In Conversation With | Everything that's not digital, will soon be: Lowe's Mehta

Vikas Mehta who joined Lowe Lintas & partners in May 2013, leads group corporate strategy in terms of setting the company’s growth and leadership agenda in thought and action. Additionally, the role includes working with prospective clients by aggregating group offerings.

Vikas’ appointment followed his success as Lowe + Partners network in roles based in India, Viet Nam & Singapore and managed businesses across 15 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. During his Viet Nam stint as Managing Director, he led Lowe into becoming the largest marketing communications company in the country.  In 2011, he took up the role of Regional Growth Officer for Asia-Pacific, based in Singapore. During this stint, he helped take Lowe among the top 10 agency networks in Asia leading new business and strategic growth initiatives.

Adgully: You have been with group for a while now. Share some of the key high points of your journey. Also, if there are any new learnings from any other market that can be implemented in India, what would they be?
Vikas Mehta: Lowe + Partners Worldwide has been really kind to have offered me a variety of opportunities over the years, within the network. My first stint with the group was in the early days of my career with Lowe Lintas India where I was based in New Delhi. A few years later, I rejoined the group but in a different country, Vietnam. The first high point came when I was asked to run the agency in Vietnam. When I took on that role, I had very little idea of managing an agency business beyond that of a practitioner. The next stint came in Singapore where I was bestowed with an APAC responsibility that gave me an opportunity to work closely with fifteen countries in the region simultaneously. It was a great experience from a personal learnings point of view, to be able to immerse in so many cultures and understand the business of brands in such a diverse environment.

The potential for tapping into cross-market learnings is tremendous. And learnings lie both in similarities and differences.

Take Vietnam for example. It’s a country of roughly 90 million people where over two-thirds of the population is below 30 years of age. As one of the youngest countries in the world, youth marketing in Vietnam is mainstream marketing. You cannot build a successful brand without targeting youth. If you now see the same scenario in the Indian context, while there is a plethora of youth-centric brands around, very few mainstream brands have been able to become youth-relevant or youth-centric.

Look at Indonesia, one of the few countries in the world where BlackBerry is the largest mobile phone brand and Twitter is bigger than Facebook. There are so many innovations on Twitter that Indonesian marketers have created that we could learn from while creating our social engagements in a market like India.

While I can go on, the larger realization I’ve had working across Asia has been that if you can marry logic with imagination, every culture offers a unique way of approaching the same problem and the possibilities to cross-pollinate those are endless.

Adgully: How would you overview the entire social media/digital marketing scenario in India and globally?
Vikas Mehta: I think digital marketing is a term that comes with an expiry date. Today it is an appropriate descriptor because digital is still considered by some as a specialist discipline. Sooner than later all marketing efforts will need to be digitally-conscious. So the paradigm is ‘marketing in a digitized world’ rather than digital marketing itself.

Every country is at a slightly different stage of evolution in getting there. India is comparable to many emerging markets. The fact that traditional media still dominates the marketing landscape means that our progress on digital capabilities is relatively slower than markets where mass media is on a decline.

The good thing however, is that despite digital accounting for about 7% of the total media spends in India, marketers are focusing on it beyond that fair-share from a capability development point of view. That’s a big factor, which will fuel innovation and help accelerate the progress in this discipline. Digital spends in India are growing faster than the global average. While on a small base, that’s a good sign and I see that pace being sustained for the next few years.

Adgully: The entire digital signage has seen a lot back and forth from last few years. How would you evaluate Lowe's growth in that and what is your take on the same?
Vikas Mehta: From our perspective, the potential offered by the medium in terms of storytelling opportunities remains largely untapped. Engaging with people Out-Of-Home is an integral part of a brand experience today and it can only grow in the coming years. It needs creative ideas built for the medium that can both leverage and showcase its strengths.

Adgully: Recently, Lowe Lintas + Partners had announced the re-launch of full-service digital division LinTeractive and you were given an additional responsibility of heading the division. What are key strategies/plans in mind for this outfit?
Vikas Mehta: The re-launch of LinTeractive is a decisive step we’ve taken as a group Lowe Lintas + Partners. Of course LinTeractive will compete and win in the domain of digital agencies. But the larger goal is to embed interactivity and digital engagements up-stream into every offering from Lowe Lintas + Partners.

As I said earlier, digital is way too important to be treated like a specialist function or like another marketing service. We live in an era where everything that’s not digital, will soon be. With LinTeractive, we’d love to play a role in killing the current industry terminology of ‘mainline agencies’ vs. ‘digital agencies’. We believe that digital should be mainline and LinTeractive is our attempt at accelerating the industry adoption of that view.

