Sundar Raman, Managing Director, MindShare

Sundar Raman, Managing Director, MindShare, is a man who knows his job and knows it well. From graduating in Applied Sciences in Coimbatore to studying Advertising in Mumbai and then the journey to becoming Managing Director of MindShare, he continues to have a fantastic run in his chosen profession.

Raman, who was with JWT Fulcrum, a startup then, attributes his learnings to his years at Fulcrum - the building blocks of his career, as he describes them. He got to work with some of the biggest clients with most provocative thinking, who were willing to challenge the status quo, which helped him in his ability to think ahead. In 2004 he moved to Delhi, which he sees as a city that's "got the best of clients and best of work happening" and wishes to change the mindset of all those who think that Delhi is not the best place to practise media.

He has spent a lot of years donning various roles as a buyer, planner, specialist in radio and print, and takes pride in his ability to make print work beyond the printed space. exchange4media's Tuhina Anand speaks with Raman, who believes that his multi-disciplinary skills helped him understand the business better. Excerpts:

Q. The year gone by saw some significant changes among the top brass of MindShare. How do you see the year gone by for MindShare?

2006 was stimulating, challenging and overall fantastic. We made some great strides this year. Yes, we did go through some senior management changes, but all for the good. We take pride in the fact that Ashu (Ashutosh Srivastava, CEO, GroupM Asia Pacific) moved to Singapore to look at APAC responsibilities. Businesswise it's been a significant year of stimulating growth across offices.

As always it's not business growth alone that matters. What matters is the kind of work, kind of initiatives we took on and the kind of results we delivered. All of these have seen movement ahead. We believe that running an organisation is different from running a business; in the latter one is more concerned about numbers and lot many things probably get overlooked. That's not the way we look at an organisation. Overall, our job is to build the capability and skill-sets of people and at the same time build revenue. That's what differentiates a good organisation from a great organisation.

It's been a good year and pretty much as anticipated. I think part of the buoyancy in the marketplace and the kind of changes and rapid action that's happening have kept the excitement alive.

I think it's finding the right ways for the next leap by the organisation in different areas. Firstly, I believe that the education of media as a practice, to be able to attract talent, groom them, retain them and grow them constitute one of the biggest challenges that I personally want to focus on. If it means I have to have my suitcases packed and be in the field every other day, and be on the move meeting younger people, that's fine. For me, that's something that keeps the challenge alive and keeps the motivation alive. Along with it come a lot of other things, typically pay structures and the abuility to show people the way to a worthwhile career. We should address this not just as brand MindShare but as an industry. The industry needs to wake up to these challenges.

Outside of it, our job at MindShare is to scale up the overall service standards so as to be able to move to the next level so that we can take the next leap. Clearly, we want to move into areas of holistic communication planning. To me, 'been there, done that' plans are redundant and clients too don't want such plans. Even consumers don't see it as something that attracts them or keeps the brand alive. Moving holistic communication planning to the next level is a challenge and a task for us.

Thankfully, we probably have the startup advantage with the kind of project works and skill-sets that we have been able to build and develop in those areas. Now, I guess it is a matter of rolling that up with every single client with a greater amount of conviction. From the kind of successes we've had and also the failures in the past in these areas, we will be able to make such plans much more integral rather than they being a sporadic thought. We have some clients who tend to think only in terms of topical hype for a brand or product, and not in terms of sustenance to achieve their ends. That's one of the key questions that keep coming, which is when one is willing to run a sustenance campaign on television why not a sustenance campaign on print, outdoor, radio, digital or activation work?

At the end of the day, it's about reaching the communication effectively to the consumer and that's critical. We have recently launched the global way of planning in MindShare called Destination Planning. This helps to think up various ways of reaching consumers and making recommendations that are a holistic offering. Destination Planning is one of the enablers that we will be aggressively pushing into this space.

Two hundred per cent! To me, MindShare's ability to invest in talent, tools, infrastructure, people, training, knowledge improvement and our intellectual bandwidth is far larger than if we were to be part of a large organisation with multiple areas of interest. Media is getting very specialised and needs cutting edge solutions to deliver on brands which have to fight in a clutter. Your ability to go deeper is far better if you are an independent entity rather than as part of a bouquet.

I think media planning should be obsessive about ROI. Having said that, it is not uniformly obsessive. As guardians of brands it's important to be accountable and to be measured which is as crucial as risk taking and being imaginative. It's not an either-or situation but something we need to focus on and something we need to add value to. We need to have a sense of whether it is working or not working. The cost of reaching a consumer is significantly high today. Media planning is not at all about number crunching but about imagination and effectively reaching the consumers. Numbers are essential, but it is more important to be able to deliver those numbers with imaginative, path-breaking solutions that reach the consumer. It's about maintaining the fine balance between the ability to reach the consumer and the ability to track it.

