Can he do the job?

T?S ?project turnaround? for JWT now. And to make this challenging mission possible, JWT, at one time one of India?s strongest and most reputed ad agencies, has brought in Bobby Pawar, the former chief creative officer of advertising network DDB Mudra Group. A 20-year veteran, Pawar took over the creative function of JWT in January this year. Steering the big ship of JWT, which has been facing a storm since quite sometime, is a challenge that he has taken upon himself and all eyes are on him now.

There has been no chief creative officer at JWT since 2008 after its last two national creative heads, Agnello Dias and Josy Paul, left. Paul left the agency to head BBDO within a few months of joining and Dias went on to start his own agency Taproot India, with Santosh Padhi. If that wasn’t enough, Taproot snared away two important projects of Pepsi and Airtel from JWT last year which created a lot of positive buzz for Taproot and negative publicity for JWT.

In another development, one of JWT’s oldest hands in the Delhi office, Rohit Ohri, also called it quits in June last year, to lead Japanese network Dentsu?s journey in India. Ohri’s exit was probably the biggest blow to JWT as he was heading one of the most important JWT offices in the world and was handling some of the most important clients too including Pepsi. There had been a string of resignations from the Delhi office before that too, including Adrian Miller (who was the chief creative officer for Delhi), vice-president and executive creative director Anuja Chauhan and executive creative director Elvis Sequira.

?JWT does seem to be in trouble, especially after so many people had quit the agency. The senior team was not in place, which is not so unusual in a big agency,? says KV Sridhar, national creative director, Leo Burnett. ?There are often issues like competitiveness, politics, egos and talent in big agencies, as advertising is mainly a people’s business. You need to bring the right set of people on board. They experimented with an expat creative head (Adrian Miller in Delhi) which did not work. Most clients want Indian creatives to work on their accounts.”

JWT, till a few years back, had been one of the strongest agencies in the country with a solid set of clients and winning top prizes at various award shows. However, after the big names exited in quick succession, it started sliding down the ranks. Apart from the two key projects of Airtel and Pepsi, the agency also lost Iodex, another big brand which it had been handling since a long time, to Leo Burnett. Last year was probably one of the worst years for the agency as it received a lot of flak. Several media reports hinted that this big ship was sinking.

Amidst all the hullabaloo surrounding the agency, came the surprising news at the end of last year about Pawar partnering with JWT’s chief executive officer Colvyn Harris to head the creative function. Pawar comes from creative powerhouse, DDB Mudra Group, which became what it is today under his creative leadership. He is the highest ranked Indian creative in Campaign?s Creative Rankings. Pawar, who had kicked off his advertising career at McCann Erickson, has also worked with Rediffusion Y&R and Ogilvy India. He has been credited with having created some iconic work for brands such as Wrigley’s Winterfresh, Wrigley’s Doublemint, LaSalle Bank, Mortgage.com, United Way and Lifesavers. In 2000, he joined Ogilvy New York as creative director where he worked on brands like Jaguar, American Express and Kodak.

He later on moved to BBDO Chicago as group creative director and senior vice-president. In 2007, he moved to Mudra Group where he partnered Madhukar Kamath. After Pawar’s takeover, Mudra has hogged the limelight with its work winning numerous awards at Goafest Abbys, Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, Spikes Asia and more. Under Pawar?s leadership Mudra launched a prestigious brand like Volkswagen in India and created some memorable and much talked about campaigns and innovations. Recently global advertising conglomerate Omnicom acquired a major stake in the agency. Today, Mudra is a force to reckon with and Pawar can easily take a lot of credit for it.

After a highly successful stint at Mudra, was JWT a tough decision for Pawar? He says, ?For me to move out of Mudra, a place where I have been very successful at, was definitely a tough decision. Especially, at a time when Omnicom was coming with ambitions and a desire to do great things. I had to move to an opportunity that would stir my blood. And this is the biggest opportunity and challenge that is outthere in Indian advertising right now. It is not just about ‘lets go and make work better at JWT’. That is one of the more obvious things but the more important thing is to partner Colvyn and set a course for JWT for the future. We want to help define the future of this business in India.?

He adds, ?We have always discussed that we are not into advertising business but into marketing communications business. We will go wherever the solution takes us. We are going to be idea and platform agnostic. The only thing we will care about is the right solution as that is what makes brands resonate better with people.?

The concept that Harris and Pawar have adopted at JWT this year is ‘2012 solutions’. Says Harris, ?Change is in the air and we have taken some big steps in terms of how we have organised the company. We are completely sorted now. The idea is to give our clients ‘2012 solutions’ to the problems that they face and the opportunities they would like to be addressed. That is why we are trying to galvanize or create a new dynamism for greater excitement around what we do. JWT is a very large ship with the best brands in the business and it now requires a fresh vision on how we will do it and then deliver on that vision.?

When asked about the challenges that JWT currently faces, both Pawar and Harris are quick address them as opportunities rather than challenges. Says Pawar, ?We have about 1150 people across the country and we have to articulate to them as to where we are going and repeat that every single day so that it becomes automatic to them. The other thing is to just spend time with people and try to make them and their work better.?

Another opportunity, according to Pawar, is the whole notion of one JWT where an idea can come from anywhere and where creative, servicing and planning are not departments but mindsets. ?We want to work in the collaborative spirit that the world works in today. There are brands that are run by the Delhi office where one part of the solution can come from Bangalore, another from Hyderabad and Mumbai. We have to re-evaluate how we work and try different things. The idea is to let the agency grow organically. It is a process of evolution and we have already planted the seeds.?

