Businesses are better off but complete normalcy is a long haul, says Pooja Jauhari of The Glitch

With the unlocking of the economy, business has become slightly better but it will take a long time to reach any level of normalcy, Pooja Jauhari, CEO of The Glitch, said during an interaction with BestMediaiInfo.com.

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However, talking about the overall business recovery of The Glitch, she said the agency, which recently won several new businesses, will make a comeback very soon.

In broader economic terms, she said times are going to be challenging until the country gets to the stage where a vaccine for Covid is available. “Till the time vaccine doesn’t come out, and our businesses and clients don’t recover, it is going to continue to stay challenging.”

The agency has been showing double-digit growth for many years. But this year it will not be as much as previous years for sure, Jauhari said.

According to Jauhari, content strategy married with long-term brand-building is really the way forward for brands today. “Be it editorial, social, e-commerce, all of it is content. It has been pivotal and extremely important for us.”

Influencers are a small part of what that the agency does. It largely manages influencer strategy on how to creatively work with them, but does not handle influencers directly.

“Our business is very core to brand-building, content, content strategy, digital and digital transformation. All of these strengths have played a vital role for us to be able to move forward strongly,” Jauhari said.

Jauhari said one of the most important learnings taught by Covid and the lockdown is to function more efficiently while working in such times.

She said the agency will come back to normal with a great level of efficiency and learn to operate without an office space while sitting in different parts of the country or the world.

“The amount of time and money we saved by bringing in these kinds of efficiencies is great. It will be passed on to the kind of talent we hire and how we remunerate because that’s what I would like to focus on more than anything else. Bringing great talents and nurturing and growing them. Even if we are not able to go back to old ways of working, they need to be taken care of and that’s our priority,” Jauhari said.

The focus of the agency has been to support its clients through these tough times, Jauhari said. “It’s our number one priority to take care of our clients and our people. While business has been a challenge, we are sailing through and I am confident we are going to come out of the crisis very strong,” said Jauhari.

Speaking on when she sees businesses going back to normal, Jauhari said, “I don’t see it normalising anytime soon and I would think it will at least take mid-next year for it to come to some level of normalcy, especially in India.”

As compared to creative, media or outdoor agencies, the brunt of Covid was not as much for digital agencies, said Jauhari. But when an agency’s clients face challenges, it moves down to every partner that they have worked with.

Clients are all about digital today and the demand is all about digital transformation, content at scale and that’s what the agency does very well. So it hasn’t hit the company as hard as any other agencies.

The digital advertising side of the business is already competitive with other agencies or a freelancer ready to work for less. 

According to Jauhari, competition has been around forever, if not the Covid crisis then something else. At the end of the day, what an agency brings to the table will count for something.

Speaking on the impact of partner clients from the events, food and aviation sector, Jauhari said, “Thankfully, we have had very few clients in those sectors and so it had little impact on us and our teams were taken care of. The talents working on those clients moved to different disciplines like different teams, moved down to help with pitches, all moved around within the organisation.”

At Glitch, only the leadership team decided to take the voluntary pay cuts as they didn’t want it to go to the rest of the team.

“It was a very good decision to partner with the WPP network because they bring in their experience to the table and their understanding of running large-scale agencies. WPP has truly supported us over the last three years, they have had our back and I guess that says a lot about the network,” Jauhari said.

Jauhari said she always look forward to opportunities rather than challenges. Opportunities to really learn and keep eyes and ears open on how to be more efficient in the way to operate.

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