Anita Nayyar, Executive Director, Starcom

Anita Nayyar, Executive Director, Starcom, holds a degree in Microbiology and post-graduate diploma in Advertising and Marketing Management along with a post-graduate diploma in Business Management. She has been in advertising for 21 years, having previously worked with FS Advertising, O&M, Lintas and Grey. In the last year and a half, Nayyar has helped strengthen the equity of Starcom in north India and added brands such as DT Cinema, Dawat Basmati Rice and Hugo BOSS to the Starcom portfolio.Excerpts from an interview with Ashish Singh of exchange4media!

Q. Is it easy to manage a celebrity-endorsed brand?

Celebrity endorsement is an ongoing phenomenon. Celebrity endorsements are quickly replacing testimonial advertising of yesteryear. It helps in media planning to the extent that the task of brand credibility is taken care of at the level of exposure, which results in enhanced noticeability. The media plan can work at lower levels of exposure compared to non-celebrity endorsed brands.

At Starcom, transparency is the name of the game. I don't know how many agencies actually practice transparency. We are probably the only agency in the country with an inbuilt transparency clause in our contract. For us the single source of income is the client. This gives me a great sense of pride since there is synergy between my principles and those of the agencies. At Starcom, we lay great emphasis on value creation for the brand we work on.

At Starcom media efficiency is a hygiene factor. We do not provide mere media solutions, we partner our clients, that is, as a media agency we understand them and their business. We have a very focused approach of how best we can add value to their business. We look at a lot of consumer insights for our clients to find out how best these insights can significantly enhance their media value creation.

Ideally, a media plan does not help. It is only a standby tool to reach the audience. Planning to connect between the brand and the audience is more of a massive challenge than being a problem.

Starcom is a division of TLG India. Apart from independent media business, it also looks after the media services of full service clients of Leo Burnett, Orchard Advertising and Ambience Publicis Advertising. Publicis is our parent company.

Starcom is just four years old in India. We have split in two zones. West and South is headed by Ravi Kiran and I head North. Starcom is aggressively focused in north India. There has been tremendous growth in the last one year. Internally Starcom has grown 100% in every respect.

Well, it is about how effectively we fine-tune the audiences, how best the data can be interpreted and applied for the client’s benefit.

Passion group marketing (PGM) is proprietary to Starcom. PGM is an approach and mindset that helps identify ways leverage consumer insights which in turn help in enhanced targeting, generation of ideas and creation of media properties. It helps marketers understand the way consumers think. It attaches brands directly to consumer passions. We've been successful in implementing PGM in the case of a premium fragrance brand and a couple of FMCG brands.

Integrating content with advertising is not really new. The only difference is the obvious issue of where the brand is used. Today, as media planners, we look for a perfect brand-fit so that it is in sync with the storyline to ensure that the brand awareness is automatic. For instance, in case of a new launch we do not use soft-branding until and unless there is a huge opportunity.

Sure. It was a seven to ten agency pitch and the size of the account was Rs 30 crore. We won and it was a full service account. It was a huge challenge, as we had to reach out to the entire country. From a media perspective we had to formulate a strategy to counter NDA’s ‘India Shining’ campaign for the same target audience. NDA had already tapped the metro audience which was almost 30 per cent of the urban vote bank. Very strategically we identified the audience to which we would address the issues. We divided the audience into youth, women and farmers, and brought up the issue of unemployment for the youth and insecurity for the female audience.

There is certainly a clutter. Creativity plays a huge role. We try and define the right audience for the creative people to enable them to reach the clients in a focused manner. We are also very careful about minimising wastage of money, time and off-hand resources by choosing the right kind of media. We use a lot of passion group marketing.

Globally, Starcom, Mediavest, Zenithmedia and Optimedia exist as four different media brands under the Publicis group. In India, three media brands existed from the Publicis group i.e. Starcom, Zenithmedia and Optimedia. However, after the WPP takeover, Zenithmedia is now known as MediaedgeCIA.

Our choice of media was specific. We ensured that we took some discreet measures. We took television and vernacular media. We suggested ‘video vans’ which were provided directly by the client. What is most important is that we looked at each state where the Congress was confident, and chose the media which was most effective in each of these states. We ran a lot of campaigns on the subject of youth and women. The way we scheduled the media was done on the basis of constituency and focused on the right message, right media and the right audience. And, yes, we had a separate in-house team for the Congress.