Adgully: How does Lowe Lintas manage to stand ahead of the curve in such a competitive market?
Vikas Mehta: A ruthless focus on consistently delivering a brilliant creative product that’s backed by a sound business strategy. Whether it’s advertising, activation, digital, PR or design, our emphasis remains on creating ideas that can make significant impact on our clients’ business.

We’re in the business of ideas and much of our energies are spent creating ideas that consistently create visible impact on clients’ business. It’s one of the biggest reasons why, in a flirtatious world of client-agency relationships, most of our clients have been with us for a decade or longer. A large number of top brands we handle today are brands we’ve built from scratch. I’m not sure how many agencies in India, or the world can say that today.

Adgully: Any particular verticals that are seeing extra focus right now?
Vikas Mehta: While advertising remains a significant part of our business, much as a reflection of the market today, our focus on other verticals is driven by a seismic shift we are seeing in the market. Most sophisticated marketers are beginning to realize the limitations of hiring marketing services as specialists. Simply put, when you have 6-7 specialist agencies working on a brand simultaneously, it becomes really tough to find a problem-owner of the overall brand strategy from any of the agency partners. So while you succeed in bringing, arguably rich domain expertise to the table, the onus of making the marketing mix really integrated is back on you.

We see it coming back to a full-service agency model, but with a caveat that the agencies will have to invest in deep capabilities across a large spectrum of disciplines, some of which today exist as separate verticals. At Lowe Lintas + Partners, we call it Full Service Agency 2.0

Our focus on verticals is guided by this ambition, which means we are working towards strengthening our current verticals, and to add new capabilities and divisions in areas like analytics, e-commerce, platformic solutions for digital and a few others.

Adgully: The ad-land could be called the junction where creativity meets and means business and vice versa. What is your take on the same?
Vikas Mehta: Our business is a commercial art, which means business is the purpose behind it. Creativity for its own sake belongs in art galleries and museums. In the business of brands; creativity does, and must mean business. The strategic rigour in the process and the focus on ROI become the two means of making sure that creativity is guided by a strong business intent up-front and a disruptive business impact as the outcome.

Adgully: Looking at the pace with which the ad-industry is evolving, what are the trends in advertising to watch out for, both in India and elsewhere.
Vikas Mehta: This could be a really long list, so let me talk about a few fundamental ones…

- Mobility (not just mobile phones) is all set to emerge as the single largest platform where brands would need to engage with their audiences. You can already see shift from mobile-first to mobile-only platforms that are coming up across utilities. The home-screen of your mobile device is likely to become the most coveted real-estate for a marketer.

- Data is the new oil and going forward, success of businesses will rely heavily on their ability to gather, manage and mine data to shape every aspect of the marketing mix.

- Storytelling would be one of the biggest differentiators between brands. And this is important because the narratives are no longer finite. Brands will have to find innovative ways of telling stories that straddle multiple touch-points, devices and time-frames and use technologies to bring the stories to life in an immersive fashion. The creative brief has already become a lot more challenging than the 30-second TVC and this complexity will probably grow exponentially.

Lastly, coming back to our own industry dynamics, I think the fundamental definition of competition is changing rapidly. Agencies are no longer competing with other agencies alone. In a digitized environment, as a creative agency, you also compete head-to-head, with media agencies, technology and IT companies, digital divisions of consulting firms, brand consultants, even the media and platform owners (both on and offline). Succeeding in this environment will take both skill, and will of a nature that we haven’t seen before.

Adgully: You have worked across various markets. Is there any other market where in you can draw parallel with Indian market with regards to the growth of the digital industry?
Vikas Mehta: Your closest parallels can be drawn from regions like South East Asia and Latin America. While there isn’t a market that could be called a mirror image of India on all parameters, parallels can be drawn with specific countries in these regions on things like internet penetration, user-behaviour patterns, choice of social media etc.

Over the years, Mehta has handled brand portfolios for companies such as Unilever, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, Vinamilk, Total Lubricants, Pernod Ricard, Vietnamobile, Intel, Cathay-Pacific, P&G, Beiersdorf, Raymond, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Diageo and Indian Oil.

He has won over 25 major international awards for Marketing Effectiveness at Effie, WARC Asia Prize and 4A’s Jay Chiat Awards including 15 wins at the Asian Marketing Effectiveness Awards.

Vikas has worked for advertising agencies such as Publicis and Leo Burnett before joining Lowe. Besides work, he is an amateur photographer, a formula 1 enthusiast and a lazy blogger.