Lintas Media Group has been a hubbub of activity in recent times. The latest move has seen the elevation of Lynn De Souza as the chairman & chief executive officer. Nirmal John & Arcopol Chaudhuri met up with De Souza on Wednesday to get the hang of her plans for Lintas and her take on the advertising industry. Excerpts:

You have been engaged in a lot of restructuring of late. How has it been panning out?

Very nicely, what we did is we organised our team around clients. There were teams working for clients in any case, but we gave them focus. For example, the Sony account was a Rs 25 crore account; it has now become a Rs 125 crore account. You have to give them dedicated services. So we have set up accordingly.

There has also been a lot of expansion on the ITC front and we have set up a separate office in Kolkata just for them. Then there have been collaborations.

The first of these was our association with Pinstorm for which we have already started executing campaigns. Then there are our tools and technology collaborations such as the one with Lodestar. We have also started with our media management system, which is being developed for us by Interpublic China.

It is a fully online system that is being rolled out in July, so it’s really full steam ahead for us. I think the buyout by IPG has really impacted us a great deal. I never expected so much of resurgence in our system. They have put in about $2 million worth of investment into our software, hardware and our bandwidth.

What was the thinking behind the rejig in the structure of Lintas’ media offering in January?

We wanted to support and focus on the vision of this one brand. The most important vision of this brand is collaboration. What we believe is that the days of growing at the expense of others is over. I will beat you down and growth is over. But growth from making others grow is what it is all about. If our clients do well, we do well. Every one of our clients, touchwood, is doing well. If a media partner like DNA grows, it’s good for us.

How is the pay-for-performance model, which you have developed with Pinstorm for digital advertising, coming along?

We have already executed three campaigns. I didn’t expect great response because there is still a lot of evangelisation to be done on the model. Brands have been used to what is called banner-buying. Here, we are providing end-to-end solutions. So there have been one or two clients whom we had to educate. We have done three campaigns so far and signed deals for a year.

I never thought that we will spend crores for these brands in digital. And the money is coming from television and print budgets.

There is so much traction, I would say it’s the tipping point for digital advertising.

So the money going into digital advertising is coming out of existing budgets for TV?

And print. Internationally a lot of newspaper readership is moving online. About 28-30% of the readership of New York Times is online. The learning from that is that the habit is changing for a certain section of the society. TV is used to build up image. Digital is very wordy and the kind of medium where you can give a lot of information. That is what print is being used for. I have seen two cases where large budgets have moved from print into digital.

A slew of TV channels have been launched in the general entertainment space. How has it affected established players?

The top two seem to be holding their own in spite of IPL and all. They also seem to be responding with huge investments.

The return on investments may not be that great, but they are managing to hold up the ratings. The new channels are not making a dent. In news, it is different. New players came in and blew everybody up. In GEC, that dent factor is missing.

Mudra recently announced that it was going back to the full-service agency model. Is something like that the way of the future?

We are not looking at a fullservice model. The days of a fullservice agency are gone. The world has gone too far ahead in terms of expertise. You have people in digital who are experts and nobody else can do that.Media planning has become so complicated that even I can’t do a media plan. The only way forward is a collaboration of these experts.

You must bring these skills together, but not in the traditional manner of a full-service agency. If they are collaborating different specialist services to offer full services, it is great. Maybe they are doing that. But if they are trying to become one agency offering full service, that is not the way to go.

Source : DNA