Sandeep Goyal, Chairman, Dentsu Communications & Dentsu Marcom

From making his mark in the advertising business, this management trainee showed that he doesn’t mind trying other avenues of the media industry as well and that took Sandeep Goyal to Zee TV as CEO, filling variety in his career experience. After Zee, Goyal took almost a year’s gap only to return to the media industry once again in joint ventures with Dentsu and floated Dentsu Communications and Dentsu Marcom.

In a candid conversation with Noor Fathima Warsia, Goyal speaks of all his experiences, where he sees the Indian media industry headed and his first, recently launched book ‘The Dum Dum Bullet’.

Q. Has it been all what you expected?

In Dentsu Japan, say if a brand is to associate with say Formula One, then a lot of time, thinking, ground-work and detailing would go into it. We still have to reach that level of sophistication in India. But I am sure it will happen soon, we are quick learners.

Make workplaces more fun. Advertising has always been a fun business. I see some of that zing ebbing. When you enjoy the work you do, you do it well.

It seemed like a fun idea, a different canvas to paint. And at 38, having already been an agency head for more than 3 years, I could perhaps afford to take the risk!

Well, intrinsically, the channel business is a more public interface business. You are constantly in the public glare. Agency business is more private, more sheltered.

My role is purely corporate, and as Chairman, I really do not involve myself in the running of the businesses. I have three Japanese colleagues on secondment to India from Tokyo. Our local managers are, I believe amongst the best in the business. Between them they run the agencies.

I don’t mind going back to being a Management Trainee. I see all these fat salaries they offer straight out of management school and I feel just plain envious. I started at Rs. 1800 per month, less Rs. 20 deducted at source as Professional Tax in Maharashtra!

After being in advertising and media for 20 years, I thought it was time for me to tell the ‘inside story’ of my profession, shorn of its glitz and glamour and yet full of its interesting idiosyncrasies, fun and laughter. I told myself that the stories I want to narrate need to be told now, not 20 years later when I hang my boots. The context of the narration may become completely anachronistic by then.

So this book, bottled up inside me, took shape as The Dum Dum Bullet. It is a story of people and brands that are in the contemporary psyche, not characters out of a history book. The situations are recent, hence easily relatable.

I wrote the book in literally the ‘pause’ frame of my career - I had quit Zee, and I was still putting together the Dentsu JV. I, for once, had the time to introspect, reflect on the whirlwind happenings of the years that had whizzed by, muse over moments good and not-so-good, reminisce about the good ole days … I knew if I had to write the book, the right time was now. And so here we are!

The world around has changed in the last two decades. Ten years ago if you were not a Levers agency, or did not handle a Colgate or any other major FMCG brand, you were not a serious player in the business. Today it is no longer so much of a life-and-death scenario. In fact if you don’t have a major telecom brand or an automobile brand or an insurance brand, you ought to be worried as you are then not participating in the growth end of the market.

Roles have also changed … from being the quintessential back-room boys, media guys have now become the toast of the business. They are the new movers and shakers.

Yes, client confidence is still the most important pillar of agency existence. Creative is a differentiator, but in itself is not the only reason clients choose, and stay with agencies.

Well frankly, I was far far too junior when I worked at the client’s end. I did not really have too much of decision making powers. It was nevertheless an enlightening stint in as much as figuring out how client organisations work, how consensus is sometimes more important than strategic goodness, how market realities are sometimes really different from the mirages some ‘creative’ advertising can end up creating, and most importantly, how advertising is not really the most important task of the client CEO, as most of us in advertising would fondly like to believe!

Client organisations are about selling products and every other sub-activity is subservient to that over-riding objective. Now that doesn’t sound very profound, but believe you me this is contradictory to the fond world-view that many of us have of clients: don’t clients exist to only buy ‘big ideas’ and ‘great campaigns’!!?

Well, the power of your idea can help brands zoom or sink. But more than that, it was variety, the vastness of the canvas that pulled me. The sheer magnitude of experience, of exposure -across product categories, across target audiences. Advertising is at its core a very versatile profession. In a day’s work, you get to handle automobiles to agarbattis, tooth-paste to tomato ketchup and maybe lip-stick to liposuction!

Advertising is, despite all the leg-work and the grind, a very cerebral business.

My early morning “high” even today is seeing my agency’s key number on an ad in the morning newspaper. I still feel the very same thrill I used to feel as an AE in seeing the ad we created yesterday, out in print this morning.

Speaking candidly, in India we have some very fine talent but media planners and buyers, rarely if ever think beyond or outside the box. Globally, media is increasingly a business of consumer touchpoints. In India ‘innovations’ are sought to show how smart the agency is, not because there is a ‘brand surround’ that has been thought through.