Nexus is a big transformation agent of GroupM: Priti Murthy

While she doesn’t often give interviews, Priti Murthy, President, GroupM Services India, was in conversation with Naziya Alvi Rahman, Editor, exchange4media, discussing her new role in Nexus, which she took over nine months ago and fondly refers to as the ‘secret service of GroupM’.

“It is a big transformation agent of GroupM. The idea is to bring in more intelligence to the way we work and handle media business,” said Murthy, calling it akin to the kind of work done by fund managers and the hyper-specialization and keen analytic research done by them across various kinds of funds.

“So you have non-biddable assets (print, TV, radio and direct digital buy-ins) and biddable assets (like search, social, programmatic). Each of these fields, as well as their integration, brings value to the clients. What GroupM did was to look at the agencies and thrive on their design thinking and focus on demand generation,” she said.

“What GroupM Nexus is delivering to agencies is ensuring that funds bring in the ROI, which means the right media plans are delivered and right optimizations are done. And it's a team of specialists doing that job, taking away the generalist conversations in these teams,” said Murthy, adding that this means, for instance, e-commerce clients will be dealt with by the e-commerce team, who are already armed with the specific knowledge, technology and other assets to be able to deliver the best possible results.

Responding to Rahman pointing out that other agencies may also have e-comm teams, Murthy explained that Nexus would work in tandem with the client for those deliverables, and with their specific teams, to get the best possible result.

“Nothing has changed for the client. This is, like I said, the secret service. It is the engine of GroupM, which ensures that client deliverables are enhanced and not compromised. So for the agency, it is the same face, same team, same planners, and a backend. It’s just that the way that backend works has transformed,” said Murthy.

She further explained that earlier, each agency had their own implementation team, while now, all these implementation teams were coming together, “without compromising on clients’ specific needs and plans. Those are very well protected.”

On Rahman observing that this would mean every plan and deliverable would go through Murthy and the enormous work that entailed, Murthy laughed and noted that the team has around a 1000 people this year, and the numbers are set to increase.

“The good thing is that being part of GroupM, infrastructure, capacity building, technology including AI/ML, are built into this team. This allows for non-replication of work, efficiency in execution, timeline management and more,” said Murthy, noting that the company has a lot of D2C clients which have ever evolving needs that can change on a dime.

“I think somewhere the vision was set out in 2008, at a time when digital wasn't that big and the scale wasn't that big. From then till now, there were different learnings we had in the system and Mindshare had led through their CMP for the TV side of the business,” said Murthy, adding that this is when AI tools were developed, all of which was coming together now to form the core of Nexus.

Rahman observed that there was significant movement in the upper echelons of agencies over the last few years and wondered how these initiatives might help retain talent and leadership.

Replying on a personal note, Murthy said she was excited by the transformation agenda. “If leaders feel stagnated in their transformation agenda, they move out or move in, as the case may be. But I also think one shouldn’t get hassled. We as an industry have a massive talent pool across the board, not just in GroupM.”

“This year we hired 200 people at the entry level, next year we’ll hire 300 people. I’m building capability infrastructure, so these aren’t resignation countermeasures, but rather, looking ahead of the curve and how I can train specialization mindsets in the agencies,” said Murthy, while noting that this had had a positive result on attrition rates.

On Rahman observing that the industry, especially new talent, was pivoting towards digital and ignoring other media (including and especially TV), Murthy said that her team was also transforming the way people look at TV.

“Planning for TV has changed. At one end you have target audiences and demographic conversations, but now you have audience planning and how you bring those two audiences together. It’s true that now there is the gaming generation, for whom everything is about technology solutions, platforms, and that’s what we’ve done with TV. We’ve created AI tools and solutions to address audience understandings and other solutions,” she said.

“The fact that the pace of transformation and adoption is so fast, and we’re not sitting on the laurels of the past. That’s what excites me as does the aggressive investment into technology and also the kinds of acquisition happening which allows us to leapfrog ahead,” concluded Murthy.