When I began my career in advertising about 25 years ago, the advertising agency offered complete communication solutions to clients. As brand custodians, we were responsible for creative, media and integrated marketing. Over the years, as liberalisation of the 90?s progressed and the industry matured, unbundling started. It began, at first, with media as a specialisation beginning to emerge as a separate function. Over the next few years, every aspect of the communications business became a specialisation and unbundling is almost complete now in 2012, particularly helped by the growing importance of digital as a medium. So today you have digital specialist agencies, search specialist agencies, PR (public relations) agencies, DM (direct marketing) agencies, CRM (customer relationship management) agencies, activation agencies, OOH (out-of-home) agencies, event agencies and so on.
This trend is inevitable because clients would naturally want the best specialist in each field to service his account needs and not a generalist. The same person cannot be an expert on digital as well as OOH as well as design. Nothing wrong with it. We live in an era of specialisations. But where nearly every holding company got it wrong is that they allowed the specialisations to become silos. Each had their own P& L (profit and loss) account to look after, each of them had agendas that best favoured their silos and none of them really bothered to think of what was best for the client. Clients, meanwhile, while they wanted the specialisms, were beginning to get irritated for having to deal with multiple agencies, often from the same holding company, and taking them in different directions. The creative agenda was driven by a creative boutique, the digital specialist made it sound that life was only about digital and the old-fashioned creative director was still stuck with a 30-second TV commercial. To my mind, this is the biggest chink in the armour of all the old-fashioned holding companies, with legacy, creative businesses and several silos of areas of specialisation under them.
May be because they were relatively younger and new age or perhaps because they were the only truly independent, and therefore, media agnostic agency or because they were nimbler, Aegis Media was one of the few players who got it right. Aegis built the best of the specialisations, focusing heavily on the digital front, led by Isobar, the world?s leading digital agency and iProspect, the world?s leading search and performance marketing company. These were backed by Carat, the world?s leading media buying and planning specialist and Vizeum. Posterscope, the world?s leading OOH specialist agency was another gem but the beauty was not just that they had the best specialists. The beauty was that Aegis Media cracked the unsolvable puzzle of being able to offer all the benefits of specialisation without the hassles and demerits of siloisation. How did this happen?
In hindsight, the solution was actually quite simple and elegant. Aegis Media mandated that there would be ?One Country, One P &L?. This mantra was universally followed and therefore, the country heads were suddenly free to move talent across specialisations, as per the needs of the client, uninhibited by the strain of silos that other holding companies suffered from. Due to historical reasons and personalities involved, despite their best efforts, others could not cut through the proverbial Gordian Knot of their silos, suddenly making them look old fashioned and clumsy.
I predict that this mantra of ?One Country, One P & L? will soon be imitated by other holding companies and it will become a trend in a few years to come. Of course, Aegis Media will retain the prime mover advantage, but the significant outcome of this trend will be that many old-world, large agency systems, will just collapse over a period of time and many of the big agency names we know of today in India will just fade away, replaced by nimbler agencies, who can provide the client with ?all the benefits of specialisation, without the hassle of siloisation?.
The writer is chairman, India, & CEO South East Asia, Aegis Media
