Girish Menon, General Manager, Mindshare, Bangalore and Chennai

“Most of the senior people in the media agencies have arrived from the full service agencies. We all started out at that time with little client interaction. With the development of full media service agencies like GroupM, this has changed and we are meeting clients directly, not as someone else’s clients but as our own. So, the key challenge for us is to pick up client servicing skills. This is what we are all consciously trying to build up as we don’t have the years of experience that creative and other agencies have.”

Girish Menon has an engineering degree in Electronics and Communication. In a manner of speaking, he chose the latter of the two, when he joined J Walter Thompson’s Media department in Chennai (Madras) after completing his MBA in Marketing in 1993. Working with JWT through the ’90s, he handled the planning duties for Citibank and Pond’s along the way, as well as other national and regional accounts. At the peak of the IT boom in February 2000, he took over as head of the Chennai Media department, and worked extensively on the Sify.com and SSI software education accounts. In 2001, Menon and his team helped launch a Tamil movie channel (KTV) and a luxury car (Ford Mondeo). With the entry of WPP Media in India in 2002, he took over the operations of MindShare in Chennai. From April 2003, he is serving as General Manager, MindShare, Bangalore and Chennai. In this dialogue with Shubha Kumble of exchange4media.com, Menon talks about the emergence of the full media service agency, its need to develop client servicing skills, the promotion of non-traditional media and more.

Q. What differentiates MindShare from other media agencies?

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MindShare is a part of GroupM Media India, which in turn is a part of the WPP Group. I think one of the main characteristics of MindShare is we are a complete media service agency. Today, all media services are private in the country, which I think, is the key change. Earlier, media services used to be handled as a division within a full service agency. Today this division has grown independent with its own brand name. But in most cases they end up just being brand names of the media departments and nothing else has changed. But in our case we are a completely standalone company. That is not important in it, as how the equity of a company is doesn’t matter to the end consumer. What is important is that because we are a stand-alone company, we are completely dedicated to media services and our focus is on specialisation. I think this was the vision with which GroupM and MindShare were formed worldwide six to seven years ago. We would like to think of ourselves as a ‘House of Media’. There are several doors within this house and each door leads to a different field of specialisation that we offer.

Q. While most other divisions within GroupM like ATG, MCI and MOne have their specialisations, what is the essential differentiator between MindShare and Maximise?

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Essentially, we offer similar services, only to different sets of clients. Then of course, there is a difference in size and I’m sure over time each company will develop its own personality, based on the kind of people who work there. In a recent interview CVL Srinivas (MD, Maximise) said that as they were slightly smaller they were hungrier and they tended to end up pitching aggressively. We operate under the umbrella of GroupM but in all other respects we are distinct.

Q. Tell us about your research divisions.

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ATG and MCI are our two cutting-edge research units. Both in the country and within GroupM Worldwide, they are the key units that have won a number of awards and accolades. Any analytic information that is required by anyone across GroupM comes to these guys here. Many times a new brand is being launched in a new category and you are operating in a large space environment. With the kind of data that these units are working on at present, we can tell what has been done in other environments, what kind of benchmarks to set and what has been successful. They are constantly doing new stuff and are the wings that we are extremely proud of.

Q. One of the biggest grudges against media planners is their indifference towards new media. What’s your take on this?

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Let me put it this way: it’s always easier to follow a used route. Also, it’s sometimes difficult to sell a new medium to a client. Then, there are some clients who, by mere necessity, go into new media. For example, McDowell’s and UB – our liquor clients, who because of restrictions imposed on traditional media advertising, have constantly been on the lookout for non-traditional media opportunities. Therefore, we are very happy to offer non-traditional media ideas to them and they are equally happy to take it up. So, here is a client who is prepared to look at these areas with an open mind, as that fulfils the necessity and requirement of the market where he operates in. Due to this, they have been pioneers in trying out a number of new mediums. For McDowell’s and Bagpiper, we have done a number of tie-ups with Hindi films. Here we have done a joint promotion for both – the liquor brand and the film.

All said and done, there are a number of clients who are comfortable with traditional media and maybe agencies in general have not put in enough effort to educate them about non-traditional media. We have a very sharp focus on educating our clients and with the help of another successful unit of ours called Broadmind, which has been a pioneer in many of these new initiatives; we have developed tools to help us push through many of these ideas.

