"Being a non-funded company has its own problems"

Being an 11-year-old company, OMLogic has seen a lot of transformation over the years. When they started, social media was not a big thing in the digital industry, but this changed over the time. 

In a chat with exchange4media, Founder and CEO Kapil Gupta talks about how the company evolved from being an online marketing solutions company to a digital marketing company. He also tells us how their business was set on a non-funded model which allowed them to come a long way and grow bigger without the pressure of investors.
To our surprise, during the conversation, Gupta did not think twice before praising their competitor Dentsu on its customer outreach and becoming one of the top digital agencies of the country today. Excerpts from the conversation

Tell us about the journey of OMLogic.

We started nearly 11 years ago. When we started, our focus was on bringing strategy into digital marketing. At that time, it wasn’t called digital marketing but it was called online marketing. There was no social media presence then and everything was very technology-centric. We started off by saying that we need to bring marketing online, which is how the name OMLogic (that stands for Online Marketing Logic) was discovered.

As social media came into frame between 2009 and 2011, we started to grow and took a different direction. Now we were not just providing strategy or communication to the clients, but were also handling their social media entities. As a follow-up of that, we tried other things like cause marketing and political election campaigns. 

Some years ago, we realized that the social media service business is increasingly going to get commercialized and we also created a few products. These products are still there. It is not that we have taken the products to the mainstream and created a lot of revenue or customer presence around it, but we see them as our avenues to ensure that we are more diverse and that we take care of the risk of social media becoming a commodity business.

From OMLogic to Efluencr, we have always seen you curating digital platforms. What has been the key element that kept you going?

The key element is to realise that the social and digital media is expanding and one needs to figure out all the opportunities that exist for the customer. When I say customer, there is one aspect of the customer which is the end consumer and then there is another aspect which is the brand. Our product envision has always been brand-centric. While consumer is the end user, we need to do everything that works for them. Our products always have great brand integration.

Mad on Ads and Efluencr are two different platforms for ROI. One is from TV ads and the other is from digital brand ads. Has the stagnation in TV industry led you to move to the digital media industry?

TV industry is not the same as it used to be 10 years ago. There are no TV advertisements that get more views on television and lesser on digital. So integration is very difficult. In fact, when we started and conceptualized Mad on Ads, the integration wasn’t there. But today, it has taken a completely different shape. And it is not just a question of TV advertisement playing online on Youtube but it is also a question of where the revenue is being generated. In that sense, television has gone through a huge transformation and we expect that it will continue to grow towards that direction. Video advertisement will start becoming a little more two-way, which means there should be lot more integration with digital; what people talk, how they talk and everything. 

Being an active player of TV media, how would you describe the future of TV, when a campaign like Digital India is blazing?

I am not an active player of TV media. As an organization, we do not do TV advertisement or the distribution of TV advertisement. We are a digital company. In terms of the evolution or changes happening in the TV sector, I think it will become two-way, where digital will become very critical. TV advertisements, which are now no longer confined to TV, are actually advertisements playing on your mobile phones, computer screens or laptops. This I believe will make everything integrated.

What are your targets and expectations to be achieved this year?

Our major target this year is to get to a state where we can focus a little more on our products. There is one interesting fact about OMLogic: we are perhaps the largest unfunded digital marketing agency and we like to work that way. We have never taken investment. While it is a great thing, it do have some flaws, as it essentially means that we never have investment for a lot of other things. While we have done a good job at creating products, taking products mainstream hasn’t really happened because of manpower deficiency, mindset problems, our inability to focus and because of the lack of funds. 

So the target for this year is to bring us to a state where we have flexibility and enough bandwidth available with us so that we can focus more on products that are going to be the future in the world of social media.

How will you differentiate your reach in targeting your customers from your competitors?

One key differentiation for us is that we go for genuine activities. We spend a lot of time figuring out where the customer would be sitting at any time and how do we reach out to them. We don’t play on how do I get a million views on something that we are doing, but we worry about where do we get the top hundred, thousand views that are relevant for the brand. 

In that sense, engagement is the biggest metric for us than viewership. Though a competitor, but one agency that I really like in India in terms of its reach towards consumers is Dentsu. What Dentsu has done over the last few years in becoming a digital first 360 degree agency is incredible. They have the model that we are looking to get at for a very long time. Dentsu has the money, energy and resources to do it and we don’t at this point of time. This is not something that I want to say for all constituents of Dentsu, some of them are reasonable, some of them are good and some of them are just terrible. But Dentsu has been a leader that has come up and understood the market.