Alok Agrawal, COO - SW Asia, Cheil Worldwide

By and large the solution that clients seek is a holistic solution, but our approach to brands and solutions is slightly different. It is more driven by what do we do to energise our consumers into action… whatever we do – whether it is a television message or on ground or online, needs to give consumers the chance to touch, feel, experience, and talk about it. Thus, our solutions will always have an engagement platform and an activation platform attached to whatever scale or level or budget is required for that particular category.

Every so often Alok Agrawal, Chief Operating Officer-SW Asia, Cheil Worldwide, feels he is a misfit in this business of creativity and imagination. Having learnt how to engineer airplanes at IIT Kanpur, he realised his limitations in following monotony and decided to shift field.

As he walked out of IIM, Bangalore, he walked into the streets of Delhi and the heartland of India as a salesman. Found it even more repetitive. Till one day he entered the hallowed world of the Gods of advertising. Since that fateful day in early 1993, he has been trying to make sense of creativity with an engineer’s mind.

Through this journey of the unknown, he studied many fine examples of brands – Arrow, Lee, Wrigley’s, Britannia, Philips, General Motors, Essar Telecom, GSK Healthcare, Hyundai, Mars, BJP, Dabur, Nokia, Hindustan Times, TimesJobs, IndiaTimes and Samsung. Worked with some renowned gods of Indian advertising. At Trikaya, which turned Grey, Enterprise Nexus and Bates and now Cheil Worldwide.

Moving from acetates to slide projectors to Powerpoint to keynote and Flash, he has experienced the evolution of this business to such an extent that it’s hard to describe it in one word. As he looks forward into the future, there are two things he is certain of. First, there are endless ideas out there, waiting to be discovered. Second, the future is not going to be what we predict it to be. It will be full of changes and surprises. And he will continue in his effort to make sense of this chaos.

In conversation with exchage4media’s Deepika Bhardwaj, Agrawal speaks at length about the BTL space in the country, the growth prospects, the challenges and the way ahead…

Q. Cheil is known for its expertise in ATL. How are you planning to establish yourself in the experiential marketing domain? Could you share some of the key BTL activities handled by the agency?

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We primarily deal with high value categories such as electronics and consumer durables, therefore, we clearly understand that a consumer of ours is not going to consider or buy a product unless they have had a thorough experience of the benefits of the product. So there are various programmes that we do at retail store points where people can come and look at our different products, experience the benefits. Sometimes there are technological innovations that we try and magnify to let people see, which may not be evident on the outside. Hence, it is not just a physical demonstration, we invest a lot in getting promoters who are well trained and who can explain to you about the different products; it is not just about the technical experience, but it has to be the whole joy of the product that you see. A lot of effort goes into creating content for the educational programmes that are played at these places which talk about the product and so on. Today, there are a lot of digital tools available to enhance the experience at the stores. Cheil has, in fact, created and patented a digital display system which was first developed in Cheil Germany and is now being sold to clients, wherein the product is connected to a display screen and there is pre-package information, so once you pick up a product, the information about the product and videos automatically start running. Thus you can navigate through the product very easily. We have used this technology for promotion of cars, FMCG products and so on.

Q. Have you seen any surge in spends allocated to BTL activities?

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Overall there is a shift away from ATL to what we broadly call BTL activations, which is at the retail level and online, so clearly there are spends going towards these. You can easily see that people are spending more on creating retail outlets, dressing up the retail outlets and then doing things beyond just that. Though I don’t think there are any numbers available, but we know across the board that shifts are now at overall almost 50-50 – 50 for ATL and 50 for BTL; the online portion is sitting somewhere in between.

Q. So are clients today asking for activations and experiential marketing solutions as part of the total communication solutions or you think it still hasn’t reached that stage?

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By and large the solution that clients seek is a holistic solution, but our approach to brands and solutions is slightly different. It is more driven by what do we do to energise our consumers into action. Not to just remember our brand, but do something about it. And if that is the whole philosophy, then whatever we do – whether it is a television message or on ground or online, needs to give consumers the chance to touch, feel, experience, and talk about it. Thus, our solutions will always have an engagement platform and an activation platform attached to whatever scale or level or budget is required for that particular category.

Q. Cheil’s expertise over the years has been in advertising. How are you creating expertise in your organisation for catering to this segment?

