Web Exclusive: Making The Talk Walk

WEB EXCLUSIVE
Making The Talk Walk
The WPP Group has taken a stake in brandquiver.com and Equus is being recast. Does ad-man Suhel Seth have a more sustainable platform this time?

By Shamni Pande

Tall claims can sometimes come true. And things couldn't be better for the brash ad-man Suhel Seth, 36. His one-month-old Brand Dotcom, which owns the brandquiver.com portal, has just struck it big, with WPP picking up 33 per cent stake in his company. Obviously, Seth is not missing out on the opportunity to flaunt this: ''This makes brandquiver one of the few dot.com ventures which is free of venture capital funding and, therefore, debt-free.'' With an initial investment outlay of $1-million which will come from WPP, the Seth brothers who will be picking up 33.33 per cent each and the balance from other investors, the company plans hubs in New York and London.

The board is also being recast, S.M. Dutta will be the Chairman, Suhel Seth the Vice-Chairman, followed by Swapan Seth, 32, who is being nominated as the Executive Director. Shunu Sen and Gurcharan Das will be on the board of directors, while the WPP nominees on board will include Eric Salama and Laurence Mellman, aged 42 and 40 years, respectively. Salama is the man who heads the new media and e-commerce initiative for WPP worldwide. The company will also have a new CEO in Ranjyoti Booroach, 38.

Meanwhile, things are also picking up for Equus Advertising, Seth's first venture which was written off by media circles post-Daewoo account's exit. In fact, the agency is being recast and will come under the Brand Dotcom umbrella. This way, the group will have two separate business in Equus and brandquiver.com. The ad agency will have a new CEO in Kaushik Roy, 40 who will move in from Philips India (prior to heading Philips India's corporate brand strategy, Roy was Mudra's CEO). This effectively means that the Seth brothers will no longer interfere with the day-to-day working of either of the two ventures.

Equus is gearing itself to set up its Mumbai and Bangalore offices which will be in addition to the existing ones at Delhi and Calcutta. Its aim: Rs 100-crore billing by 2001 against its current media billing of Rs 35 crore. Overweening ambition? ''No,'' explains Seth. The agency is seeking to add an additional Rs 14 crore business from the new Apeejay account for its e-Commerce business development which it bagged recently. In fact, it has just launched www.teastall.com for the group which owns tea brands such as Assam Frontier.

In Delhi, Equus is trying to recast its client portfolio and 'resign' the Benetton account even as the Harvest Gold account seems to have reaped rich dividends. It has grown to Rs 2.5 crore from its earlier budget of Rs 25 lakh. ''Also, we are looking at many dot.com clients as the agency will tie up with WPP's Henley Centre for research know-how. We are also looking at a possible partnership with Telequest,'' he claims in an attempt to justify the additional billing target of Rs 65 crore.

Through the Looking Glass

Effectively, what we are looking at is a rejuvenated Equus that's seeking to re-establish life after the Rs 10-crore Cielo account shifted to Enterprise Nexus. And also at a business model in brandquiver.com which claims an existence beyond the superficial eyeball-game. In fact, the site has apparently logged more than 11,000 page-views per day and has, as of now, a strategic alliance with ORG-MARG. It also has an understanding with Carat Media and a regular Reuters feed on advertising and marketing issues. Also, the site is at an ''advanced stage of negotiation'' with NCAER, reveals Seth.

By July, 2000, brandquiver will also strike a synergistic partnership with Quadra Advisory, which is headed by Shunu Sen. The deal will be for giving advice on Net consultancy and will seek to guide clients on the Net strategy and how they must approach advertising on the Net. Essentially, the idea is to evolve a structure which gets business revenues from projects rather than merely depending on traffic on the site. ''We will continue to look at serious growth by developing long-term sustainable client-relationship much in the same manner as we do with traditional business in the physical world,'' adds S.M. Dutta.

But then, is Seth forgetting sites such as ideasnyou.com set up by Rama Bijapurkar along with Ashok Jain, or the one by TNS MODE called Inter@ct.com, ''this is a venture by MODE to take care of on-line research for the Net, by the Net,'' says Kalyanmoy Chatterjee, Vice-President, Taylor Nelson MODE. His perspective on on-line research, per se, is thus: people in the developed markets are using on-line option for secondary research now which was earlier done through the telephone. This stems from the fact that, typically, people in the West are uncomfortable about meeting researchers. In comparison, the bulk of the people in India are uncomfortable while responding to queries on telephone. Hence, secondary data is still largely dependent on one-to-one sessions. While its true that the interactive platform of the Net could work at watering down inhibitions, it still remains a niche platform for research which seeks a response from a certain audience profile which may not have access to the Net.

Therefore, his is not the only on-line consultancy or a research platform. Nonetheless, the brandquiver platform has managed strategic pacts which will work in its favour. In fact, apart from bagging the Philips contract for on-line research, Dabur will be its second client for on-line research for Real fruit juices, Dabur Honey, and Hommade pastes. It will also be its first corporate client which will pay a monthly subscription to get special downloadable information.

True, on the face of it, Seth has managed to make his talk walk in ensuring that the portal will not be dependent on ads but will focus on revenue-generation. The Philips account for on-line research is to design a dream TV by 2002. Rajeev Karwal, 37, Senior Vice-President, Philips India, for one thinks that this is the best way to draw consumers into an interactive platform without any inhibitions. ''The idea is to let the customer decide on how he wants the dream TV to be like in its design, features, and sound. And this is the best way to know what appeals to an Indian,'' he adds.

But will such a niche platform work for a product which, eventually, has to have a mass-appeal? ''This exercise starts from the drawing-board, and will come back to the drawing-board. We will invite consumer-feedback on a mass platform once we have a design draft which our engineers have worked on. We anticipate that, by 2002, there will be at least five products which will be developed exclusively for the Indian market from the complete perspective of India as a key market in the Philips worldwide strategy,'' says Karwal. Net, net, if it works, why not make things better.

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