Continuing with its series of round tables, Good Ads Matter recently held one to debate whether brands can be built by agencies working on projects rather than the agency-on-record retainer method. 

The agency panel was moderated by Sonal Dabral, creative consultant and film director and featured Abhijit Avasthi, co-founder, Sideways; Aditya Kanthy, chief executive officer, Omnicom Advertising Group; Ashish Khazanchi, managing partner, Enormous; Gautam Reghunath, co-founder and CEO, Talented; Harshil Karia, founder, Schbang; Mithila Saraf, chief executive officer, Famous Innovations; Navin Talreja, founding partner, The Womb; and Rajesh VR, chief executive officer, Ogilvy India.

While the full round tables will be revealed shortly, as print partners, Manifest offers its readers a sneak peek into the panel.

Avasthi: I genuinely believe that CMOs aren’t interested in building a long-term brand because they don’t know where they will be in two or three years. Is it impacting brand building? Yes. I’m a big advocate of long relationships between agencies and brands. Brands won’t be as solid otherwise and it’s beginning to show already.

If one believes a brand is built in less than 10 years, one doesn’t know what a brand is. A brand is a product or service that helps you command a premium. Today, everyone is looking for discounts and moving to apps based on that. A lot of the people in the last 10-12 years haven’t built brands. We have now had a generation of marketers thanks to the startup ecosystem, who have not made profits. They have burnt money and don’t know how to earn money. A brand is solid when you make money.

Dabral: For the brand building to continue to happen, the onus has to shift to the CMOs. So, the marketing department at the client’s end has to have the responsibility in a larger way than before. They control what the brand is even with multiple agencies. So, even if someone is coming for a two-week project, that person is told what is right and that agency team can assimilate and start living that brand for that short period.

Kanthy: Brand building is the single most important thing for an agency. The ‘project versus retainer’ discussion is the current market reality and that is what the agency’s customer needs. There’s an economy built by some of these brands which is thriving on these projects. There’s a problem for us to solve including categories where they don’t have the belief because (on agencies and retainers) we know how that works and we have been doing this for decades. Applying creativity and being consistent is our job and that helps with both short-term and long-term results.

Karia: Tech founders are very impatient. They want results fast. When one is working on a project for them, educating them (to move to the retainer business) requires a lot of conversations. I don’t think that works especially with teams that don’t have a marketing department but have a budget for the same. In four meetings or a month, that founder will say he wants to create an in-house team. Impatience is the need of the hour for them.

Khazanchi: A lot of the clients that are looking for projects have in-house creative teams. In-housing and almost an agency kind of model within brands is what’s happening at the likes of Swiggy and Zomato. They have people out there who have moved from creative agencies. The CMO too will have people in the team who will take care of the stuff required daily. Secondly, earlier brands looked to have extreme consistency. Now, brands go from emotional to funny to long format to short format. Agencies were a keeper of that tone of voice and that has changed.

Rajesh: Projects are a segue of building a pipeline for the future. After one finishes the project, it’s about the investment from the agency side and creating business solutions for the client. One needs to keep meeting the client after the project is over. It’s so difficult to get a segue into a new client because of the competition, so once you’re inside, it’s about converting it for more business.

Reghunath: Projects keep us on our toes and I like that. I don’t buy the fact that brands can’t be built on the back of projects. Creativity has been democratised and the client has many agencies empanelled. They have done so because they want to work with multiple creative partners. The onus on building the brand is a client’s responsibility now. Agencies have a part to play in that for sure.

Saraf: Very often, the argument for projects is made because of economics. It can be a short-term, very high-margin business because one doesn’t need a massive team. But, two or three years down the line, the kind of value one can create with a retainer client, who trusts an agency is significantly higher. I would always be in favour of retainers because that value is unlocked from year three onwards and it takes time. The second aspect of this is the agency value. If you have even 10 contracts out of which five or six are five to six years old, the actual compounded value of that is seen to be much higher even if one is delivering the same number of repeated projects.

Talreja: Many a time, a result of a campaign reveals what to do next and that’s not possible when one works on a project. Many of the CMOs are very young and are even immature to a certain degree. They want one good campaign that can perhaps help win at Cannes and then they will move to the next agency for another famous campaign. With that, one’s probably not keeping in mind the TG and the consistency of the brand tone. These are not matters of concern to many of the new-age CMOs. Having said that, there are a bunch of them who do think of this though. Another factor is that there’s inconsistency if one is a project-based agency. Billings vary and are inconsistent. It’s scary to hire people and have their families rely on an agency if it’s solely focusing on projects.

This story first appeared in the January issue of Manifest. Get your copy here.

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