January 19 marked the day when the Advertising Club hosted the Effie’s, the industry’s coveted advertising awards. A total of 1,276 entries were received where McCann Worldgroup was honored with the crown of ‘Agency of the Year’.
At the event, independent creative agency Enormous was bestowed with the title of Grand Effies for its Jaquar campaign ‘Unimaginable Brand Extensions’. Speaking to Storyboard18, Ashish Khazanchi, managing partner, said, “We have been reaping the reward of it, doing our work well so that we create a reputation for ourselves, which brings us the kind of businesses that we want to work with.”
Edited excerpts
This is an eventful year with elections being right around the corner. How do you think brands and agencies are going to capitalise on this opportunity from an AdEx and marketing point of view?
There is a big change which is going to happen mostly in terms of media consumption over the next two or three months. It’s a great opportunity for marketers to go out there, get their message out, because people will come back to television and they’ll stay glued to it for many months.
There will be a little bit of a boost in terms of economy and in terms of sentiment. The stock markets are very likely to go up especially around this time. So, public sentiment is very important for public spending.
AdEx on CTV in India is expected to grow by almost five fold and reach $395 million by 2027. What do you think will be the prominent growth factors for this and also what are the potential barriers in this path?
The great thing about advertising on Connected TV is that it takes away from the things which traditional media used to suffer from, which was measurability and actionability. Both of these things are possible with Connected TV. People are interested in your product, in your service, and it doesn’t end with consumption of a television campaign.
The barrier right now would still be the penetration of Connected TVs in the country is small. It’s growing like mad but it will take some time to get to where the idiot box used to be.
So, it’s still a challenge. The fact is also that people are consuming a lot of their entertainment on apps, and on phones.
What is 2024 looking like from an Enormous point of view? Are you taking part in any new pitches? Anything you’re looking for?
We don’t pitch too much, although truth be told, there are a couple of pitches we are a part of right now. We don’t take part in too many pitches and do our work very well. It’s really quite a big deal for the industry that the bigger campaigns, the more strategically thought through research campaigns and well-crafted campaigns are not necessarily coming from the bigger agencies. So that is a quantum shift.
We have been reaping the reward of it, doing our work well so that we create a reputation for ourselves, which brings us the kind of businesses that we want to work with.
Agencies are going from reputation driven to work driven. So that’s how brands are now approaching agencies as well, right?
The work that you do will give you the reputation. You can do your public relations etc, but people are smart who will see through it very quickly now.
There are at least three to four agencies I know which are doing good work, and Enormous is one of them. And I see businesses chasing such agencies all the time. That’s how it should be.
In-house agencies versus traditional agencies, which agency do you think will lead the future?
One thing is very clear. The future is going to be fragmented. There’ll be agencies which will have poor competencies and they’ll attract clients and talents like that. In-house agencies have nothing against that. There is certainly an advantage sometimes of certain kinds of clients to have an in-house agency. But mostly, I’ve not seen it really succeed in more than two or three cases. That too for a brief period of time.