"Consumers respect advertising only if it's relevant": Laura Desmond

Laura Desmond, who took over as global CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) in June 2008, was in India recently. Desmond has spent most of her career with the Publicis Groupe. Before moving to SMG, she was associated with Leo Burnett. She has held many important roles in SMG, which includes CEO of MediaVest and SMG - The Americas. In addition to her present role in SMG, she also sits on the VivaKi board of directors.

afaqs! caught up with her and discussed everything under the sun, from Ravi Kiran's departure to the booming OOH media industry in India and the future of specialist agencies. She was accompanied by Ravi Kiran, CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group, South Asia. Excerpts from the conversation:

Edited Excerpts

Laura Desmond: Both. We need a leader who puts people at the heart of everything that Starcom Mediavest Group (SMG) does. The person should manage to keep SMG as a people's organization and also put the clients and products above the day-to-day politics. The new person will need to lead us with our global vision of being a 'human experience company'.

Laura Desmond: I would like to say that MediaVest -- which is present in 33 markets globally -- is a faster growing brand across the globe than Starcom.

Mediavest was launched in India with a specific purpose. It wasn't launched with the sole objective of pitching for more businesses for the group and make headlines. Instead, there was a strategic need.

The heritage of MediaVest in the US, UK and Mexico says that it started with local clients, then evolved into a MNC focus. The same is going to happen in India as well.

I must clarify that we are not trying to force-fit anyone or devalue one brand with the other. Instead we believe that Starcom and MediaVest have distinct positioning in the market, and both can grow to their utmost potential, without negatively impacting each other.

Laura Desmond: Starcom thrives on 'Space for Ideas' while MediaVest on 'Truth and Design'.

'Space for Ideas' is about the world that has an abundance of ideas; the issue really becomes creating an appropriate media for them to live and thrive. So, Starcom is about taking innovation and creativity to next level and create the media experience that you want the client to live in.

On the other hand, 'Truth and Design' is more about igniting social community. Think of it as, 'go find the human truth, design the media plan for them and ignite conversations in the process.'

Both are relevant, both can work.

In general, MediaVest has a higher concentration of local clients than multinational. Starcom is in 65 markets across the globe. My vision is to enable them to properly service the right kind of client in any sector possible. There could be two brands with distinct positioning and strategy -- for example, United Airlines and American Airlines. It could be that MediaVest is very well-suited for one type of airline and Starcom for the other.

The objective is to coexist in the right fashion and tailor for what each client needs.

Laura Desmond: By making the organisation flatter. Eighteen months ago, we took out layers of management we thought were not adding any value. So, we eliminated our regional CEOs, and the flatter structure has global headquarters overseeing our most important markets directly.

Second, we tried to create global teams that can interact together; so, I've got an executive management group of top ten people around the company globally. We are now trying to bring online a new programme for the next circle, called the Impact Circle, which will be a group of 50-70 middle managers from around the globe.

I think it's naive to think that small is going to win. This is a global-scale world now.

Laura Desmond: Yes, there will be integration, but in a different way. Some 15-20 years ago, the business revolved around creative messaging, and the full-service model stacked from the creative at heart, while today is the period of fragmentation and specialization.

For a while we will continue to see fragmentation, but integration has to happen, though the question is when and how -- whether it will be integrated around messaging again or something new.

We might even see specialist agencies re-integrating to achieve scale, which is important to compete.

The digitisation of content and media is creating a neutral-screen approach, which will allow content, conversation and community to go across all platforms.

To generate conversation and build communities, one has to integrate with the paid media. Today, the media business is primarily paid media. But one has to build capabilities in owned and earned media as well, in order to compete with paid media in future. That implies that we'll have to think about integrating all those specialist fragmented entities, because global companies will have to integrate paid, owned and earned assets a lot faster and strategically.

Laura Desmond: I think the media agencies of five years ago or even today won't be able to do that; it's the media agencies of the future that will do that. And that's one of the reasons why we had put together our own mission two years ago to reinvent our agencies.

Media agencies have a better chance than other verticals, as they pursue more of the consumer centric upstream strategic role, versus the agencies who are over-focused on trading and commoditising the market.

However, I don't believe even for a moment that the media agencies can execute all of it. But its role as an architect with the client -- to shape and stitch things together and find the right partners to execute -- is something media agencies can achieve.

Laura Desmond: I don't think anyone has cracked the code for mobile advertising anywhere. The reason why people are desperate to figure it out is that mobile penetration is higher than any other screen in the world.

The encouraging part is that the numbers for smart phones is growing, and it will solve a lot of the problems. Advertisers will now be able to experiment with the new technology and bandwidth.

Mobile advertising has to be more about point in time and immediacy. Retailers, quick service restaurants, movie studios and theatres are trying to figure that out, because all these are impulse purchase and decision, so point in time matters for them.

Another interesting thing to watch out for is what tablets do to mobile advertising space. Because they are going to give a new definition of what mobile is. Mobility will expand beyond the present realms of mobile phones, because the kind of marketing you can do on tablets is very different.

Laura Desmond: Yes! Just like the Internet, mobile opportunity lies in segmenting the audiences -- where they are, what they are doing, what they are surfing and then sending specific messaging to them.

We do have the data to do so; it's just that the companies don't know how to make it operational. We need to build the pipeline from the carrier data to the client data to media data, so that we can follow that right path.

Laura Desmond: The growth for OOH will come about when the network becomes digital. There is tremendous creativity there. If you remember the movie, Minority Report, there was a scene where different OOH signs were served up for individuals who were passing by. I know it sounds far-fetched, but it will happen one day. Because the idea to be able to serve content based on the relevant audience is there, and the personalization of that is just about technology.

Ravi Kiran: What we have seen so far in out of home in India is at a rudimentary stage. What we are doing right now is find walls and hang hoardings on them. Ninety-nine per cent of it is static, but the combination of new technology would bring in transformational change in OOH.

Most of us haven't even started thinking on this; we are at a stage where the US was some 30-40 years back, like how do I measure how many people are passing by or how many are watching my sign.

I think in the next 8-10 years, this medium -- when combined with the latest technology and the spaces where people are around -- will grow at a better pace than what we have grown in the last 40 years.

Laura Desmond: Yes, you are correct. Here is the interesting thing: a consumer knows they are going to see advertising messages everyday. If given a relevant choice of messaging (and we have done some research here), they would love to see that.

Like for a large family, an SUV ad is more relevant than a two-door sports car. In the future, advertising can earn more respect, provided it becomes more relevant and contextually targeted.

Ravi Kiran: To be able to compare things, one has to have numbers. It's not the red versus yellow debate, as both are qualitative names; as opposed to 2 versus 4, which has a different meaning. So, I don't think quantitative data analysis or measurement would go out of fashion.

The important thing is that we (SMG), as well as many of our rivals, now invest quite a bit of energy, resource and money in understanding consumer behaviour, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques.