By Kalpana Ravi
Dheeraj Sinha – CEO & the Chief Strategy Officer, South Asia at Leo Burnett
2021 showed us the power of collective collaboration to make things happen. As we head into 2022 our focus will be towards harnessing this energy to build a people-first agency. Here are the key focus areas which will unlock growth and success in 2022.
Digital, Data & Technology – Our culture and orientation has always been towards solving client’s business problems using data technology, and creativity. Data is the currency of today’s world. It defines the customer experience across every platform and touchpoint. And in today’s world, the experience you create defines your brand. Using data to create personalized experiences will help brands build be more relevant and impactful. Therefore a big pattern of communication for our brands has always been about bringing out the product narrative in an interesting way. For us, the focus is going to be on creating full funnel solutions for our clients by integrating data, technology and creativity and building disproportionated success for our clients.
Creating for the Millennial Bharat – Last year saw the industry embrace digital transformation, this year will be about creating mobile first, language first, digital oriented communication for our brands. Language first communication will play an important role to help scale brands up. In the last 5 years India has gone from a 250 million internet users to 650 million internet users. The introduction of smart phones and 4g has accelerated India’s digital transformation and parallelly has had a profound impact on brands and businesses. With more than 500 million users who are getting their first taste of technology through their mobile phones, the focus will be on creating content, platforms, products to capture the attention of the ‘millennial bharat’.
Learning – In a world which is constantly and dynamically evolving, we continue to empower our workforce by helping them upskill and learn to stay ahead of the curve. We have over the past year helped our entire agency to build digital proficiencies so that the entire team can think digital first and platform first. The focus next year will be about honing these digital proficiencies to navigate the all-important platform world which in turn will help our brands win big.
Power of Collective Collaboration – We recently moved into a new space, one which we have consciously designed to facilitate a collaborative work environment. To build a new age agency we have to do away with old school ways of working and reinvent ourselves in a way which will help us collaborate better.Our aim was to build India’s biggest coffee shop. The office does not have hierarchal seating or designated workstations instead we have created different zones in the office to help teams work together.There is a silent zone – the library, the lush zone which is surrounded by plants to bring the outdoors indoors, the interactive zone where people can sit and brainstorm and the Café Burnett zone where we serve some really amazing coffee.At Burnett we have always nurtured the culture of ‘heart and hustle’ and this is perhaps what has helped us navigate the past two years.
