Inside Leo’s 3-point growth strategy: New brands, global briefs, wider mandates

New Delhi: When Amitesh Rao took charge of Leo South Asia 18 months ago, he inherited what he calls “a fantastic agency… extremely successful, very healthy, with a very strong culture and DNA.” 

The mandate was not rescue but acceleration—building new muscle on a proven frame so the shop could claim, and keep, the global top spot.

“To get to No. 1 in the world—and then stay there—takes a very different orientation from simply scaling a peak and sliding down,” said Rao, CEO of Leo South Asia.

That orientation has already produced visible markers. Leo finished 2024 as the world’s No. 1 agency on the WARC Effectiveness Index and No. 3 on the Global Effie Index.

Yet Rao insisted that awards and recognition are “only outcomes.” His own scorecard, he said, tracks the everyday choices that make those outcomes inevitable.

Transformation as a daily discipline

Rao’s definition of success starts with continuous reinvention:

Relentless capability-building: “You have to keep on changing, keep on growing, keep on embracing new technologies, new ways of working, new kinds of talent—every day, every month, every year.”

Strategic heavy-lifting: A concerted investment in strategy has “put a very strong strategic grounding under every idea,” which Rao credited for the agency’s Effie surge.

A broader craft palette: Over 18 months, Leo has layered technology, digital, commerce, and experiential onto its traditional creative core.

Partnership mindset: The shop now collaborates “a lot more with entities around us within Publicis Groupe and outside,” including a creative-intelligence partnership with Google.

“Being in permanent build-mode is what drives growth,” Rao emphasised.

What actually fuelled 2024’s numbers

With the industry growing in healthy double digits, Leo’s Indian operations expanded at almost twice that pace, Rao claimed. He pinpointed three engines:

Why the global push matters

Indian agencies have rarely been tapped to lead creative thinking for overseas markets, but Rao believes that should change: “Indian creative and strategic talent is some of the best in the world. Leo is at the vanguard of proving that, and I want the entire market to become a fertile ground for global work cracked out of here.”

Culture, not just capability

Rao argued that talent expectations, employment structures and agency hierarchies are shifting just as fast as technology. Leo’s task, therefore, is as cultural as it is commercial: create an environment where diverse specialists—strategists, technologists, commerce planners, and experiential designers—can “flourish” under a single creative idea.

Leadership changes over the past year, he added, have “dramatically accelerated both the pace of growth and the quality of work.”

Looking to 2025, Rao’s biggest challenge is consistency. “If you stop moving, you’re actually sliding backwards,” he said. The plan is to keep the agency in permanent build-mode, extend its overseas footprint and deepen partnerships at home—so that next year’s trophies remain, as ever, mere by-products of a system built to improve itself every day.

“Growth comes from partnering, not protecting turf”

For decades, advertising networks carved their authority out of fenced-off expertise: media in one silo, Creative in another, public relations in another, and digital in a third. Rao argued that the playbook is now reversed. “This is a collaborative economy. Growth is coming from collaboration, not from territorialism. The world of ‘I’ll do everything’ is gone,” he told BestMediaInfo.com

Rao points to the broader corporate landscape to make his case. “Forget advertising—look at Microsoft,” he said. “It transformed from a company that tried to do everything inside Windows to one that now collaborates with OpenAI, Intel, NVIDIA. Their growth is coming through collaborations.”

The same dynamic, he added, defines modern start-ups and unicorns in India and abroad: “Their stories are stories of collaboration.”

Why advertising must give up its moat mentality

Historically, creative agencies have guarded their domains. Rao called that stance obsolete.

“Creative companies have always said, ‘This is my area; I don’t want anyone else involved.’ That’s an old way of thinking.”

The future, he contended, lies in stitching together outside capabilities—technology vendors, shopper-marketing specialists, experiential partners, PR outfits—so the client receives “a solution that is much closer to reality.”

Building a culture and a commercial model for partnership

Leo’s internal systems have been rebuilt around that philosophy. “We’re a collaborative agency. We work with technologists, PR people, shopper experts, experiential designers, and commerce teams—lots of different capabilities. We cannot sit and build everything in-house,” Rao said.

The agency’s job now includes finding the right culture fit and structuring commercial arrangements that let external and internal talent share the same brief without friction.

