Kent Wertime, President, OgilvyOne Asia Pacific

Unless you have more money than the sun, you can't possibly reach everybody. You never get to the point of a marketing machine where you stick a certain amount of money on one end and you get customers on the other end. Human beings are rational, emotional and intuitive and this means that marketing will always be part art, part science. You have to target and that isn't enough, as I can target you but if I can’t touch you, I can’t motivate you. So is it enough to just do a great ad today? No. Is a great idea, message still central to communication? Yes.

As interactivity and direct approach are becoming keywords in various marketing languages, OgilvyOne is ensuring that it is doing its bit by speaking to advertisers about the importance of the digital medium and the place that it is increasingly finding in media plans. As President of OgilvyOne Asia-Pacific, Kent Wertime has seen the Asian markets at close range and believes that digital is no longer niche or new, but has become a mass media today.

In this interview with exchange4media's Noor Fathima Warsia, Wertime speaks about the changes he has seen in the advertising and media in the past 16 years and what he believes are trends driving marketing and communication strategies today.

Q. Regarding the growth on the digital front, have ad spends increased accordingly?

Not really. Digital is just a fraction of the marketers’ spends today. The thing we see across Asia is that about 4-5 per cent of the total ad spends is on digital. In 1999, when the dotcom boom was at its high, the hype preceded the numbers, today, the spending actually lags behind the numbers – that 4-5 per cent should be 10-15 per cent. Relative to the reach and the opportunity that the medium has, advertisers are still underspending. But that is going to end – we are at an inflection where marketers are reawakening to the digital reach and the fact that it isn’t experimental any more, but indeed a mass medium.

I would rather use the term digital and yes, of course. We are still faced with the big question that in the future how much would people do at the terminal versus some sort of mobile device – wireless based Internet usage. People who have connections today aren’t going to give up. This base is only set to increase further.

To some degree, yes. We have built a provocative case of the entry level in this medium not being expensive. So, it certainly merits some experimentation. In the world of marketing today, saying experiments seems almost flippant as more and more marketers are talking return on investments, but as I said, you have to have a certain sense of science and art in marketing and you need to be brave enough to try something. In lots of cases we see that when marketers try digital for the first time, they are surprised by the results. Consumers want to talk to them and they can be unprepared to having a discussion like this. Increasingly, of course, a lot of marketers have realised that at a low entry cost there is no harm, and certainly there is a need to try the medium.

Quite a few. You have something what people term as outer net and I think that is really the sleeping giant of the digital future. The outer net constitutes all the physical spaces that people are beginning to wire up and we are seeing the leading edge of that right now in countries like Japan and China. For instance, we are seeing that plasma screens are becoming cheap enough to make sense to have people to replace posters, which cost you money in printing, reprinting and have shorter lives. But these screens, which are one time expenditure, can be changed frequently and go on forever. So, the economics are working such that there are more digital points of sale.

We are also witnessing new types of technology where physical spaces are becoming interactive – for example in Japan – you have a QR code, which are short codes and a phone and you simply take a photo of the code and the translation software built into most phones instantly links you to a mobile site. So, this is traditional medium becoming direct response.

A bit of both. It is clear that in the marketing world of today, you have to use a lot more data and analyse details because communication is simply getting more complex with media fragmentation and inflation. The old carpet bombing technique of mass marketing of hit consumers with a lot of GRPs is becoming redundant. One, because it doesn’t work, and second, it is much harder to do this today, even if it did work. Unless you have more money than the sun, you can’t possibly reach everybody. You never get to the point of a marketing machine where you stick a certain amount of money on one end and you get customers on the other end. Human beings are rational, emotional and intuitive and this means that marketing will always be part art, part science.

You have to target and that isn't enough, as I can target you but if I can’t touch you, I can't motivate you. So is it enough to just do a great ad today? No. Is a great idea, message still central to communication? Yes.

The ignition point was that very early in my career I graduated from university with a degree in literature and had studied archetypes in psychology fairly extensively. As I was doing advertising work, I kept seeing things that I recognise as fundamentally archetypes and I was analysing a lot of advertising and why it worked or didn’t work. Then I moved to Asia and realised while the cultures change, the archetype hero remains the hero with different faces and names. People’s basic attraction to marketing was based upon something much deeper than the surface of the individuals in advertising.

International advertising is forever in the debate of local versus global copy. The more I looked at global brands, the more I felt that there was story to be told that this is actually the engine room of effective messaging. It isn’t in the culture, it is one level below, which is the archetypal level. If you fundamentally have the story that touches the central roots of all human beings, irrespective of language, culture, etc., you will have an effective brand that was the impetus. At some point it becomes an emotional link.

