Advertising lacks talent

Our Corporate Bureau / Mumbai

With Indian economy growing just under eight per cent and foreign direct investment standing at 5.5 billion dollars, it is no surprise that the number of brands in the country over the last few years has exploded from a mere 400 to 13,000.

In a scenario like this, the advertising industry is witnessing a booming opportunity in all segments across industries and markets. One of the key hurdles the advertising fraternity needs to overcome was spelt out at the AAAI diamond jubilee symposium. The future of advertising was that of the dearth of creative talent in the industry today.

"Talent remains to be a major issue in India today. Television is a medium, which has still a lot of opportunity in this market; TV penetration here has good growth potential. Despite fragmentation, TV and film are still the most cost effective ways of developing brands. And the need of the hour is clearly harnessing of creative talent to meet the mammoth of an opportunity," said Michael Birkin, vice-chairman, Omnicom.

Birkin then touched upon the subject of how in recent times brands have gone into a mode of reinventing themselves from time to time. "To keep reinventing a brand is impractical and dangerous. The focus should be on refreshing the brand within the confines of what it fundamentally stands for."

George Zacharias, president and chief operating officer, Sify, said, with technology changing at a rapid pace, brands must learn to adopt new delivery platforms faster and recognise this age of convergence.

"Not so far away will come a time when new media and digital platforms will all be cross linked. Technology is changing the way people become aware of products and a lot of times exposure to a brand takes place even before the consumer buys it."

Zacharias hence stated that it was important for advertising professionals to know what comes up on the net when one did a brand or product search.

The future, therefore, will have to connect the brand message to the consumers across delivery platforms and will have to become more spread out and all mediums and technology encompassing.

Another point of view was offered by Vahid Mehrinfar, chief brand futurist, Vahid Associates, on how advertising needed to start bench-trending and not benchmarking. Need to start tim-setting and not only trend-set. "The time has come for the advertising fraternity to manage the future possibilities by channelising consumer's expectations."

On a more creative note, Bruce Matchett, chief creative officer, JWT, stressed on the importance of the generation of ideas and stated that it was only ideation that would lead to the survival of the industry.

On penetration of the advertising business with registered companies, Pradeep Guha, CEO, Zee Telefilms, said out of seven lakh registered companies, only 20,000 advertised.

This essentially means that advertising is tapping only six per cent of Indian business. Birkin added that while multinationals were important businesses, the fundamentals of an agency would be strong only on the back of a strong base of local businesses.

The other area for potential in advertising was pointed out to be customer relationship management (CRM). While worldwide CRM has left much to be desired, Birkin stated that CRM was a mouth watering opportunity for India.

Citing the example of Nokia, which has adopted a different strategy for penetration in the rural and urban segment, Birkin professed his belief in the CRM market in India, and its potential to drive growth.

Another trend that was spotted was that of measurability and accountability. It was stated that although till date the two have not been stressed upon, going forward, agencies would have to gear up and be more accountable for its advertising so as to show a direct link in the bottom line to advertising and marketing spends.