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Advertising as we know it seems nearly dead. Brands are seen making more Instagram reels than 30-second commercials. The planning and strategy function in ad agencies must obviously keep step. As Prem Narayan, chief strategy officer at Ogilvy India, explains,“Fundamentally, from a world of one big idea, we are now moving to many pieces of content and smaller manifestations of that big idea or different ideas on different platforms. ”Narayan was among the first cohort of planners at Ogilvy India, which he joined in 2004, and was mentored by Madhukar Sabnavis. The planning team had just three or four people then. Today it numbers over a 100!
Narayan — who grew up in Tamil Nadu, did his schooling largely in Madurai, his engineering course in Kerala, and MBA in Pune — uses a football analogy to describe the planning function. “The creative people are the forwards because they are the ones who deliver the output that the world sees. Planners are the midfielders. We hope to give a good pass. Also, our job is to make life easy for the defender, which is our account management team.” Edited excerpts from an interaction with Narayan on the evolving agency model:
As clients today seek more reels than ads, how is the strategy function at agencies shifting?
The overall advertising market in India is around ₹1.6 lakh crore, of which about 50 per cent is digital. For many of our clients, anywhere between 25 per cent and 70 per cent of ad spend is now digital. For D2C clients it may be more. So certainly the media has changed. Hence the client expectation from agencies has also significantly changed.
From the good old days of one piece of content we are now moving to 50 to 100 pieces of content of all kinds — content that brands put out, influencers put out, and so on. Yet the brand still needs to speak as one voice. How will that occur? What I hear more and more from our clients is: ‘Can you guys at least, from a strategy level, bring all of this content together, so that we speak as one brand and it doesn’t look like disparate pieces of work done by different people’. So the strategic role of the agency has increased to hold the brand voice and brand narrative together. It has also become a lot more complex, so clients need somebody to simplify stuff. And who better than us to do that.
Somebody has called the role of agencies today as imaginative repetitiveness — spinning one idea through different stories to a multitude of people. So that has necessitated a change in how agencies think.
A lot of advertising work now seems related to customer experience and other stuff where the consulting firms are edging in. How do you deal with that?
There are two parts to that. I am bucketing advertising and content as one stream, and this will be led by either one agency or a combination of many agencies, depending on how the client chooses to play it. And there, I think, we have a strong role.
What’s also happening is that a lot of clients are using an idea to engage with consumers interactively. And that also leads to generation of a lot of first-party data. For example, the birthday song campaign we did for Cadbury, which created unique songs for each user. We cracked the idea, we enabled it on the packaging — people were able to scan it, input details, and create their unique video. Of course, there is tech involved, but the idea is still at the centre of it. Similarly, the ‘joke in a bottle’ campaign, which we did for Sprite.
But the other parts are also becoming significant. Performance marketing has become very big because it’s like the sales door today. There are the Accentures and the Deloittes who are doing it, and then there are performance marketing specialist agencies — we ourselves have an agency called Verticurl, which has now become part of Ogilvy One, specialising in that territory.
A lot of that work drives the bottom funnel or the click-to-sale part of the game.
But you can feed the bottom of the funnel only if you get the customer hooked to the brand. As the saying goes, a customer does not buy an Audi at 30… he actually “buys” it at age six. You have to create desire and intent on the brand to win. The job of brands and advertising is to get more people into the funnel — only then will the performance marketing work at the bottom of the funnel.
As the Unilever chairman recently said, the job of brands is to create desire at scale. That’s a phrase you will hear more, and will be the new mantra for agencies.
What are the new market opportunities for ad agencies?
Content will be a big play, and tailoring content specific to platforms like Meta and Google is becoming quite important. Ad agencies have to understand how people behave on platforms and then deliver to those behaviours. Our revenue will shift towards a more ‘advertising-plus-content’ kind of world.
Also, strategy will become important to guide clients on developing structures and briefs, so that influencers talk in a way that’s in congruence with the brand. So those are territories where, I think, a lot of our focus will lie.
Also creating experiences and engagement on ground is becoming a big thing with clients. I see a very strong role for agencies in activation. You will see a lot of stuff we did at the Maha Kumbh this year, with clients like Amazon and Fevicol, gaining ground. Those are opportunities for future revenue streams that would unlock as we move forward, because today nothing is siloed — so activation-meets-technology-meets-creativity.
I think we will move to a world where there will be lots of IPs (intellectual properties) like Coke Studio, because you want to build something consistent year on year. Agencies can partner brands in creating those IPs and in executing them. We are already there on the execution in some, but that’s something we will have to strengthen.
I also think there is a role for agencies in consulting, because only when you work with the client, understand them, define the brand, and look at how the whole funnel works, can you seed the idea and take it to execution.
So how far has Ogilvy reached in unlocking these opportunities?
On both tech and content, we have a strong force. We have over a 100-strong content team and 10 to 12 technologists working internally at Ogilvy.
One of the revenue streams that is really opening up is our tech team sitting here and working for clients globally — both with Coke and Mondelez, we have been able to do that.
We are now building Ogilvy One in India. Ogilvy One is a global entity that basically focuses on customer experience and engagement. And we have Verticurl, based in Coimbatore, catering largely to international clients.
Ogilvy One is something that we hope to build quite strongly in the next two to three years. Consulting is also something we want to start and, hopefully, we should do that in 2026.
Will the Trump tariffs impact Indian advertising?
It’s going to be a tough year. There is no running away from it. Though tariffs may not affect all our clients directly, there is an impact overall at a macroeconomic level. When that happens, and the overall climate is tough, how do clients still grow? Should they focus more on rural markets? Are there more opportunities at the really top end, premium end of the market? Do we need to pivot in some categories? All of those conversations are on with many of our clients. We all have to double down this year and work harder, which is where I think the long-term relationships that we have with our clients matter. We have had clients who have been with us for 20, 30 and even 50 years.
This article first appeared on The Hindu Business Line
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