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The Perfect
Adman
TBWA strongman Michael Greenlees talks
to Shamni
Pande on how
his Gene Pool initiative is reshaping his ad agency's thrust worldwide and
in India.
He is the perfect Englishman who
has taken to living in the US rather well. ``I am not about to give up my
affair with tea though,'' says Michael Greenlees, President
& Chief Executive Officer, TBWA Worldwide. And the shift to US is
significant: after all it was he who had set up Gold Greenlees Trott (GGT),
one of the most exciting agencies to explode onto the London ad scene in
the Eighties. GGT went on to become world's fifteenth largest advertising
networks with over 40 per cent of its business in the US, until it became
part of TBWA through the Omnicom group acquisition.
His pre-occupation with `Gene Pool' initiative,
is therefore all but natural. After all, it is a move that courses through
the veins of the agency's culture which has spread through a non-US
epicentre network. Greenlees on his first visit to India talked to BT's Shamni
Pande about
the importance of assimilating cultures.
 Q. What is the big idea behind your `Gene Pool'
initiative?
Well, all this excitement is about empowering the
workforce with multiple skills and build cultures where learning can be
taken across organisations. This is not exotic sensitivity exercise that
needs to be forced down our system, as it is intrinsic to our structure.
We are a patchwork of very passionate groups that are under a common
banner today. Hence, our learning and integration must be one that gets to
creatively build out of that difference and not make some insipid clones
in different places.
Does this mean that you pull resource pools out
of regions?
Yes. We have already done that with India, where we
have used TBWA/Anthem's interactive strength as a sort of hub for
processing all the software and back-end work.
What are your immediate concerns for India, how
happy or unhappy are you with they way things have worked out so far?
I am extremely happy about our Indian office, that
is why I am here. In fact, I am rather late in making my visit here and
think that this region's contribution to our overall 15 per cent growth
target is very critical. Here, we are currently at No. 18 and we hope to
be among the top 10 in the next three years.
Is the double-digit growth you talked of still
possible in the face of a slowdown in the US and other markets?
It is true that clients are concerned about the
slowdown. This will attract investment in new technology, where people
will switch to more realistic frames. It's compounded by the fact that in
the last six months we've seen a lot of financial failures in interactive
and technology sectors. E-toys is bankrupt and pest.com has sold a lot of
its businesses. Walmart has laid off something like 50 people in its
interactive and technology divisions. All this means that people are very
careful about where the next advertising dollar goes. But then, this does
not mean that growth plans of companies will vanish.
During such times, marketers think of very focused
spends. And to us, advertising is not just about spots on a media
schedule. We are brand architects and look at ways of constructing brands
in innovative ways. This means, and not just for us here, that niche
activity spends on public relations, direct marketing, and events are on
the rise. We feel comfortable about achieving our 15 per cent growth
target.
Are you about to launch your media-buying arm OMD
in India?
OMD is definitely a priority. There has been a lot
of change at OMD: it has got a new management and a new CEO for Europe and
Asia Pacific. In India, however, media consolidation has be looked at very
carefully. Because this market defies big and homogenous structures. It is
fragmented and lends itself naturally to a micro-market structure. In
India, our equation is different. Omnicom has presence through Mudra, R.K.
Swamy/BBDO and TBWA/Anthem. So one needs to take stock the comfort level
and equations.
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