The challenges that the digital media is throwing up right now will probably get accelerated five years from now. Our openness to dabble in spaces which are not comfort areas for us but probably comfort areas for a fresh college graduate is going to define how well we shape up in times to come. These are days when one can learn a lot from juniors.

The change is firstly in the recognition that media is as important as the development of communication. I think that realisation has come primarily from the client side. There are clients who think of media as more of releasing ads, but I guess that mindset is changing. You can't expect the level of adoption to be similar across the board, but there are signs of that.

Second, there is also the evolution among media owners. I think the media industry is doing a better job of building its own brand than some of the marketers. The landscape has changed dramatically in terms of the agency structure and agency view of solutions and the specialisation that media practitioners need to develop. I guess that's a far richer learning and growth.

Today, I find people in my organisation and industry who are classically the planner types or the buyer types but are morphing themselves into other functional specialisations. Structurally we have evolved as an industry.

At MindShare, across Asia, we all contribute to Big Switch, a blog, and are part of the community that's adding to it and learning from it. We have an active community of bloggers within the MindShare network, and this is a significant example of how practitioners are using this to their advantage.

I guess there is enough space to build and leverage blogs. Honestly, I don't think the plot on blogs is mapped yet. We are experimenting and will continue to do so for the next three-four years in different spaces. This experiment would not be restricted to just blogs but many other community initiative spaces that marketers and consumers would want to leverage. We are investing in that space and have sizeable plans to actively participate in the space and one will see that in the next three-four months. It's also a movement to a space of engagement based communication and not interruption based.

India is ahead on tools across many markets. Perhaps the markets that are ahead of us are the UK and some parts of the US. We definitely belong to a market which is ahead of the curve in most of the other Asian markets. Having said that, I also believe that tool is not a solution. It will not think for you, it will only throw up certain patterns; and application of a tool is dependent on the person who is using it. The user's ability to think up possible implications and different points of view are not considered in crafting a plan, deciding on a strategy or making a recommendation. A tool is just an enabler, but thinking is what propels us ahead.

Tools are integral to our ability to craft. Any tool or any set of data or any set of enablers will help us take the leap, if at all, and before anybody else. And I guess that is integral to our system, and we have our own ways of crafting plans. What is important beyond tools is the accountability that has to go into understanding how much of risk one is taking and the kind of returns one get out of it. I would be willing to go to the extent to say that tools are critical to any function because that gives us the ability to amass a lot of data in a meaningful, structured way. At the end of the day it's the thinking that's going to separate us and we try to create the lead much ahead of the rest. This ability to think comes with good quality, better trained resources.

If we can address the issue of talent we would probably cure half the diseases of the media industry. What ails us is the compensation structure of media agencies. Media has become a strategic and market edge tool, I guess it's on a par with anything else that helps build brand communication and if recognition of marketers to this function has to increase, a lot more needs to be done. People who recognize this are not penny pinching or pushing down compensation. They are seeing the results and are willing to pay adequately. These are the factors that some savvy marketers have already recognised and are willing to invest in that area. So, if there is one thing that's ailing outside of talent, it is certainly the current compensation structure.

Let me begin by saying that we have few things to teach back to these markets. But if there is something we can learn from them, it is the accountability from media owners' side and the ability of professionals across clients' and agencies' side to respect and value the time spent by each other in the business of building brands. We can also learn the ability to think up a good idea and then package, present and execute it with finesse. I guess that's something we could do a lot more and a lot better.

Our attrition rate is in the order of 20 per cent, probably slightly below the industry standard. The ability to retain people is very simple, at the heart of it all you have to show a great career for people who have joined the industry and compensate them well. The agency should have the ability to get the best out of its people and guide them and direct them to deliver their best. If we start doing that, I think people will start to see the grass on the on the other side a little less green.

At MindShare we have been able to do that. We have a significant amount of training that goes into our people. Every individual goes through a structured training programme. Also, as a global company we are able to provide far more career options to people and far more challenging opportunities. The number of Indians in the APAC region today is significant. You don't have to box yourself in a single-window kind of situation all your life. There are more opportunities to learn while on the job - individuals can acquire specialisation by getting into our various practices like insights, advanced techniques, interactions in the digital space, activation or content in the advanced space. There are a lot of opportunities which help develop a holistic career planning.