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I don’t think it’s fair to say that we are only an advertising agency, people say that because they see our ads on TV with Aamir Khan. We have done a fair amount of non-ATL work for years globally and here. We have done hundreds of stores for Samsung. If you see any Samsung store, in all probability it has been designed and built by us. The entire branding inside and outside is done by us. So if you see activation in a mall for a Samsung product or on television, it’s done by us. And this is the activity we have been doing in India since the time we started, which is about seven years ago. So, we have a fairly large BTL team which is dedicated to different categories, with specialisation in design, activations, out of home, and all this is seamlessly integrated.

Q. You revved up your team with appointment of Ankur Bose as VP- BTL. Is it a move towards strengthening Cheil’s offerings in the BTL space?

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We are investing hugely in this domain, which is quite evident with appointment of Ankur, who has a lot of experience in this field. Yes, it is a step towards strengthening our integrated BTL solutions to clients. We are looking at providing turnkey solutions to clients, both in retail space and in events, exhibitions and activations. Apart from Ankur’s appointment, we have made significant changes in our internal team too. A design team has been set up exclusively to provide 3D designs, in-store retail and events design. We have also developed an Internet-based solution called Internet Progress Measurement System, connecting our stakeholders online to gauge progress on ongoing activities. We are looking at this domain quite consciously now and these steps will help us strengthen our expertise in the domain.

Q. So would you say this medium scales over print and television?

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It is easier to measure the RoI, but what mainline media gives you is reach. You can’t get the scale of reach that you are looking for by direct contact, especially in a country like ours which has such a massive population. Besides, there are two other factors – cost per contact through print or television is much, much lower than cost of direct contact, moreover the quality of implementation is a huge nightmare. Because logistically, things could go wrong in the last minute, plus the non-professional attitude of some people, untrained manpower – all these could be a big nightmare. Doing things in a more professional manner helps in making things easier and for this, people are investing in training manpower. But that will take some time, it will take some time for this field to mature.

Q. Do you plan to expand your offerings to more clients?

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We have been working for Samsung, we have done some work for other clients in the past. I look at it as a combination of retail and non-retail experience. People tend to see retail and activation as two independent things, but I feel they are strongly linked. In fact, there is larger footfall in a retail outlet on a regular basis if it is interest that draws the customer in. A guy will go into an electronic store because he wants to buy an electronic product or at least take a look, as opposed to someone who is just walking in a mall, since he might be there just to watch a movie. Hence, this consumer visiting our retail outlet is a lot more important to us vis-à-vis someone who is just in the mall. But we don’t differentiate between the two and hence what you do at the mall has to be that much more interesting, eye catching and appealing, because people have come there for fun, if you deliver fun to them, they get attracted to you and in the process they may retain something about the product. The retention might be low – and there is nothing currently to measure that – but when they come to a store they have clearly come to get more information about you. It’s not so much about fun and frolic. If you take the fun element out, obviously it’s more about education and then the retention is much higher. So that’s what we look at and this is one area where we are constantly adding global learnings.

Q. How have marketers responded to the whole experiential marketing domain?

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Today, everyone is looking at this domain quite closely, including the marketers. But so far, most of them have majorly focused on optimising and maximising display. For example, can I get little more shelf space? Can I get a little more branding? But in the last couple of years, it has picked up steam. With the advent of modern retail and emergence of malls, all the big international brands are setting up their exclusive stores. A connect is being established in malls, high streets, and this has really accelerated the pace. Today, everybody realises the importance of the medium, especially consumer electronics brands, and they have really taken the medium along.

Q. How do you measure returns on such kind of activities? Are they at par with other mediums or would you say it can’t be compared?

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It depends. If you look at traditional media, then there are some best benchmarks, like GRPs and how many numbers I am going to make, regardless of category and regardless of the campaign. When we are going Live, we measure responses by number of people contacted or out of the number of people contacted how many showed positive response or how many numbers booked, or how many actual sales happened. So depending on each activity and the objective of the activity, we can immediately measure it. In fact, all of last year we went and signed up with malls across 30-40 cities and we would go there every weekend and do an activation programme for some of our product categories so we could have some presence. So, some week it would be phone, some week television, and so on. What we could do was compare the results of city 1 versus city 2, week 1 versus week 2. We could take stock on a Saturday and analyse what worked and what didn’t work and make some changes overnight so that we could do better on Sunday. Therefore, constant monitoring is there, constant feedback is there , because you are constantly reading out the numbers, you don’t have to wait for a third body to give you data on how many spots were seen and how many GRPs were gained. Thus, it is so much easier to monitor and implement and make it effective. So RoI is a lot easier to measure.