"To think out of the box you need to move out of your box & collaborate"

The core ingredient for successful campaigns or brands is the relationship between clients and agencies. The collaboration leads to more reach and eyeballs for the brand.

Sharing the important pillars in the relationship between agency and clients, Sanjay Tripathy, ‎Senior Executive Vice President - Head Marketing, Product, Digital & E-Commerce, HDFC Standard Life remarked, “The agency has the outer perspective and we work together with particular brands and different industries. The agency guys bring real life insight for the brand.”

According to hi, there are a few things that agencies need to do to get it right. He said, “I believe an agency needs to work on four things – accountability, capability, continuity, and agility.”

Accountability
“We seek equal ownership of the brands and clients and agencies need to work together and focus on the common core and work as a team,” said Tripathy.

Capability
He admitted that there are issues that exist on both the client’s side and the agency’s side, which include salaries, the work environment and work satisfaction. “Good training increases the capability of the brand and it develops the business. Training is very important, and proper training gives more idea about creativity and building,” he added.

Continuity
According to Tripathy, “Our industry is all about people. Unfortunately, the people keep changing and the continuity is lost. You don’t really get the guys who have really worked for the brand and came out with a great campaign. And over the period of time, twenty different guys must have worked on the campaign, and probably the agency might have faced the same situation.”

He affirmed, “In order to maintain continuity, it is important that agencies maintain the same involvement in the brand, even with high attrition.”

Agility
Businesses are moving very fast and there is a persistent threat to all brands that need change. The client and agencies both need to be proactive rather than reactive. They need to deal everything with a broader perspective.

While judging one of the creative awards, he said, “I was thinking if today’s all this come from different agencies and few of them will go to the next step and how many of them will survive how many of them will come for the next round.”

Sharing message with the industry partners he said, “For the agency partners we need to work with a brand very closely to understand how to really bring out the change before the change is required.”

Sharing about the consumers interest he said, “I think the way the consumer is consuming media is changing. Ten years back consumers normally reads newspaper listen radio spending day in office over pc and come home and watch TV.

It was the most sorted way and everybody knows where the consumer is what are they watching and now mobile come everywhere and now its complicated. Its no longer the one single campaigns that matters it’s the micro campaigns in different platforms makes different. And along with the in this

Coming to the new landscape we have to move beyond the 30 second format to work at par with the evolving media.

We have to think out of the box and to think out of the box we need to move out of the box and collaborate.

He concluded by saying, “I would love to see six things from you all and i.e The new landscapes, collaborate, brand, Business, people evaluation and question your clients.”

Sanjay Tripathy was sharing his views at the Goafest 2014 on May 30, 2014.