Plan to scale up India ops exponentially: Mindshare CEO

Unilever's nine-month long media review ended last fortnight, with incumbent agencies Mindshare, PHD and OMD retaining their existing regional accounts. However, PHD and Initiative also bagged Unilever's global media planning duties. CNBC-TV18's Storyboard interviewed Nick Emery, the Global CEO of Mindshare, the 4th largest media agency in the world.

Below is the edited transcript of Emery’s interview with CNBC-TV18

Q: PHD and Initiative won the planning for Unilever globally. Do you see this as losing out?
A: I don't think we lost out. We ended up at the beginning of a competitive review with 75% of the global business. It is a privilege to still work with Unilever. And it is important to qualify that. Planning in North America, across all of South East Asia, including Australia, and across the majority of Europe, still sits in market, as does preliminary majority. We think of reporting, the number of businesses of planning and reporting the analytics that comes out of that. So what officially happened was that the planning, an element of planning on global brands in London was split between the Omnicom Media Group and IPG. Q: You have heard about broadcaster NDTV's lawsuit against India's TV ratings body TAM. Is there any global precedence? What's the view abroad?
A: India is such an important market with television as a growing medium and still such an important part of the medium that it has to have a robust and reliable measuring system. I think that's what everyone is working towards.
Every market around the world always has an issue at some point with their measurement systems, and they are never perfect. They are either too broad in their demographic approach, or they don't allow you to look at other areas. It is more important that we look at new ways of trading across screens and measurement across media, and not just on television.
Obsessing about old style metrics, even though they've been around for a long time and have been accepted, they're still imperfect. I think it’s better if we focus on a better and a more consistent measure across all screens, and not just television. Q: How difficult does that make things for you, given that Mindshare's parent company – WPP is named as a defendant?
A: Well, it doesn't make it difficult for us, because our clients understand the issue. So I don't think it makes it difficult at all. Q: Ahead of the digitization deadline in the 4 Indian metros - the IBF (Indian Broadcasting Federation), Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) and Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) have agreed to suspend the use of TAM for 9 weeks. What's the likely impact on media buyers and the media buying function?
A: Well, I don't think they'll be more relaxed. They'll probably have to be more vigilant, eventually. But it's not ideal. But there are reasons why it is happening. I think its important that clients and agencies and media owners work together to ensure that we are still as accountable as ever, the return on investment is still as robust as ever. And that we still are as we always are- spending our client's money as if it was our own. Q: In February, Mindshare set up its global mobile hub here in India. How many global clients do you service from the Mumbai office now? Are there any plans to grow the hub here?
A: We service about 15 or 20 clients from the hub here now. And, we plan to scale that exponentially. Mindshare's business-- 75% of our business is global. We have relationships with 40 of the top 50 worldwide advertisers, and we hope that it would scale pretty quickly. Q:  GroupM revised its global ad spending forecast to 5.1% growth with a downward revision for all regions. Does that still hold?
A: We're still keeping in line with our prospects. If you look at India, you see growth slowing down. We’re also worried about inflation and other areas. I think generally, across Asia, we see growth slowing down - they're still growing, but slowing down. Latin America is growing, exponentially in many ways, taking over the mantle that Asia has had for the last few years in terms of dynamic growth. North America is stable, and Europe is patchy. So, I think that's the right global outlook. And that clearly masks a number of national and regional variances.