‘No conflict between purpose-led and business-led advertising’
Consumers are increasingly expecting, and buying into, brands that play a role in society that goes beyond commerce, says Amitesh Rao, CEO – South Asia, Leo Burnett, Publicis Health & Publicis Business. Fresh from a successful showing at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Rao spoke to Alokananda Chakraborty about what it takes to keep the flag of creativity flying year after year and how Publicis is putting AI at its core. Edited excerpts:
Leo Burnett was India’s top performer at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2024. Can you share any unconventional techniques you have used to refresh creativity within your team since taking over?
To begin with, we see ourselves as a true creative company, not a creative department within an advertising agency. It is not uncommon to spend an hour with someone from our team and walk away wondering if you met a strategist or a creative or a business leader – but you will know you met someone with powerful creative energies. A culture that fosters and encourages this is never short of freshness.
We are a melting pot of diverse cultures, varied educational backgrounds and eclectic interests. In Leo Burnett, you will find technologists, engineers, lawyers, street magicians, social workers, gamers, communications experts, and a few whom you cannot find a label for. What unites everyone is a love for and a belief in creativity and its power to be a transformational force.
A great example is our Innovation Lab, Apollo 11. The average age is 25 — and it comprises product designers, anthropologists, data strategists and social platform strategists. When you work with teams like this, the solutions we come up with for clients are truly creative, and no longer limited to conventional advertising.
I also believe creativity, and creative people, respond amazingly well to challenge. Some of our best clients’ challenge and collaborate with us in equal measure, and we ourselves continuously challenge ourselves to do that next big piece of work, win that next big business, create that next amazing customer experience.
Purpose-driven marketing was one theme dominating conversations at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France. How does Leo Burnett differentiate itself in this area?
Consumers are increasingly expecting, and buying into, brands that play a role in society that goes beyond commerce; in fact, doing so makes for better commerce. Consequently, as a creative company, our best work sees no demarcation between being purpose-led and being business-led. Work that is authentic, demonstrated at scale, and linked to real outcomes for both business and for cause, is work that has a genuine impact.
A great example of this is our partnership with P&G Whisper where we have been working towards the cause of menstrual education in India over the past years with our Keep Girls in School campaign. Now in its fifth edition, this is a movement, not a campaign. About 2.3 crore girls drop out of school annually due to the lack of proper menstrual hygiene management facilities, including the availability of sanitary pads and information about menstruation. Whisper and Leo Burnett have been on a journey to keep girls in school for a long time and we wanted to bridge this gap. Our efforts have helped over 100 million school girls learn about periods and period products to date.
Are you AI-ready? How does AI really help in enhancing an advertising house’s capabilities?
Publicis is putting AI at its core to become the industry’s first intelligent system. Publicis Groupe is consolidating all data within every aspect of its operations under one single entity called CoreAI. By providing access to all necessary data and information through CoreAI, employees can work more accurately and faster, accelerating growth for both clients and themselves.
From an advertising standpoint, we see AI playing an important role at both the input and output levels of the work we do. We are ahead of the curve in our adoption of AI into the output streams to drive efficiency, with AI-based tools and platforms already intrinsic to the process of creative development and execution, enabling teams to work faster and collaborate more seamlessly.
What are some of these tools and which are the areas where they come in handy?
AI-assisted production tools assist producers in rapidly creating personalised content for micro-audiences and platforms, resonating with customers, driving consideration, and purchasing options. Content strategists can test and optimise campaign assets in real-time, building intelligence for future planning. At an input level, we are learning to harness the power of AI to glean richer insights, to open new perspectives, and to work as a fertile feeding ground for creative ideation. We recognise that the technology and its applications are still in their nascency, but we are geared up to leverage them as they evolve.
With our investment in AI and our Power of One service model, we are uniquely placed to harness and leverage the power of data, technology, content, and creativity for our clients. To give you an example, Mondelez Oreo Leo Burnett India, Prodigious India, Publicis Tech services and MSL came together to create the biggest AI-led campaigns in recent times #SayItWithOreo. This campaign #SayItWithOreo for the first time made unlimited fully personalised messaging at scale a possibility by leveraging the power of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Staying true to Oreo’s stay playful proposition, it generates witty responses in Farhan Akhtar’s voice to any question asked. The entire process is completely AI-enabled with no human intervention once the consumer plugs the question.
India clearly is a strategic market for Leo Burnett both in terms of the clients and as a hub for talent. How do you view the India market from a global lens?
Globally, we are recognised as the market that is consistently at the vanguard of the best, most progressive work the agency is creating for our biggest clients. We are known to have some of the brightest, strategic, and creative talent in the world, a thriving culture of innovation, and incredible energy and passion. We are already working on several global assignments on big brands out of India, and we see this trend increasing going forward.
Digital transformation is the single-biggest imperative for CEOs across the board. What kind of spending have you earmarked as we look ahead into 2024 and beyond, given the fact that digital is no longer a luxury but a necessity?
Reinvention is perhaps a more appropriate word than transformation to describe the imperative facing businesses today, given that within a decade many of today’s business models will be extinct or unrecognisable. Technology is of course one of the key drivers of this, and I believe embracing the changes needed to harness it, goes far beyond spending.
For us, digital is not a different business entity or even a stand-alone capability, it is integrated and part of what we do. With that in mind, we are already focused in terms of our investments – this year over 20% of our talent pool is core digital, and the remaining 80% is natively digital. We have invested in capability building, platforms and tools, and partnerships and will continue to accelerate that investment over the coming three years.