Publicis Groupe has built itself as an end-to-end partner for clients across the marketing communications value chain and is now focusing on transforming clients’ businesses through technology, which remains at the very core of the Groupe’s business, as per Amaresh Godbole, CEO- Digital Technology Business of Publicis Groupe India.
“Publicis Groupe has transformed itself a lot and there's a very clear vision at the group level, which is to partner clients in their own transformation. In fact, this is not being done by Groupe as lip service because most of the past acquisitions - be it Sapient, Epsilon, etc. - have ensured that our technology businesses learn from the global giants. As a result of this, there’s a lot more emphasis on knowledge transfer from these companies into our operating divisions like Digitas, Indigo, etc.” he added.
Delving further into how the vision of the holding company ladders down to the divisions such as Digitas India, Indigo Consulting and Publicis Commerce Builds, he shared that the digital technology business of Publicis Groupe in India aims to partner with clients in their marketing transformation led by technology.
“Indigo Consulting does this via its expertise in financial services brands as they require a lot of specialist knowledge in terms of integration regarding regulatory concerns, specialist products, etc. In the case of Digitas, we partner with clients for marketing experiences, sales, and channel transformation programs. However, Publicis Commerce is focused on the new and emerging era of commerce technology transformation,” he elaborated.
He also emphasised that while the primary client for Indigo Consulting is the Chief Information Officer; the Chief Digital Officer or Chief Commerce Officer becomes the go-to person for Publicis Commerce Builds, and Chief Marketing Officer is the prime link for Digitas India.
In his view, owing to the absolute clarity that the Groupe now has in terms of partnering clients depending on their respective brand focus on different sources of revenue and growth, there are three different stakeholders in each organisation along with their distinctive budgets, mandates, etc. which is why there is very little cannibalisation.
“While we may indulge in platform sharing for common skills that go across all the brands internally, to ensure that we have one view as the digital technology business when it comes to partnerships with product companies and use it as our strength. When it comes to going to the market, we go to three distinct windows looking at three different stakeholders in the client's office,” he clarified.
In his opinion, this model coupled with the vision, scale and marketing transformation in terms of commerce, channel or sales, has worked quite well for the network in India as the previous year saw Digitas post its best offline bottom-line results to date and commerce tech grew exponentially, at approximately 465% in 2022-23.
Pegging hope onto the same and backing his views, Godbole also shared that both of Publicis’ mature brands- Digitas and Indigo are on track and expressed that they would be recording double-digit growth this year.
Commenting as to what enticed him to switch from Publicis Groupe as the CEO of Digitas India in February 2020, to join Google as Head of Creative and Capability, he stated that while he was quite happy with the role that he was earlier serving at the holding company’s operations in India and had no plans of moving out, the opportunity of working with the California-based tech giant and the timing just felt right.
“I had already seen Digitas grow from a startup to the point in time when it was considered to be one of India’s leading digital agencies in just a decade and I always shared an admiration for Google. In fact, when I was leaving Publicis, I had a conversation with the leadership team in India wherein I clearly told them that I would be keen on coming back to the organisation, after 2-3 years, if there was a challenging role for me in place and that’s exactly what happened,” he elaborated.
Sharing more about his return, he said, “When the role of CEO-Digital Technology Business of Publicis Groupe India came up in February, last year, I couldn’t say no! It felt like a learning experience on two fronts to me. First of all, this was a totally different ballgame of running a cluster of agencies, leading leaders and maintaining each agency’s unique culture which in itself is very different from the challenge of running a standalone agency. Secondly, what has always excited me the most is- scaling up nascent divisions, which is what I did for Digitas back in the day, and therefore now coming back to Publicis, I’ve been relishing the challenge of coming in and scaling the commerce tech division like a startup over the past one year.”
Touching upon the fundamental difference between working at Google and Publicis, he pointed out that while the former is a product company and the latter a professional services company, they both have a great culture and employee-friendly policies.
