‘MullenLowe Lintas is not just an ad agency anymore, we are focussing on marketing now’

The MullenLowe Lintas Group, which has been known for its award winning ad campaigns for decades, has forayed into marketing as well to offer 360-degree solutions to brands. e4m caught up with the Group CCO & Chairman Amer Jaleel and Group CEO Virat Tandon to understand the 53-year-old group's strategy. 

How has this year treated you in terms of creatives, revenue and popularity? 

Virat Tandon: 2020 and 2021 – both have been fairly eventful. It has been a great challenge for not just the business and organization but even the entire world. Businesses have not faced so many challenges and questions on all fronts with no template to follow for answers – be it revenue, profits, mental health, employee satisfaction…it has been a great learning experience for the leadership at all organizations. Every organization must find its own answer and even we have struggled with what is the correct answer for our organization. It was quite satisfying that we have been able to navigate these tough times and, of course, the outcomes could have been better.

We have had a good run on creative and popularity especially with our return to awards. In terms of revenue, we are closing the year with a definite double-digit growth. So, 2021 has been a better year than 2020 barring the second wave which could have been navigated in a better way. It would have been great if we could have come back to the office but other than that, it has been great. 

Amer Jaleel: Due to the lack of physical interactions, all relationships in the pandemic-hit world were based on what you bring on the table, when you are actually not on the table. Everyone’s work was intensely under scrutiny, be it consultation, communication or marketing because you don’t have the flamboyance and domination that you bring to the consultation; that’s all behind a screen. Without a physical manifestation, if you can grow, become bigger and better as an organization then that is an achievement – a very special one. This is what 2021 has shown. There was no spotlight, no theatrics. Trying to impress others with noises doesn’t work anymore. The purity of your contribution gets downloaded in the minds of people through a mental WIFI. When the purity of the results gets translated in such times, it is immensely satisfying.

A recent report says over 65 per cent of ad expenditure has shifted towards digital globally. How has this shift affected the creative side?

Virat Tandon: Digital has grown leaps and bounds in the last one and half years. It’s the way people are consuming news, content, the way people are socializing and even the adoption of digital platforms – all of it has grown. One needs strategy, ideas, a new digital landscape and right people to advise and to create ads. We got the right people to create content for the new channels, started training people for the digital world in 2018-19 actually under a programme named DNA, got Google and Facebook on-board in this programme later, which helped us to create a robust platform. However, digital is a new communications platform. The idea is still at the core which needs human insight. You may have tools and analytics to expand business and arrive at some cohorts, but you still need a core idea to get ahead. You still bank on human insights for these ideas to come through.

The other thing we have kept pace with is innovation and how we have used this time to change our offerings. We entered the voice space to create experiences for brands, launched the Kaam Wapasi platform to help migrant workers and clients during and post pandemic. We transformed one of our key business which was GolinOpinion which was a pure play PR agency and formed Lintas Live as we realized and understood the need for a digital-first agency early in the pandemic. More recently, we have launched Lintas C:EX as the pandemic increased content consumption through OTT platforms, especially in India, which is the highest in the world, at about three hours per day. We have invested in bringing Yogesh Manwani onboard, a leader who understands the content business. We also experimented with changes to get ready to adjust with the dynamic environment. It has been exciting as we have been open, adaptive and not scared to face the upcoming challenges of the digital domain. 

Amer Jaleel: Digital has come into our life and we must adapt. Just the way you and I are adapting to the presence of digital, businesses and advertising are also adapting the same way. Businesses are getting disturbed with the expansion of digital platforms. What we are focusing on is how to shift our focus from just communication to now marketing. We have stopped thinking of ourselves as advertisers only; in a revolution and a disruption as big as digital, we can’t afford to be just advertisers anymore. We are looking at marketing and business as well and providing complete solutions to brands. 

Digital is a passé. We may witness a biotech age in the future in which people don’t even need devices. Everything might directly download in the human mind. Technology is relentless and progressive, and people will adapt. Our focus is understanding consumer behavior. We are the scientists of human behavior and we keep building on that. We pride ourselves on that and we will continue to do so. The greatest thing is that the speed of knowledge and understanding this behavior has increased due to increase in disruption from all sides. Whatever machine learning happens, Lintas will be on top of it. 

Your digital-first agency Lintas Live has completed a year now. How has it performed so far? 

Virat Tandon: It is like a double engine now; the first engine understands how media, social media and influencers operate with the kind of messages that can create a buzz, and the second engine brings a solid creative culture. This was missing earlier. There is a lot of collaboration within the internal teams now. We are approaching challenges of clients in an integrated manner. We are providing a complete solution with the help of hyper-bundling (bundle creative and media agencies together) that started a few years ago. So, when we show the clients what Lintas Live can deliver today, it is met with positivity. We began this approach of hyper-bundling some time back and it took time for our people and even clients to grasp it completely but now when we go to clients and offer them what we have, it is pure magic.

