Focus areas for 2022: Ajit Devraj, Managing Partner, Dentsu Impact

The post-pandemic reality has set in a new normal not only for consumers but for brands as well. There has never been a more drastic and sudden change in the 4 Ps of marketing. Brands had no option but to think on their feet and change their business & marketing models almost overnight. This has also had a huge impact on the advertising agencies and their future plans. Considering these changes, our focus areas for 2022 are as follows:

• The people agenda

We operate in a talent-driven industry, where people are the core differentiator. The last few years have brought about a paradigm shift in how businesses engage with their people; being human-centric in approach is no longer a good-to-have but is a must-have. A human-centric workplace is where employee well-being, purpose, innovation, and performance thrive. This needs to be hot-wired into the culture of the workplace because when you take the initiative and invest in both your company culture and your team’s well-being, you set them up to succeed at work each day.

• Be agile or miss the bus 

We live in an age of rapid change, where new threats emerge out of the blue with no advance warning. However, with these threats comes a host of new opportunities that can radically change the landscape that we operate in. We need to keep an eye out not only on the aspects which might impact our business but also on the ones that impact our clients’ businesses. Hence, future-proofing the business needs to be an always-on activity that the agencies need to practice. This is another critical aspect that we are already building into our culture. Cross-functional teams are encouraged to work together and come up with strategic initiatives that can then be deployed effectively and quickly. ‘Fail fast to grow fast’ is going to be the mantra for success in these volatile times.

• Building new capabilities

As marketing becomes more of a business driver and marketing teams are told to take on business KPIs, the ask from agencies is also evolving. More and more clients are seeking business inputs from agencies. Be it inputs on which markets to enter, their product portfolio or perspectives on consumer behavior led by analytics. Agencies are being posed with more and more challenging and diverse problem statements. In this scenario, it is critical that agencies start building a perspective on the aspects which can then be built into a new capability area leading to a new revenue stream. This is a major focus area for us and would be one of the key responsibilities not just for the leaders but for the entire organization. It requires a fundamental shift in mindset from offering what we sell to understanding the client’s business, their pain points, root causes of those pain points, and delivering a solution that works for them, which may be outside the remit of traditional communication. This requires a focused approach towards upskilling current talent and an inorganic element of bringing in talent from outside the industry.

• Embrace technology for more effective storytelling

For the longest time, storytelling was defined by the rules of the medium that it played in, however, the last couple of years have seen an explosion of consumer engagement avenues and this landscape is drastically changing even as I write this. Rather than replacing the old ways of telling stories, technology helps amplify their strengths and make them more accessible to anyone who wants to create a world of their own. With new avenues like NFT, metaverse, etc., technology can make the art of storytelling even more impactful and immersive. Another facet of technology in storytelling is that it allows brands to create personalized content at a scale that makes the content more relevant for individual consumers. It enables brands to move from a one-to-many communication model to a one-on-one communication model.  Our focus this year will be to leverage both these aspects of technology to get brands to connect with their consumers at a much deeper emotional level and provide our clients with truly rich, immersive, and impactful brand stories.

• The conscious agency

With this pandemic, we all relied more and more on each other. Empathy is the need of the hour not just in our personal relationships but also in how businesses engage and interact with society at large. There needs to be a larger role that businesses have beyond the top line and the bottom line. Businesses need to be cognizant of their social footprint and be active contributors to the betterment of society. We are actively working towards not just building a purpose-driven approach internally for our talent and partners but are also looking forward to actively engaging with brands by helping them design sustainable solutions aimed at the betterment of society in general, which perhaps make business sense as well.