“When it comes to a California-based tech company, a lot of the product management is largely taken care of centrally, even though local teams feed inputs for localised features which is why the role of an India office is to primarily drive the service of sales for the products and ensure that the clients and agencies understand and ideate on how to leverage the product best albeit in terms of creative, media or technology,” he said.
In his opinion, he finds more meaning for himself in the agency ecosystem because first of all the operating model is extremely decentralised - while being well supported by a spine of global processes, tools and governance. In addition, the nature of the work is completely people-dependent and based on local nuances.
Having said that, Godbole also shared that when it comes to technology leaders such as Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. the agency ecosystem does lose some talent to them, but it’s not at a worrying scale. The major trouble happens when the agency setups lose out on the crème de la crème talent and that’s precisely what needs to be safeguarded, in his opinion.
“While there are people who switch to tech giants, startups, content companies and even OTTs from the Indian agency ecosystem, we do see that a lot of the talent returns after a couple of years because, for those who are used to being at the core of a product or business, many of them miss it after a point of time. For example, if you're a creative person who is used to being at the heart of creating a campaign, then to be in a role which is an enablement role may not be something you will enjoy long-term,” he stated.
He also added that in cases where an individual is ambitious and has aspirations for becoming part of the global leadership teams in large technology companies some years down the line, there are mainly two paths to get there- sales or product engineering background.
“If you are doing anything else, you can definitely get a functional leadership role maybe with an expanded geography, like from India to APAC, but eventually, you might find that there’s a bit of a glass ceiling post that because the general management usually comes from a different skill set,” he stated.
Godbole also suggested that rather than complicating things, agencies can take certain measures to ensure that the right people stay with them. This can be done by creating a positive culture, bringing in clients that allow the talent to do exciting and good work, building a culture of psychological safety where one can say no to unreasonable internal requests as well as external client requests and paying the best money that they can afford at each level - along with ensuring that people get regular increments and growth.
To cater to the talent retention woes of the agency business, Godbole highlighted that because
technology talent is so much in demand these days, agencies don’t just compete within the ad industry but with all the big tech companies, product companies, and more.
“A lot of times we find it easier to win businesses than to bring the right people on board for the business! Therefore, Publicis Groupe has created a robust talent engine which has a separate and focused team working on technology talent acquisition and a separate one on advertising talent acquisition,” he said.
The other prominent challenge which continues to worry him is the ever-evolving nature of technology and the requirement of not just keeping up with the latest advancements, but deploying them for clients and being ahead of the curve in building new capabilities.
Throwing light on the top five emerging technologies in today’s day and age, Godbole pointed out that Generative AI is definitely topping the charts as it has the ability to impact both the work that we create as well as how we go about our work and that in his opinion, it is something that everyone across domains should take very seriously.
“Instead of seeing it as a threat, we should see it as a co-pilot which can make us 5x, 10x, 20x more productive by taking away all the grunt work. In fact, if you use AI to help you turn around the 90% volume form that happens in any job, then you become free to focus on the 10% inspiration that comes from human genius,” he added.
With this, he also stated that in the current times, he has witnessed four generative AI platforms having an immediate impact- Adobe Firefly and Midjourney for visual content, Runway for video, and ChatGPT4 for content.
“I believe now is the time that we should embrace it and understand how this works and how it can make us more productive human beings because eventually, I think we would get to a point where it's humans and machines rather than humans or machines,” he said.
He also pointed out that Machine Learning has been used for targeting at scale, performance marketing, etc. for quite some time now and that Commerce is becoming quite big with brands finding ways to digitally sell to customers.
“Blockchain is still finding an incremental real-world application amongst the whole Web3 universe in today’s times. Moreover, creating immersive experiences, not just on the metaverse, but using technology to turn brand purpose into brand action is something that a lot of people are thinking about,” he added.
On a concluding note, he also shared the view that there are various new pathways that have opened doors to new ideas to gain consumers’ engagement and mindshare, and while some of them may be at scale right now, some of them might not, which is why marketers need to test and learn and figure out the right ways of leveraging these technologies in today’s day and age.
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