India is the fourth largest market for us: Jack Swayne, mSix&Partners

Jack Swayne, the Global CEO of mSix&Partners, spoke to exchange4media about how the India market is one of the fastest-growing at present. He also shared the challenges of being a new agency and the client categories that he is scouting for.

Edited excerpts:

What brings you to India?

India is a very important market for us. It is perhaps the fastest growing market in the globe for us right now. It is grown 300% in the last five years. We have come to India to meet clients to understand the market dynamics more significantly spend time with our team here. Moreover, take the learnings from here and scale them up in other markets around the globe.

What are these learnings? What is it that the India team is doing differently than other markets?

The clients in India are obsessed with business outcomes and the ROI that media marketing drives. Moreover, the clients are consistently tracking brand and media metrics which significantly help them in amplifying overall ROI. A few other markets sometimes get lost in the brand metrics which impacts the client’s business. I believe that we can take that to more markets around the world.

What is it that the India team needs to learn from other markets? 

Our proposition of bringing diverse thinkers, talents, and creators together to reinvent the way brands are built is what Indian market can explicitly learn from us. I think when we best show up to solve clients’ issues, we are thinking about media and content. Now, the India team has done that a lot with content and increasingly with commerce. I think we could do more of that here because that has been very successful for mSix&Partners in other parts of the world, particularly in EMEA and North America. I also believe that the opportunity here is being able to show up in a more joined up way to reinvent all of the brands that we work with by thinking about media and content. 

Your journey in India is less than a decade old? What are the challenges of being a new agency?

I think there are a lot of advantages and that's shown in our growth, because when you're a new agency, you don't have any legacy and you're setting something up for the needs of clients today, and that is, if I had to boil it down, is that's to be as sort of digital as possible? I think that's been the advantage of being newer that’s why mSix&Partners grew during COVID. We have been consistently growing for the last five years. 

Now, the disadvantages of being a new agency, normally, are that you don't have the sort of scale and presence. But we are very lucky as mSix&Partners have the backing of both Mindshare and Group M that give us not only the scale but also the access to the tools, talent and experience that help us grow. I think we've been lucky that we can offer our clients and our people as a new agency, sort of the best of both worlds. 

Going through your client list, you have a mix of categories from FMCG to cosmetics. What more categories would you like to add? 

We are planning to bring auto and consumer electronics into our business. Being a newer agency, there's a lot of headroom for growth for us across a whole number of categories. Beyond exploring categories, we are always willing to work with clients, who believe in faster growth and adding more digits to a number in a stipulated time. If I think about the work that we're currently doing with a number of our clients, the thing that's shared amongst them all is this desire for fast growth.  Being newer and more agile we can deliver fast growth. 

How significant is the Indian market for you? What would be India's contribution to your global numbers? What's been the growth in the last eight years?

Indian market is our fourth largest market after UK, USA and Germany. There ambition is to be even higher. In a years’ time they will be number one. India has been growing exponentially over the years and will surpass other countries in terms of growth and performance in the upcoming years. As we are a newer agency in the market, we think that leveraging sheer market size, velocity and speed in terms of market growth, can differentiate us in the market. 

When we're looking at all of our global forecasts, we're seeing that globally, we're probably predicting 5.9% of growth in ad expenditure, where it's more like 12% here in India. And so it carries on that velocity. There's a real opportunity to grow it quicker. We have grown double-digit every year, including the more difficult times of 2020. We feel very optimistic about this market and the growth potential.

What are your plans for mSix&Partners India? 

We are ardently mapping how to accelerate growth and expertise in content to foster our presence across the Indian market. The launch of &Studio powered by technology is the perfect example of how we are segmenting and structuring our content while making deals with clients. 

I think clients are pretty happy with the single TVC asset that they get that we can push out at the top of the funnel. But where the real pain point tends to be in the thousands of iterations needed for more performance-focused commerce assets, whether that's across Amazon, Google and Meta. We've created a piece of technology that allows us to take a single asset and turn it into thousands of different iterations with different calls to action, sizes, and formats for all of the different platforms. 

When was it launched in India?

We launched it two months ago and rolling that out now and I believe in the next six months, be able to come back and talk about the brilliant results that it's done because we're talking to all of our clients about it now. I believe that our salient marketing mix makes us who we are today by synchronising media and content together. I think it'd be really important for our clients because it's solving one of their key pain points at the moment.