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Not too many years ago, advertising
agencies shied away from any sort of what
was known as 'below-the-line' activity.
They were reluctant to take a brief on any
such sort of abovementioned activity; creatives
fiercely fought to stay far and clear
of it, and the unfortunates who got conned
into it, or were too junior to protest being
saddled with it, hid it from the rest of the
world. Anyone who worked in DM (direct
marketing; note it shares the same abbreviation
with popular Indian slang 'DM',
meaning down-market) agency was a pariah.
A DM agency was anything but 'specialised';
you had to be a dreg or cast-away
of traditional advertising to have landed up
in that profession.
How wrong they were.
It's taken the advertising industry
decades to realise that what they considered
as 'below-the-line', is in fact, an
extremely specialised field; one that
requires a very special kind of evolved talent
to understand the dynamics of it.
David Ogilvy - many would agree - was a man before
his time; one who was prophetic in many ways too.
"Direct response: my first love and secret weapon", he is
famous for having said. Few understood what it meant
at the time, but today all heads nod in agreement.
Most, if not all, self-respecting advertising companies
have full-fledged, independently functioning direct
marketing arms.
Direct marketing means anything but handing out
fliers and putting pamphlets in the mail in this day and
age. With the boom of the Internet and mobile technology
the world has gone digital, and what was once considered
as 'below-the-line' marketing, is more like 'frontline'
marketing these days.
'Below-the-line' and DM too, are terms of
the past. Today, 'one-to-one' marketing is the
way to go, with just one clearly defined objective:
building bonds between consumers and
brands. In a freewheeling 'one-on-one', Brian
Fetherstonhaugh, Chairman and CEO
OgilvyOne Worldwide shares his knowledge,
convictions and excitement on all things digital,
and all things direct.
In which industries do you see new
media playing the largest role in Indian
marketing communications?
I think it's going to play a large role in a lot
of different industries. It's already becoming
well established in IT and business-to-business;
that's probably the first place. I think
financial services, FMCG and healthcare are
three areas in particular to watch in India. I
think the emergence of the online banking
services is going to be very interesting as we
see the economy unfold. FMCG is so huge in
India, and it's really just in the beginning of
its journey into digital marketing.
We haven't talked much about healthcare. I
get a very strong feeling around the world,
and also in India, that healthcare will be an
industry that makes extensive use of digital
media in the future.
How so?
Once again, if you think of how consumers
go through a journey, there's very deep information
seeking from the consumers themselves
when they find they have a new disease
or condition. They are intensely interested
and curious; search marketing - for example -
plays very much into that. In other markets,
we find that when people don't feel so good or
get some medication from a doctor, one of the
first things they do is go to the web and educate
themselves about the condition. The
healthcare process is quite complex; you have
a patient, a physician, sometimes a laboratory,
sometimes a pharmacist, and the connections
between those people can often be done in a
digital way. It's an area that we're starting to
explore a lot. We're doing our first 'Healthcare
Verge' in Europe this June, so we're going to
explore it and bring that learnings to India as
soon as possible.
So, I think that will be one of the areas that
will be very strong.
Do you think we can see OgilvyOne
Worldwide playing a leading role in educating
India on Global best practices in
digital marketing, from your clients to
perhaps even your competitors?
Clients first, targeted prospects - people
we'd like to go and do business with. I think
we will play a role in the education of the
industry; like we did at the Verge summit we
just held in Mumbai, with industry experts
and people from the media. I don't think
we're going on a mission to educate our competitors,
but we do see the opportunity to educate
people to the possibilities of digital marketing.
We will provide some thought leadership
in digital marketing; it is part of our plan.
All marketers acknowledge that we're going
to have to use new media, but there's an acute
shortage of people in the industry today, who
actually understand it. Will this be an impediment?
How do you think we can overcome it?
It certainly is a very big challenge to find the
talent that understands brands, understands
a bit about the technology and also understands
how to use the technology. So the programs
that Renuka (Jaypal, President,
OgilvyOne Worldwide, India) has here, the
training programs that we have globally have
a very powerful emphasis on digital skill sets.
The simplest thing to do would be to look for
people in other agencies, who have an interest
in the area, and then developing them ground
up.