According to Harris, Pawar is the one who would help a great deal in bringing this change to the agency. ?Bobby has a very ?colourful?, frank and forthright way. That frankness will save a lot of time. When there is a client issue or opportunity or an idea which we think can help them build up the business or category better, then we can talk about it directly rather than beating around the bush. In the traditional way, we could arrive at a 30-seconder or a billboard, but that doesn’t work today. We need to set up the company in a way so that there is a seamless element which we can deliver in whatever we set out to do. That is the challenge,? he says.

One of the biggest challenges that the agency and the entire advertising business is facing right now is the high rate of attrition. And JWT has had way too many senior level exits in the last couple of years. JWT’s structure has been questioned time and again. Ohri, in one of his earlier interviews to the media, had indicated that he felt stagnated in JWT towards the end and was looking for a bigger role and even Harris had spoken about how Ohri had ambitions to become the CEO. Now having moved on, Ohri does not wish to comment on anything related to JWT. Another senior creative professional who had left JWT within a very short span of time does not want to say anything about the agency.

Talking about the string of exits at JWT, Sridhar, who was creative director at JWT Bangalore in the eighties, says, “I don?t know what exactly happened with Aggie, (Agnello Dias) what were the issues or whether he was sufficiently empowered to lead the agency. Aggie is a purist creative person and he might have quit because he did not want to handle the politics in a big agency. Now it depends on Bobby as to how does he manage egos and re-build the team and manage it.?

How does JWT plan to cope with attrition? Says Harris, ?The churn is actually at the lower-middle level, and they are not huge value drivers. As long as the core team is intact, it is fine and that is one of the most important things from a client’s point of view too. Of course, there is churn, but churn is managed in a few days. You need to constantly make changes as this is a dynamic business in a dynamic market.?

Pawar thinks that the problem with Indian companies is that people don’t make hard choices. ?You need to know who your race horses are, who your work horses are, and both are equally prized. You also need to know who your donkeys are. And you cannot mistake your donkeys or your mules for either your work horses or race horses.? He adds, ?Also, hunger and passion are more important than talent. A hungry person will stay in there and not give up but a talented person, probably because of his talent, will say ‘I will come in the morning and crack it’. We have to figure out who do we want, who is more right for us. Also, when you let people grow, you are anointing future leaders. You have to see if you can visualise that person two level up, if you can’t, then you have to be honest to them and to yourself.?

Another big task in front of JWT is to seamlessly build digital and mobile into the entire system. Last year, the agency brought another Mudra hand on board, Max Hegerman, to lead the digital function at the agency.

?The digital space is evolving and we are very clear about the role that we want to play in this space. We want to make sure that we have also become the evangelists of the digital mindset. We are not just doing it because its another revenue stream,? says Pawar. ?At the end of the day, an idea is an idea if we can make it seamless. All this comes from the belief of the ‘big idea’. Even though the notion of the ‘big idea’ is from the TV era, you need broad ideas now. To get solutions that can be stretched into the fabric of consumers’ lives is the endeavour. There are a lot of plans in the digital space, but we can’t let all the secrets out of the bag.?

After Taproot took away the two much-talked-about key projects from the agency this year, does JWT now perceive independent agencies as a serious threat? Says Harris, ?We are a large format agency. The clients do go out for one or two projects for various reasons like idea or price points and that will continue to happen. Our scale is very different. If our clients think they are getting a better solution elsewhere, so be it. We are going to be there to partner them for the end-to-end solution throughout and if we are the only ones, then we are 100% accountable.?

According to Pawar, the ‘Any Given Sunday’ concept in American football which means that on any given Sunday, any team can beat any other team, can be applied to JWT. ?For us everybody is a threat as they are swimming in the same fish pond as ours. We will take a behemoth as seriously as we take a BBH. A challenge is a challenge and that is what gets our blood up.? He says that JWT wants to be more dominant. ?Those two projects took the focus away from other important work that we do on brands such as Sunsilk, etc, but let’s put that in perspective, what they took away is like really small. If you look at other agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi, they lost a third of their business. Look at what happened to Rediffusion. But the two projects in this story became bigger than what happened to these agencies. What is the logic to that!?

?All the negative publicity was mainly because we lost those two projects. However, for any client, we do almost 400-500 projects in a year. Media can make Mount Everest out of molehills and that is exactly what happened in this case. We got more coverage than even Lokpal got, which is unfair to the Lokpal,? quips Harris.

Sources say that the agency is currently working for the ?next big idea? for Airtel, amongst other things. Things seem to be looking up for the agency which has managed to sort out its structure and attract one of the biggest names in creative as its head.

The task isn?t impossible, agrees Sridhar pointing out that there are some very good people at JWT. The agency has also promoted three of its creative heads?Tista Sen, Swati Bhattacharya and Senthil Kumar to national creative directors, all of whom now report to Pawar. ?The big task that Bobby has is to make JWT seem like one big agency. They have to redefine their philosophy, make it clear and then need to be one JWT. He has to find a common agenda and a common vision along with other members in the team and management. Bobby is definitely capableof steering JWT ahead. He has already proved himself by steering Mudraso successfully.”

JWT is now looking forward to create a seamless structure to bring about the changes that it wants. Says Pawar, ?What you are seeing is the intent. What we are will keep on evolving. There is no future model of the agency, as it has not been written yet.

Everyday we live and work, we try different things.?