In 2021, the Indian unit of Dentsu Group was rocked by a series of senior-level exits and a lot of rumours and confusion around the fate of agencies and talent within the group. Following this, Dentsu in India made significant changes and rejigged its leadership to script a turnaround. But then Narayan Devanathan, who had taken charge at Dentsu after all the old and familiar names had left, also departed . Now, after many months of restructuring and getting new leaders, things seem to be finally falling back into place for the agency group. Devanathan is also back, having taken up a consulting role as group chief strategic advisor.
The agency also appointed Harsha Razdan as chief executive for its South Asia office. This post had been lying vacant since the sudden exit of former CEO Anand Bhadkamkar, who quit in September 2021. Storyboard18 caught up with Razdan, who said his first priority is to bring things back on an even keel.
Edited excerpts:
What were your initial thoughts on taking on a new role at Dentsu after what the agency has been through over the past couple of years? What was your perception of the agency when you decided to take up this challenge?
I did know that there were challenges, not only in Dentsu but generally in the agency world. But I was actually captivated by the opportunity and the vision our Japanese colleagues and my boss Rob (Dentsu Asia-Pacific CEO Rob Gilby) had. (It was) trying to shape the future and not doing what was done only in the past. It connected to a lot of my early experiences and I thought that if you joined the two, it'll be one hell of a ride.
Speaking about your earlier roles, you have been with FMCG companies but your most recent roles have been with the big consulting firms. How, according to you, were you well placed or set up to take a group agency kind of role within an advertising agency kind of set up?
I understood the client side when I was with PepsiCo and Unilever and the experience at Accenture gave me a well-rounded view of digital transformation and what the new-age digital looks like. That's what clients are looking forward to. The last five years at KPMG, I was in the client and solutions role listening to clients trying to serve their needs. And the biggest learning after coming in here is also that clients have been telling me, “Listen to us, you people have not been listening to us, listen to us and work will come your way.”
So you're telling us the previous leaders were not listening to the clients?
I wouldn't say that. I think it's just about the feeling the clients have. Perhaps we have not paid enough attention to what the clients are saying, and we assume that the solutions we have are what the clients want. I think at times you would not have the answers, but you should have a discussion, say this is something I would advise you to get done by X, Y and Z. But to be honest, I don't think most of us, including I, have been honest all the time, but I think that's the only way that you can go back.
This role has been vacant since the sudden exit of Anand Bhadkamkar in September 2021. When you joined, what was your immediate mandate?
The first thing was stabilising Denstu, making people feel comfortable, making them feel that there's someone who is going to listen to them. A lot of things happened in the last two and a half years, and there's a lot of confusion between the region and the global team and what they were trying to interpret as India. We now have stability. You'll see stability in our leadership, stability in terms of how we are going forward, stability in terms of how we pitch to our clients. I think that was the biggest thing in the first three to four months and now we move on from there.
How has the client perception about Dentsu changed? There was erosion of client trust owing to events over the past two, two and a half years.
I would say it has gone down. But I have visited about 60 to 70 CEOs, CMOs over the last five months. Each of them says, “Thank you for coming and meeting me.” “Thank you for telling us the new story.” “Thank you for being a different person to what we've seen in the general agency world.” And every time we have been called to a pitch, I thought we were underestimating ourselves around our losses, some of them we can talk about, some of them we can’t. But I have been pleasantly surprised with the kind of brand equity that Dentsu had and the way we are bouncing back.
What are some of the new business wins that have happened over the past couple of months? I know the losses in terms of Reckitt and Maruti Suzuki. How are you replacing these?
Lots of them. Berger Paints, Aditya Birla Capital, Talk Pharmaceuticals, and we have got a number of other clients which are also sort of falling into our kitty.
The use of tech, generative AI and related solutions… What is your strategy in that direction?
I think our philosophy very clearly for South Asia will be to be an agency which is at the intersection of marketing technology and consulting. That's the intersection which is the sweet spot for us. We want to be a ‘B2B to S firm’—a business to business to society firm. Do the right thing for society. Everything that you launch, have society in mind, do the right thing for society and start defining your niche when you talk about society. And the second thing is being a people-centred transformation company—that doesn't mean to become an HR transformation company, but very clearly, we believe you understand the psyche of our consumers better, psyche of our clients better, psyche of our own people, and psyche of clients better to try and do something in that space which we know about and build equity around.
People problems are one of the biggest challenges this industry faces. In the past two, two and a half years, Dentsu has lost a sizeable amount of talent, some renowned names in the industry. How are you attracting new talent and also trying to retain existing talent?
There's a history in terms of why we lost a lot of good talent. We had acquired a lot of companies at one point in time. And then we realised that clients were telling us it was getting really complicated for them to understand whom to reach out to. If you have 18 or 19 companies and each of them has a CEO, CMO and a chief people officer, it becomes difficult to manoeuvre. Dentsu decided to change that and sort of bucket into a few master brands. Yes, it was unfortunate. We lost some of the talent but the current talent we have with us, and you'll see a lot of new people, with youngsters, that's the big thing we are trying to solve. Very clearly, we are trying to do a lot of different things. For example, we run something called a next-generation concept. There are strategic, strategic things that I'm working on. We pick up 30 of the young and budding leaders, divide them into teams and they work directly with the leadership team. They feel involved in sort of creating the new Dentsu. We will have to look at a lot of upskilling. We'll have to pick people from outside the industry and mix and match them to create the new Dentsu. At the same time, I believe that youngsters will learn much faster than me, which if I give them a chance, they will do much, much better than all of us.
My perception of Dentsu has been a company that is aggressively acquiring tech-forward digital organizations, startups, independents and more. As the new leader of Dentsu, what is the direction you want to take?
It's a very interesting question, because I think we've reached a stage where we have achieved a reasonable degree of capability. So we have a two-pronged approach. One is to grow organically and nurture existing talent and keep growing at a particular pace. We are still in search of acquisitions in the new age of tech marketing space and we'll pick up companies that fit our strategic needs. Yeah, but this time it'll be a calculated movement and direction rather than the rapid, aggressive, acquisitive company that you talked about.
(Edited by : Sangam Singh)
First Published: Oct 26, 2023 3:22 PM IST
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