‘Radio, regional print, TV hot on media buyer’s agenda’

When Publicis Group, the $5.5 billion marketing communications holding company, launched the India Media Exchange (IMX), it married the traditional media buying capabilities of Starcom Mediavest Group and Zenith Optimedia. As a combined unit, IMX comes a close second to the current leader WPP’s GroupM, and has now been instrumental in negotiating business for both the agencies. IMX president Shyam Shanker talked to DNA Money’s Arcopol Chaudhuri.

It’s been a year since IMX was launched. What was your key focus in this period?
Our focus was on strengthening ourselves internally - getting processes organised, putting systems and teams into place.

We began with a small set of people who came from Zenith Optimedia and Starcom, who were buyers in those systems. Thereafter, we had to build our team, bottom up, at Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai etc. We were expanding even proficiency skill sets within the system.

Considering that IMX is a first for India, what were the challenges you faced in terms of client expectations?
Firstly, the key challenge was in establishing confidence among clients. We had to convince them that IMX would bring suitable scale in media buying services and more. We did not want them to doubt the credibility and potential of a new entity, considering they had used to getting the same from the media planners earlier.

Secondly, we had to ensure that if confidentiality issues were to arise, they were systematically addressed - because we have clients in similar category. We planned well to make sure that we were not diluting any client and gave them a level-playing field.

How different is IMX from Publicis Group’s entity in China - CMX?
Actually, the reasons for setting up the Media Exchange in China and India were very different. CMX is a huge player in China, but it’s a very controlled market over there. Over there, media owners give the solution, and you buy the same solution for different clients.

India is relatively a very open and merit-based market, so media solutions can be made very contextual. For example, in Kaun Banega Crorepati’s third edition, we brought two clients - HP laptops and Hyundai Santro - in the same media offering. Thus, we created solutions relevant to two different brands. Being a large buyer, one was able to do it. If one were a small buyer, may be we would not have been able to do it. If you have 3-4 large clients, you can bring all of them on the same media offering and give customised solutions to each brand. Scale in context, that’s what we’re about.

It’s a good value-add to the Publicis Group’s business in India then…
See, by themselves, Starcom and Zenith are large enough, that when you put them together, they are 70% bigger than GroupM. There were a cluster of agencies - Universal, Madison, Initiative, Starcom, Zenith - all with billings in the range of Rs 600-800 crore bracket - and on the other hand, there is Group M in the Rs 2,500-3000 crore range. IMX helped us get into Rs 1,500-1,600 crore range.

For a client, what kind of negotiation muscle does IMX bring to the table?
We more or less end up buying the plan, rather than planning the buy - almost like buying a commodity. If you observe, clients like HUL and P&G have a large bandwidth with very large adspend. But it’s the medium and small-sized clients who’d benefit the most since they would want to be guided by our advice on media properties where they can get the best deals. For example, radio is the most promising medium today. Regional print and television are hot on the advertiser’s agenda, since both have been showing better returns. Clients now want to engage consumer in his preferred language of choice.