I sympathise with those laid off at tech firms, but hiring them will help agencies: Josh Gallagher

Josh Gallagher, chief operating officer, EssenceMediacom, is currently in India meeting clients and briefing teams.

 

One of the clients he's met with asked him to put a road map for media and how it will look in 2030. We caught up with him to learn the same, how the agency is working after its merger, how tech layoffs are helping the industry and more…

 

Edited excerpts:

 

How’s your week-long trip in India been so far? What’s been the agenda for this?

 

This is my first trip back since Covid. I’m here to spend time with my clients.

 

I’ve also been spending time with the team within the agency. The kind of people we have within the agency now is very different from four years ago. Some of that has to do with Essence and Mediacom coming together.

 

Media is changing, and while we still have the core ‘media people’ within the agency, we are also looking to build a diverse set of talent, given the work we do. Not only are we looking at the ‘strategy’ and ‘planning’ people, but also those with insights and analytical backgrounds, along with those strong with data and creative too. This is our ambition around the type of work we want to do. These are also the types of questions that our clients are asking us and where they want to grow their business as well.

 

The requirement to have broader retail thinking is really important. It’s not just performance retail, but how we think about retail end-to-end with the type of work we do are questions clients are asking. So, the skill sets that we need to answer our client’s questions, whether they’re media-related or bigger growth-related is changing the type of setup that we have within the agency.

 

What was in the PPT that you shared with your client about ‘media 2030’? Do you think with the rapid pace the media industry is changing? Can predictions for seven years ahead be made?

 

I think we can have an informed opinion on what some of those things might be. I look backwards to look forward.

 

If I look back five or seven years ago, we were talking about QR codes. At that time, they weren’t scaled. They went through a peak period and then a period where people thought it was going to die before coming back (during Covid).

 

A similar thing is happening with voice search. If I look to 2030, voice search is going to increase exponentially. The reason why I think that is because of generative AI. The way we were taught to search on Google was in a very specific way for very specific things.

 

The way we now use search through Bard and ChatGPT is much more natural language. So if you have something that is listening to natural language so that you don’t have to type, it can be a real accelerator for voice assistants.

 

Can I guarantee that this can happen? No. But what I’ve seen in the past is that when you combine two things – the technology that sits there and the technology around generative AI, that’s where we see predictions happen in the future.

 

If you look at TikTok, it came on the back of short-form video with Vine and music. Bringing those two things together is now what we see as the bigger cultural platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. To that extent, we can use some of the things we see present now in the future. We may be sitting here in seven years and remembering the conversations around the Metaverse.

 

The conversations could be far too advanced for the reality of the technology now. In the future, it’s likely to be big and that’s because people are so involved in categories like gaming already. They’re already involved in virtual and immersive experiences. Gaming won’t go away and only get bigger. If it forms part of an immersive experience of what we think the Metaverse is, then yes it’ll be here in seven to ten years.

 

What’s your sense of the agency's Indian operations? You’re visiting soon after the agency picked up ‘agency of the year’ at the Abbys held during Goafest. Are awards a priority?

 

No agency is set up to win awards. They are a by-product of good work and awards do motivate people within the agency. That’s why there are award shows like the Cannes Lions. We’ve always been successful in global awards shows.

 

Now I would like to see our work showing up in different kinds of award shows – creative, effectiveness, award shows that reward our capability in data, analytics and insights too.

 

It's been only four months since the merged entity has been operating. What was the priority at launch and what's been achieved so far?

 

Every agency has growth targets. Our short-term target was to bring together the two agencies which were big and successful. We were fortunate that we were already working together on some clients. We had complementary skills already. There were a lot of internal targets that we gave ourselves in terms of making it clear to the people in our agency about what they were getting into as well. When we bring together these capabilities, it’s a big opportunity for people within our agency to upskill and cross-skill. A lot of work that we were doing pre-merger and post-merger was about making it very clear for our people what our proposition was and where they saw an opportunity within the agency. I hope for a lot of people this was exciting. The type of work we are doing is a testament to that as well.

 

Was the transition smooth?

 

Doesn’t matter what the change is, any change brings apprehension. What I have noticed within this merger is that a couple of things benefit us, as opposed to some other coming together of agencies.

 

We had Essence leaning more towards performance, analytics, data and tech. MediaCom was more about handling big CPG clients that solved problems that were traditionally more reach focussed. It had big partnerships predominantly.

 

So it was a complementary bringing together of these two agencies and people in the organisation, which made it a lot easier. Yes, the cultures are different for a lot of reasons, again I think they are complementary too. Bringing the two agencies together involved a lot of hard work and planning, but it’s been helpful because we weren’t the same kind of agencies.

 

What’s also helped is that we are two successful agencies coming together. So the biggest challenge for us was to challenge ourselves to bring something new as a collective.

 

EssenceMediacom is pegged as a new-age media agency. What is it that a new-age media agency needs to do?

 

If I think about the way consumers experience advertising right now, that’s where we should start what a new-age agency must look like.

 

The way consumers consume media and content on new platforms is where we should start to think about how we should build our agency. We need to be able to keep up with consumers and that’s why we’re adding into our media service things like content. That’s how a consumer experiences content on platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. It’s a blending of big-scale culture and immersive passion and entertainment. We need to build an agency that can deliver on that for our clients and take advantage of that opportunity.

 

So, there’s a requirement for a back-end understanding of how these things work through analytics and insights because our clients want to match consumer expectations but they want accountability for the results.

 

Has the industry been able to keep pace with the consumers and their media consumption choices?

 

I think we’ve always been a step behind. Our challenge is to keep up as much as possible. For the opportunities that still matter or have scale for clients, we’re a step behind.

 

If we were to look at those opportunities that might be present in three to five years that are starting now, then we are a few steps behind.

 

You touched upon AI. How is the agency embracing this?

 

We’ve been using AI in some of our products for a while now. Internally, when using AI, it speeds up a lot of the things that used to take a lot of time. Whether it's analysing our creative or media work, it helps to make decisions for things that work fast like e-commerce. It also releases our people’s time to think bigger about how they solve problems for our clients.

 

We’re going to start to see the application of AI which is consumer-facing in the work that we do as well.

 

Talent has been a challenge for a while in the industry. Would the layoffs among the tech companies help the industry now with regard to it?

 

The biggest challenge around talent is making sure that we are giving them the right career progression and skilling them in the right way. We have a real responsibility to our people to skill them in the right way to make sure they’re satisfied with the work that they’re doing in the right environment. This is a bigger task than looking at retention or churn rates.

 

Getting people from these tech companies would help agencies. It’s a real positive. I feel sympathy for the people who are laid off but I think from a broader agency it’ll help.