“Rewarding time to be in the media business:” Mindshare’s Chadwick

In an interview with Campaign India, James Chadwick, Leader-Business Planning and Invention, Mindshare Asia Pacific spoke about the peculiar media planning challenges typical to the current economic downturn today and why these are great times for media agencies.

“The challenges today revolve around helping clients to re-evaluate their channel mix at a time when some of them have diminishing budgets, some of them are trying to have to increase their justification for using advertising budgets. Also, all businesses want to increase the amount of digital they use, which comes down to the perception of stronger engagement and the ability to do something new, more measurable. For some companies, their budgets have come down to a level where they feel that they cannot do a proper TV campaign anymore. So should they switch over to digital; those are some of the interesting questions being posed right now.”

On the trends being seen in the marketplace today, Chadwick comments, “The economic climate is very polarizing. Companies are faced with the question of flight or fight. There are companies that are choosing to fight and take advantage of the economic downturn and increase their market share. And then there are others who are taking flight often in the more troubled categories. From my experience, it’s the organizations that have marketing at their core, which are more likely to choose to fight. It’s the companies where marketing is more of a periphery function and does not have as much clout in the board room, which are choosing to take flight.”

Chadwick says the other question being asked nowadays is whether companies should stick to something old or try out something new. He adds, “Something new is usually digital or some form of content marketing in terms of branded entertainment, sponsorship, content creation etc. So where the marketing investment in digital is already in double digits, those are the markets where clients are looking at doing something new. The third decision is the debate over data versus gut. This is interesting. I think a lot of agencies would like a lot of data, and would like to invest in research and tracking, which comes at a cost. There are companies that are starting to scale down, and some big companies are having to scale down on their decision to keep systems in place and are leaning more towards gut. The problem is that in the short term, it just becomes harder to make decisions but we are going to come through these tough times. If we turned off our data support systems during a crisis, we will never understand what happened during those times. And this is something that happened during the 1997-1998 Asian crisis where a lot of companies stopped doing their continual research and it was very hard to diagnose.”

Elaborating on the effect of the downturn on categories in particular, with specific reference to automotive, Chadwick says, “In general, the automotive companies have unprecedented business issues to face, centered around survival.  Any category that is in a high purchase segment and is not an impulse decision, inevitably ends up going into the Internet. Digital would be the primary decision making tool. That will happen in India as well. There is an argument that in developing/emerging  markets like, say, India or China, digital is far more important than in developed markets because here when one is buying their first car, there is a lot of anxiety about making the right decision. So people spend enormous amounts of time researching the car online, before they buy it.”

Chadwick says the current economic situation is an opportunity for media agencies, “In a sense, this can be quite a rewarding time to be in the business that we are in. When times are good, and the business and budgets grow every year, clients feel more comfortable about making some of the strategic decisions all by themselves. It is at times like these that clients come to us with more interesting questions which are not just about media but also about how businesses growth can happen, about looking into the future and seeing where the business is heading.”