We are genuinely tight as a network: Amaresh Godbole

Recently, the world’s largest professional network LinkedIn appointed DigitasLBi India as part of its elite panel of Certified Custom Apps Partners for the APAC region. DigitasLBi is helping LinkedIn create unique brand experiences that engage customers and prospects to help marketers connect with their target audience by building custom apps, campaigns, and innovative social solutions that leverage LinkedIn’s data and APIs.

In this interaction with AdGully, Amaresh Godbole, Managing Director, DigitasLBi, India, speaks about creating brand experiences, transition from LBi to DigitasLBi, recent work and business wins, and more. Excerpts:

Post joining the panel of LinkedIn’s Certified Custom Apps Partners, how is DigitasLBi is helping LinkedIn create brand experiences?
This is an achievement I’m personally very excited about. Being a LinkedIn Partner is a tremendous testament to our technology chops, given LinkedIn’s stringent standards while selecting partners. We can now service our APAC clients for these requirements and have already started getting several partnership requests from our offices.

What this allows us to do is to work in partnership with LinkedIn and create remarkable user experiences leveraging the power of LinkedIn data. For instance, we have already created a site, which juxtapositions your career history from LinkedIn against history of the product being browsed, showing how you’ve evolved together over time. There are many more use cases, including lead generation and interactive personalised experiences. You’ll soon see some exciting work on this front.

How has the merger with Publicis Groupe helped the agency?
It’s helped tremendously in many ways; three areas are top of mind for me:

  • The ability to offer integrated solutions via collaboration with network agencies, which is a real value proposition for clients – we’ve already jointly won and worked on several clients with BBH and Starcom Convonix and there are many such collaborations in the offing
  • Opening up of global Publicis clients for us
  • The backbone and infrastructure support that is a huge strength of the Publicis Groupe

It’s been three years of the merger of Digitas and LBi, what have been the key developments and changes since then?
It started with a two-fold cultural and organisation integration challenge – integrating the two brands as well as integrating LBi into the Publicis way of doing things. Fortunately, it was the perfect marriage of brands – Digitas was strong in Delhi, LBi in Mumbai. Overnight we became a leading player in both key markets. Further, the DNA and service lines were aligned, thus boosting up our collective capabilities. Both the brands had enviable client rosters, and we’ve managed to grow the relationships further over the years. Today, it truly operates as one company with no traces of borders between the two. In fact, we’ve had several people swap offices between Mumbai and Delhi, which only makes everyone closer.

Please tell us about the DigitasLBi Culture Club initiative. How is it helping the company engage the Gen Next?
The DigitasLBi Culture Club is a ‘Big Idea’ for creating a sustainable culture and organisation stories leading to deeper engagement with our people. The concept is very simple. Remember how college fests were done? It’s all about the teams, using their interests and talents to help make a whole lot of cool stuff happen. This is divided into four initiatives: Events, CSR, Environment, Communication. Each initiative has a city and country chapter, which collaborates and makes things happen with HR as defacto Club Presidents. The Club has full management support to make things happen, whether it’s via funding or contacts.

This turns employee engagement form a checklist driven mainly by HR, into everyone’s playground. And the success of the initiatives makes sure the people have a payoff by doing meaningful things they enjoy beyond work.

In terms of business, how has the agency grown in the last one year?
In our first few years of operations we grew exponentially and quickly became one of the leading marketing and technology agencies in the country. Today we are almost 300 people spread across three cities. The focus for the last year has been steady and profitable growth, both of which are tracking really well. But just to put ‘steady’ into perspective in our world, in percentage terms it just means that we are growing in double digits instead of triple.

What have been the key growth drivers for the company?
Being a global player gives us ready access to evolved market learnings, tools, processes and IP. A local player, even one which is just integrating into to communication group, has to struggle to create all this on their own. This is a big differentiator for our clients. Our ‘Connected Commerce’ Study, ‘Responsive Retail’ and ‘Brand Live’ frameworks have all helped us win pitches and manage client challenges effectively. Internally, we have an asset repository called the ‘Vault’ that gives us access to the best of international decks thus giving us a head start for every brief.

The network strength also allows us to play in multi-market pitches, and we do it really well as we are genuinely tight as a network.

But none of this would be effective without the right people. The culture and talent pool that we’ve built up is a combination of digital natives supervised by a leadership team comprised of recognised talent with a combination of ATL, digital and technology experience.

In a recent 30 under 30 list by a leading digital publication, we had eight nominees and three winners, the highest for any agency; while most of our leadership has appeared in regional and Indian ‘top leaders’ and ‘emerging leaders’ lists.

Many of these talented individuals have been with us through the entire journey, while several others have tested waters and come back. We always welcome them with open arms.

Importantly, we’ve always had a strong client focus, building relationships that last years, rather than take a leaky bucket approach of just chasing new business and losing existing clients. We believe our existing clients are our best source of new business and most of our new business comes via referrals.

What kind of clients is the company looking to work with this year?
Our client roster is one of our great sources of pride. It includes the likes of Budweiser, Cadbury Dairy Milk, Dabur, Godrej Nature’s Basket, Hotstar, HUL, JK Tyres, Larsen & Toubro, Nissan-Datsun, Nivea, Parle Agro, Tata CLiQ, and Vespa, among many, many other leading Indian and global brands.

The plan this year is to work with clients that are either evolved in their digital plans, or genuinely aspire to be.

We’ll continue to tap into our vast experience in FMCG, Auto, Technology and Lifestyle brands. Further, we’ll also aim to tap into categories where we have strong global learnings, such as e-commerce, BFSI and Media. We seem to be on track, with both AoR and project wins in each of these categories.

Going forward, what are the biggest challenges for DigitasLBi in India now?
The greatest challenge for us remains retaining and attracting quality talent. We find that it’s easier for us to go out and win new business than find quality people in high numbers. The digital marketing industry competes with IT companies, traditional advertising, media, clients of all sorts, e-commerce and start-ups and even Bollywood for the same talent pool.

Going forward, we are very committed to do everything we can to help nurture quality talent, not just for the agency but for the industry at large.

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