Investing in “creative thinkers,” not just writers and art directors

One visible outcome is the hiring pattern of the past 18 months. “We have onboarded creative technologists and creators,” Rao shared. But the definition of creativity has widened far beyond ad-school resumes:

• Engineers and coders
  
  
• Lawyers who understand the narrative power of regulation
  
  
• Even dentists, whom Rao labels “pure creative minds”

“Creativity is not the prerogative of a writer,” he stressed. “Ten years ago, you had to write well or visualise well to be considered creative because that was the only way to express ideas. Now technology lifts that burden, which means anyone with imagination can contribute.”

Rao positions this infusion of diverse talent alongside the agency’s parallel investment in deeper strategy. “The other big area of investment has been in creative technologists—part of our broader push to expand creative thinkers,” he said. Together, strategic rigour and tech-enabled expression form the bedrock of the collaborations Leo pursues with outside partners.

“It’s time to separate creativity from craft,” emphasised Rao

In an industry where words like "craft" and "storytelling" are often held up as sacred, Rao is unafraid to challenge the very foundation of modern advertising thinking.

“The belief that advertising is a craft has to be deeply questioned,” Rao said bluntly. “That world is gone.”

It’s a provocative stance, especially coming from the leader of one of India’s most awarded creative agencies. But Rao’s argument isn’t about diminishing the role of artistry; it’s about unbundling it from the evolving definition of creativity in the age of scale, speed, and systems.

Historically, advertising creativity was synonymous with individuals who could write beautifully or visualise with flair. That model, Rao argued, is outdated.

“Craft was the prerogative of a few personalities—great writers, brilliant visualisers. But today, it’s about imagination, not execution,” he explained. “Creative thinking now exists independent of craft. And we need to separate the two.”

Rao envisions the agency of the future not as a collective of star talent but as a system designed to generate ideas from anyone, anywhere.

“I think the agency of the future is not driven by a personality or an individual or a group of individuals who are great at craft. It is driven by creative thinkers who can create cultures of creative thinking and not cultures of creative craft,” he highlighted.

How Leo is cracking the Gen Z code

In a time when agencies lament the revolving-door nature of young talent, Leo is quietly flipping the script. At the heart of it is a cultural reset—one that reframes the entire conversation about what it means to “retain” the next generation of creative minds.

“Retention is not the goal. It’s the outcome,” said Rao. “The real question is—how do you create an environment where talent can flourish?”

It’s a deceptively simple idea that Rao believes will define the agency model of the future. For him, the conversation is no longer about giving talent jobs but about creating systems that allow them to think, build, lead, and—most importantly—belong.

Rao is quick to dismantle the familiar industry gripe that Gen Z lacks loyalty.

“They’re incredibly loyal—but not to companies. They’re loyal to belief systems, to purpose, to identity,” he said. “They don’t care about hierarchy; they don’t blindly respect experience or even knowledge. They respect talent.”

He told BestMediaInfo.com that once, Leo invited a cross-section of its Gen Z employees to present to the agency’s leadership team on how they define themselves. The result, Rao said, was eye-opening.

“We were asking the wrong question: ‘How do I hold a Gen Z’s attention?’ What we should be asking is: ‘How do I earn it?’”

That one shift, he said, changed everything.

For agencies grappling with attrition, disengagement, and a disconnect with the young workforce, Leo’s playbook under Rao offers an alternative: stop chasing loyalty; earn belief. Create space. Remove ego. Rethink what leadership looks like.

“Talent respects talent. That’s the culture we’ve built. And that’s why they stay.”

“Not Just a flash in the pan,” Rao on the pursuit of consistent greatness at Leo

When asked about what keeps Rao up at night, the answer has nothing to do with awards or client pitches. It’s something far more enduring—and far more difficult.

“I’m obsessed with the idea of consistency,” Rao said. “In 30–35 years of ATP tennis rankings, there have been maybe 25 world No. 1s. Only three of them stayed at the top for more than two years. Staying good consistently—that’s the real challenge.”

It’s a rare mindset in an industry often driven by momentary wins and campaign highs. Rao’s north star isn’t just producing great work; it’s building a system where “greatness is repeatable,” regardless of who’s in the room.

“I ask myself, how do I create a culture and a system where success isn’t episodic but systemic? When five people leave, the work is still world-class. Where the agency itself is the star.”

For Rao, the legacy of a creative agency isn’t built on momentary brilliance. It’s built on the systems, cultures, and mindsets that make brilliance inevitable—again and again and again.