Q. As the Head of MindShare South, what difference do you see between clients in the South and those from the rest of the country?

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One of the main differences is that here clients operate with a relatively smaller budget in the sense that larger clients in the South have a smaller budget compared to the larger client in the North. Here, we don’t have clients who spend a hundred crores a year. Our larger clients here spend in the regions of Rs 20 to 30 crores. So, this automatically removes you from larger initiatives like sponsoring the India-Pakistan series. At the same time we have ambitious plans for national brands who want to be significantly present on the national stage. So, we end up thinking harder at how to make the money work. So, it’s mainly about how to make the small budget leverage and make it appear larger than what it is actually. This is the scene that I tend to deal with most of the time. Even with the larger clients in the South, they tend to really squeeze the extra bang out of each buck. I think all media owners based in the South also recognise that. I’m fairly certain that the way we interact here and the way we discuss things is more micro managed than it is in Bombay (Mumbai) or Delhi.

Q. Speaking of clients, what do you think is the biggest challenge in dealing with clients today?

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See, at the end of the day we are in a service business. Most of the senior people in media agencies have arrived from the full service agencies. We all started out at that time with little client interaction. With the development of full media service agencies like GroupM, this has changed and we are meeting clients directly, not as someone else’s clients but as our own. So, the key challenge for us is to pick up client servicing skills. This is what we are all consciously trying to build up, as we don’t have the years of experience that creative and other agencies have.

Q. How do you go about measuring the effectivity of a campaign?

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That’s a million-dollar question. There was a time – five or 10 years ago when you would be called for a brief, you’d release the ads and you’d go home. Then you’d wait till the next campaign to turn up and there were no questions asked. Today, we are down to weekly measuring the effect of our campaigns and not even waiting for the campaign to end. This is mainly done to ensure that any needed correction is made right away. In terms of possibility, there’s something that today all clients are talking about is branding: brand awareness and ad awareness. These are the two metrics that are by and large accepted. There are a few clients who are linking sales to advertising, but I think there are a number of other factors that affect sales like distribution, dealer margins and things like that. So, we have models in place that can predict what awareness you will get for ‘x’ number of yardsticks that you put out in the market. That’s the kind of commitment you can give the client. So, then the client and the creative agency or all agencies would go out and do a test in the market to see what kinds of numbers come in. If you meet the number you’ve made it, if you haven’t then you’ve failed. But of course it’s all easier said than done as to set those predictions you need some historical data and, data is something that we don’t have too much of. Some clients have conducted previous studies and have some historical data while many are realising the importance of it and are now making investments. Here, you have to work with some concessions. But in a year or two all our clients will have some basic data in place that will make measurement actually possible.

Q. With media services moving out of the full service agencies, the interaction between creative and media has been reduced. Is this placing an adverse effect on the end result?

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I must admit that some of the best work that we’ve done and those I’m proud of has invariably happened when the creative and media guys have sat together and gone over things earlier on in the planning process, instead of a last-minute thing. Here it becomes a natural evolution where ideas come from both sides and you come back with something consolidated. So, I don’t think there’s any getting away from the fact that the best results come when everybody works together. Having said that I can find enough examples where separate agencies are working for a client and some great stuff comes out. I think what you will discover is that the onus of coordination goes to the client while earlier it used to happen in-house within the full service agency. Today, clients have taken the decision to unbundle their services. So they have taken the responsibility of ensuring that there is coordination among the different agencies involved by bringing all parties together for brainstorm sessions and things like that. So, good quality output is very much possible, it’s just that we need to put in that extra effort.

Q. What accounts do you currently handle?

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In Chennai, we have Ford, the entire Murugappa Group that consists of TI Cycles, Parryware, Parry Confectionaries and we have Cholamandalam. In Bangalore, we have McDowell’s and IBM. These are the biggest in terms of billing. We, of course, have a number of other clients.

Q. What kind of growth plans have you set for yourself?

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Our plans are consistent with any other company. But what seems critical for us is to service our existing clients. For me that is primary rather than going after new business. I think it is more important to focus on the clients that we have rather than speculatively pitch for a number of new businesses. I feel that if your client grows then you as their partner will automatically grow.