There are speculations that AI will affect the jobs in the creative side in the future as one ad can be presented in 100 ways with the help of technology. Do you think so? What is the biggest challenge before you as the head of creative agencies with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and metaverse?

Virat Tandon: Our strength is human learning and producing original ideas. AI can then take that idea and make use of it in many ways – get more ROI, build on it, etc. But our strength is coming up with an idea; AI cannot come up with an idea of ‘Jaago Re’. That is a human strength.

Does that mean that MullenLowe Lintas Group’s core business is marketing now?

Virat Tandon: We are first and foremost a strategy and creative organization. The creative thinking required in marketing is a game changer. We are developing ourselves to accept marketing challenges by partnering with the clients in a way that we can move upstream. We are redefining the ecosystem to recreate a contemporary system to partner in marketing. So, we have been planning this for a couple of years now. Recently, we hired Kedar Teny as the CEO of Lowe Lintas who comes with a lot of experience in marketing. The future of this industry is not just advertising. The scope of this industry is evolving and we need to shape our offering in the same way.

Traditional media sources used to be the primary source of inspiration for creative people until a few years ago. Now, a lot of interactions, opinions are shared on social media. Has your source of inspiration also switched from traditional to social media? 

Virat Tandon: Most importantly, our ideas come from insights which answer the brand challenge. Insight always comes from watching human beings and understanding something about them that is not cliché or finding a unique nuance. Earlier, these used to be picked up by daily physical observations and now we do that on social media. It is an organic way to pick up behavior now. We also have digital tools for organic observation of consumers' insight and behavior. It’s a mix of organic observations and analytics. You get the insight and then come up with a strategy to serve it back through various mediums – print, radio, outdoor and digital media. 

Amer Jaleel: Social media has led to a lot of new understanding for us. How people behave in the physical social realm and how they behave on social media are totally different – the environments are different. In social media, people react freely while in the physical world, they choose to avoid confrontations. Our biggest source of knowledge comes from people's own interactions and then from the interactions with clients.

How much time does it usually take to make an ad?

Virat Tandon: It all depends on many things such as topicality, budget, urgency, etc. There may be a situation where you come up with a topical idea which will not be relevant tomorrow; the communication strategies are made in a few hours in such cases. Others are more impactful and carry purposeful, long-term ideas. A lot of thoughts and strategy needs to go in such pieces so that can take 3-5 months as it requires a lot of homework, discussions, planning and execution. 

Perhaps that is what purposeful communication is. This year’s Kantar's BrandZ India report highlighted the same. 

Virat Tandon: Our brands have been taking a stand way before others started talking about it. We have tools and the people who created that kind of work and supported the causes consistently, over a period. It’s not a coincidence that 7 out of 15 top brands in Kantar’s report belonged to us because that’s our culture. We are pleasantly surprised that an agency is now measuring the purposefulness of brands – as it should have been done much before. 

How has the ‘live communities’ helped Lintas Live to grow?

Virat Tandon: We have started hyper bundling of our own teams such as creative technologies, digital strategist, storywriter, scriptwriter, designer and create communities around the brand when we go to pitch or while working on a strategy. There is a lot of enthusiasm around it. As a mature organization, we have created processes so that people of different teams come together and collaborate efficiently. This leads to expression and exchange of ideas which has helped us to streamline our businesses with brands. 

Going ahead, what will be the key focus areas of the group?

Virat Tandon: Be solution oriented. As mentioned, clients expect solutions from us. What we bring to the table is the strategy we use to unlock the brand challenges and objectives. Following that, we work on high level creative ideas that remain in people's minds for a long term. There are so many ideas that are born today but die tomorrow. But some ideas are great which people remember for a long time and they get embedded into people’s minds even after 10 years or so, such as ‘Daag Achhe Hain’. Many ideas have become part of popular culture. That is what we want to continue to bring to the table. 

What are your expectations for 2022?

Virat Tandon: Innovation and creativity flourished during the time of crisis spanned in 2020-21. We have seen so much creativity around us and a lot of receptiveness from all sides – channel partners, clients, etc. I want the same enthusiasm for innovation and creativity in 2022, sans the virus of course. We should lose the crisis but not the enthusiasm.

Amer Jaleel: We had lost spatial chemistry in our professional life during the pandemic. We were so used to sitting together and chatting that it was taken for granted. Now, as we have started returning to the workplace, as a person and as an organization, I expect spontaneity of combustion of ideas and being together in the coming year. 

Presentation can still be done over Zoom but for ideation we need people sitting together and having accidental collaborations. Our campus is like a university where people can discuss their random thoughts with others and hope for something to get sparked during those conversations. These things stopped in 2020 which made us realize the importance of being together on campus. We now value physical presence and togetherness. Value togetherness would be the new normal in 2022.