A fair amount and in different ways – when you speak about Asia you are speaking about huge geographic diversity, cultural diversity and when it comes to digital, huge technology diversity. I can make a statement on Asia and it is equally true and untrue in any sense that I say. There are places like Korea and Japan, which are really digital societies today and then there are markets like China and India, which are developing very rapidly, but you can’t necessarily use the phone in India in the same way that you can in Japan. There are differences in countries and then there are differences in points of time – there are many things that you can do in India today that you couldn’t have 12 months ago.

That said, the basic principles of communication at work are the same – if you aren't targeting people, not inviting and engaging them, doesn't matter if it is SMS or a very advanced application, it wouldn't work. You are hitting a moving target constantly so you have to have some sort of constant principles or it would be impossible. If you are just thinking technology and not basic principles of marketing, then you are missing the point.

When you look around today, you see the great level of things available for marketing, activation, real marketing, digital, sponsorship, product placements – the list goes on. The world I started in Asia was the old world of advertising, based around the great TV commercial and print ads. Now, it is this great world of marketing that is much more complex and intertwined. More importantly, I have seen Asia work on its own terms in the last 16 years and not follow others. I think there is a real sense of pride in the marketing community in Asia and there have been new ideas generating. In fact, when you talk digital, I would say Asia is the leader when it comes to the mobile.

Yes, the Cannes showreel, which was end all be all at one time, is still important, but today, there is so much more.

Quite a bit, but it is also that much more exciting. The challenge for the agency business is that you have a lot to consider, analyse and aggregate today, and the client budgets haven’t increased in the same rate as the agencies get compensated. This is making agencies look at new structures. We are thinking new ways of resourcing our businesses to be able to aggregate a lot more information. When you look at our business, and there are hundreds of different channels of marketing, the job will only get tougher. And to add to things, the world is speeding up.

The thing with statistics is that you can make it work in your favour or against you. If you take an absolute population, yes, you are right. But if you take an affluent urban target and the penetration there amongst mobile users or Internet users, then it is very different. How many products are really geared to everyone in India? I hear what you are saying, it’s not mass like mass of TV and it wouldn’t be for some time. TV and print are still the big spend areas for Asia, but what we are seeing in the next five to 10 years’ projections is that clearly digital will take over some major mediums. It has already taken over radio in Japan. You have to put it in context.

You are right, there is a paucity of good data. When you buy TV you are given terms like GRPs – it is a universe that most of the marketers are comfortable with. But when it comes down to digital, you are comparing one thing to a lot of things. What measure do you use – absolute reach, click through rates or some other form of aggregated measures. The problem then is that you are comparing an apple to a pineapple. We deal with this problem every day. Agencies are looking at ways to help clients do the analysis. They are developing more frameworks to help explain how to match up these various mediums and it isn’t always a case of this versus this, in a lot of cases it is this and this.

The other thing is that marketers at some point have to go by more than just pure numbers. Sometimes they have to go with a bit of gut and if they know it is out there, they have to determine how long they want to wait for a specific number before they move ahead as against getting left behind if they don’t, and quite a few times, their competitors aren’t sitting and waiting. This is the great thing about digital – it is an incredible leveller in marketing.

The big change between 1999 and now is that when we were talking about Internet then, it was sitting in front of a PC and surfing websites, and now when we say digital – we are still talking about the Internet, but we are also talking about broadband, mobile devices, wireless devices on which you can watch TV, there is outer net, there is physical devises turning direct – you are talking too many devices. These are exciting times.

So, if you go back to your point about reach, yes you can look at absolute Internet users and say that there still aren’t that many users, but I think it’s missing the bigger discussion about when you aggregate users of mobile phones, Internet and people reacting to digital in their life in physical spaces. That is a major force in marketing that is coming up rapidly.

The first, according to me, is the desire for activation, which means more and more advertisers are looking at ways to get closer to the point of purchase. The next trend would be brand experience. Advertisers are looking at brands differently than they did before, when being top of mind was everything. Even though, that is still vital, there brands have to do much more today in regards to engagement and experience.

Another trend gaining more ground every day is the focus on return on investments. Marketing in a funny way is under the gun. CEOs need to know what really the return is here. Channel planning and convergence is yet another emerging trend. Because of the proliferation of these different channels, many more marketers are looking at how to make these pieces work – the selection and so on. Some of the works that you see today are ideas that transcend a media and become very big ideas like what we have done for Dove.

And the final thing is the whole notion of mobility. No one can afford to ignore the fact that there is a device that sits in your pocket and is with you all the time. And given the increasing competition, these trends are applying to India much more than ever before.

I am looking at a book regarding the future of the Asian market. I am trying to find the time though, I’m in a real time deficit now.