L&K Saatchi and Saatchi’s Paritosh Srivastava also took charge of Publicis Worldwide India earlier this year. In this interview with Geetika Srivastava, he speaks about the age of AI in the agency world, a cookie-less future and looming challenges for the industry. Edited excerpts:
How will advertising agencies deal with the changes that AI will bring?
AI, at this point, is primarily about collapsing time. Be it in thoughts, articulation or art, AI is generating a lot of stuff much faster than we ever could. So there are more options on the table. The creativity vector is still owned and ruled by the human mind, experience, gut and intuition. But generative AI has become an active collaborator in the creative process. We believe that the firms that will ride on the AI wave and be the early adopters will reap disproportionate benefits in the long term and we would like to be a part of the leader pack.
What are the most significant changes you expect to see in a cookie-less world?
First-party data is super critical in a cookie-less world. Brands and publishers are actively working on this since they need to connect their first-party data with a strong identity graph to activate and scale it. Going forward, customer-focused personalisation will be the bedrock of all advertising solutions. With the consumer decision journey (CDJ) ruling supreme, programmatic advertising is likely to see an unprecedented upswing.
A liquidity crunch in some sectors has depressed advertising spending over the past several quarters. What’s been your experience?
The creative agency business is facing margin pressures for quite some time, with quality and cost of talent being the biggest challenge. The talent cost has seen a significant rise over the past two to three years. The industry at large must focus on creating a quality talent pipeline. On the business front, our North office has witnessed noteworthy growth over the past three years, and we are working towards building this further. We are also now looking at focusing on opening up opportunities in the South.
Is the mushrooming of martech companies a threat or an opportunity for pure-play advertising companies?
In line with the India growth story, the media and advertising business will see enormous growth in the coming years. There will be enough space for everyone to grow and realise their ambitions. We have positioned ourselves to garner a disproportionate share of this growth.
Our silo-less, fluid, and single-window offerings ensure that there is neither accountability loss nor any gap between idea and experience, regardless of scale, category, or CDJ complexity. This is bolstered by our Power of One ecosystem, which gives us end-to-end domain expertise in data, experiential, shopper, e-commerce, PR and performance marketing. In fact, our integrated offerings have seen immense traction in the market.
Almost 70% of our business includes integrated mandates, using two or more services.
Ad industry honchos complain that hiring talent is more difficult now as new employees look for flexible tech-driven opportunities. Your views.
We recognise the need to adapt to the changing times and have developed employee-friendly policies that embrace the new working culture. We encourage our employees to engage in continuous learning and place deep value on their well-being, both mental and physical. Marcel, our enterprise connectivity platform, facilitates learning modules for our employees.
Other initiatives such as PubFit, Work Your World, and Pub Academy ensure the holistic development of our employees, resulting in better talent retention. We have also invested in multiple campus programmes with the idea to offer these fresh recruits a first-hand experience of advertising to hopefully create the next generation of talent for our industry.
What are the milestones you hope to cross in the coming year?
L&K Saatchi & Saatchi was the Number 2 creative agency at this year’s Abby’s One Show, the oldest and most prestigious award in the country. Being one of the most integrated mainline agencies, with both media and digital capabilities, we are firmly entrenched in the top 10 creative agencies in the country, by size. Our current focus is to maintain our double-digit growth rate to reach our next milestone — making L&K Saatchi & Saatchi the youngest agency to break into the top 3 creative agencies in India across all parameters.