18 Feet & Rising, the UK-based full service agency, has its sights set on India as part of its expansion plans. Its founder Jonathan Trimble speaks with BrandWagon’s Shinmin Bali on his maiden trip to India about the agency’s potential presence in the market, the impact of Martin Sorrell’s exit from WPP, what plagues the agency model today, and more. Edited excerpts:
What are the types of clients that you would want to work with in India?
We are looking at Series B funded clients. So this would be at a point when they are going from an idea that is working to an idea that everyone knows about and they have to get on the advertising ladder. There are going to be clients with relationships to India in some shape or form. In the first instance, our Indian presence will be such so that we can look after the global requirements of our UK clients here. I don’t think we are ready to compete with anyone here yet. I am taking my time to figure things out but what I do know is that there will be creative and design talent here that will be valuable to do work for us in London. If it is going to happen, I would like to be in India by September.
How do you think Martin Sorrell’s exit from WPP will impact the ad industry?
He has been a very big figure in the industry. He is essentially the creator of modern advertising. But it is time for a change. He has had an incredible run but his stepping down creates an incredible amount of space in the market. It creates tremendous movement now because he was pretty good at sewing up deals. If there is one thing I think he knew an awful lot about is how he would go into a very global situation and say, “I’ll get this done for you, in whatever manner you want it structured.” None of the other networks seem as capable of doing that.
Imagine the UK for example… say, Marks & Spencer. When it calls for a pitch, it only pitches between WPP agencies. So imagine, a force like that stepping out! I don’t know if clients will move out of WPP quickly because the deals or structures they do are pretty locked in. You are going to see that without the sales force of Martin Sorrell talking to these clients at the top, there is opportunity for all sorts of things to happen. For example, it may become unlikely for closed pitches with WPP to happen in London.
Does this set WPP to be stronger or weaker?
In the short term, when you lose a leader like that, it can make you weaker, is my perception. The main thing everyone is circling around is the breakup value. I think there has been some hiding about where the growth has come from. It was kind of weird seeing Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at Capitol Hill in the same week as Sorrell stepping down and I think WPP had been posting growth basically through digital media but meanwhile it has been hiding real systemic margin problems with greater businesses. And now that this has run out of steam, the network may be debating selling some of the entities off.
Do you see the agency model to be in trouble?
On the media side, yes. Back in the UK, transparency is the hot topic. Everyone’s a bit murky on where that digital money went. We know that IBM has a platform where a client can buy digital media by themselves. But they don’t know the planning so they still want to talk to someone to get their head around it. I was talking to a client in London and he said that it is possible that he would want to do media in-house. To an extent, it is the same for creative with the in-house strategy going on. My main observation is that the salaries at agencies are very expensive for the fees now. So you need a whole different generation to come through, but they are not that attracted to the business. Agencies need to keep in mind that in the end, we want to move to markets where people are still willing to work in advertising.
What’s your opinion on big networks oscillating between being specialists and full service agencies?
A lot of people would like creative and media to get back together. It is more possible than ever but it is going to be difficult to do. So in India, GroupM is about 80% of the media market. So it is dominated by one group that will be pre-buying everything. Media independents in the UK are doing great work in getting your campaign seen. So needing the network buying effect is not there. It is entirely possible then, for buying to come back into creative. The efficiency isn’t working. It is destroying value in an absolute race to the bottom. What you could see in the short term is media independents and creative independents coming closer and working together.
What we find in the UK is that Facebook and Instagram advertising is very generic among competitors. So if it is a food brand on Instagram, it is all about recipes and almost the same set of influencers. In some ways we need to get back to having one or two great creative executions, a good and simple big strategy and flow it very simply through everything. A lot of energy goes into programmatic but there’s not much gain. It is because of the P&Gs and Unilevers and their retail models, but there is a whole set of brand new clients that need awareness.
A recent report suggested that consumption in the UK is going down. How does it make advertising harder then?
We are a B corporation. It is a benefit corporation and we run for the benefit of the shareholders but also the community and the employee. This is the next big movement in business — it’s basically not consumers. Fifty percent of the people in the UK think capitalism is messed up. Clients are not interested in treating people as endless machines of consumption which is why it is funny for me to hear the size of the FMCG business here.
The difficult answer is that consumption isn’t the way forward actually and that there are still companies that need awareness.
Are advertisers apprehensive about spending on digital given the recent data leaks and privacy breach?
I sense a general worry regarding some of the digital platforms. So when somebody like a Unilever says it is not going to be spending on digital as much, people listen. Advertisers are worried that their consumers are worried.
Shinmin.Bali@expressindia.com
@shinminbali