’ll enter every single media award show.
On a personal front, is it good to get back to creative?
Of course. I started off and two-thirds of my career has been in creative. Obviously, there is the thrill and joy of going back to it, looking at good creative work, interacting with creative directors. I think the exciting today is given the technology and business prospects being so vast, how do you take it to the next level?
What’s more fun and creative? The media or creative part of the ad business?
The biggest fun, challenge or opportunity is bringing it together. I don’t think creative or media should work separately from each other. That doesn’t mean I’m saying they should be bundled together. That’s not going to happen. The door is bolted on that one. If we can find a way to make our digital, media and creative agencies work together, we’d have created magic which no one else can. That’s really the philosophy of one P/L , because; today if you look at any agency; somebody creates a campaign, somebody else goes and briefs it to the media and in the end you’re trying to force-fit thing to see how it can be brought together. On the other hand, if you can conceptualise it together, you can really create magic and to me, that’s a big opportunity. That’s the big thing we’re looking for.
Obviously, you’ll now be spending more time on creative than media.
Yes, I will have to, because, for one it’s an area where a lot of activity is happening at the moment. The second thing is that with Rohit’s moving out there’s a little vacuum that I’ll have to step in and fill up on the leadership. The media, outdoor and digtal part of the business is something I am familiar with it so for the next few months, I’ll have to spend more time there.
Are there going to be any new people or any change?
At the moment, we’re not envisaging any new people. There isn’t any immediate change or anything as such, because we have enough people running each of our businesses. But, if opportunities arise, if there are better career prospects and great talent available, we’ll obviously look at adding on. But the structure is in place. I’m in that happy position where I don’t need to make a change at the moment.
The fact that Rohit has moved to Singapore indicates that like is the case in GroupM, you will see people from India also moving to regional roles
Yes, of course! In fact, we believe completely in liquid talent. When I was running South East Asia and South Asia for six years for the Aegis Media part of the business, there were quite a few people who we moved. V S Mani, who runs Carat in Vietnam has moved. Anupriya who runs ZenithOptomedia now used to run my Singapore operations. There are tonnes of examples of people who’ve moved up and down. We’ve actively encouraged that and we’ll definitely have much more of that. I think Indian managers are best in class! We completely underestimate them. There will always be a very high demand for Indian managers, because they are of such good quality. But, however, you do have to respect the sentiments of the country you’re in. It’s a very fine balance you have to keep. Some of our competitors have a problem that they’re seen as Indian mafia in some countries. I hope we never get into that scenario. It’s an issue of balance.
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
