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IPG reported $2.50 billion as revenue for first quarter of 2024 compared to $2.52 billion in the first quarter of 2023.The organic increase of net revenue was 1.3 percent  from the first quarter of 2023. The net income reported was $110.4 million.


Philippe Krakowsky, CEO of IPG said, “The first quarter results we are reporting today represent a solid start to the year, and are consistent with our 2024 targets. Our data and tech driven media offerings, healthcare marketing, and PR capabilities continued to perform strongly, driving our growth. Marketer sentiment has begun to improve relative to the back half of last year, and the new business pipeline is more active.

“We continue to enhance our offerings, further embedding precision and performance into our integrated, full-funnel media solutions, including our suite of Unified Retail Media services, which deliver cross-platform planning and optimization for a range of clients. We are also progressing in the integration of technologies such as Generative AI into the core of our marketing services capabilities, notably through our recently-announced partnership with Adobe, which speeds content ideation, creation, production and activation. By deploying proprietary best-in-class Acxiom data and identity products into our enterprise-wide marketing engine, we can create a more accurate picture of consumers and deeper connections with brands, all in the service of helping marketers drive growth and achieve business outcomes.

“At this point, with our smallest seasonal quarter complete, we continue to expect to achieve full-year organic growth of 1-2%, although a recent decision by a significant ongoing client will adversely impact the balance of this year and likely make achieving the top end of that target more challenging. With growth in that range, we continue to expect to deliver adjusted EBITA margin of 16.6% for the full year. The strength of our balance sheet positions us well to deliver on our long-standing commitment to capital returns and also augment our offerings and asset mix with M&A, with a particular focus on further broadening our commerce and digital transformation capabilities.”

IPG reports $2.50 billion as revenue for first quarter of 2024

BMW India has put its creative and media account up for review. Industry sources aware of the development tell Storyboard18 that the pitch is underway in Delhi. The account size is pegged in the vicinity of Rs 150 crore. 

IPG-owned Lodestar UM is the incumbent. The agency handles the brand’s media investment and strategic planning in print, television, online, out-of-home (OOH) and radio. Lodestar UM has been handling the account since 2017. 

In 2021, after a rigorous multi-agency pitch, IPG’s Team Dynamic was announced as BMW India’s integrated communications partner. Team Dynamic is a bespoke IPG solution created for BMW India, with regional resources drawn from across IPG. The unit has been working on the brand's creative, digital services, and studio production work.

Earlier in 2022, the German luxury carmaker sold out the allocated batches of SUV iX and an all-electric MINI for the year in India. The company’s midsize electric sedan i4 was launched in May. 

According to media reports, globally, BMW is set to introduce 25 electric vehicles by 2023. Nearly half of them – the full electric ones – could be launched in India. BMW India's ad spends were around Rs 139 crore in FY21 compared to Rs 171 crore in the previous fiscal. 

Experts say that the Indian automobile industry has been grappling with a slowdown since 2019. A combination of factors including the BS6 emission norms, global shortage of semiconductors, the pandemic, and the tense socio-economic environment across the globe, has slowed down the auto sector. However, there are positive signs as big players in industry, especially in India, are driving towards recovery.

As per market and consumer data experts Statista in 2020, the Indian automotive industry spent 39 percent of its advertising budgets on print media, followed by television ads at 29 percent of the total expenditure. Interestingly, the spending on digital advertising increased from 12 percent in 2018 to 25 percent in 2020, while cinema ad spends decreased from 11 percent in 2018 to just one percent in 2020 when the pandemic hit. 





Pitch, Please: BMW India puts its media and creative account up for review

In 1954, when Mumbai was called Bombay, Adi Patel, Bal Mundkar, Rudi Von Leyden, Bobby Sista and Khurshid Dhondy formed a club to bring together agencies and advertisers. They took inspiration from their counterparts in Calcutta, which was the hub of advertising agencies back then. The Advertising Club of Calcutta came into existence in 1953 to bring together like-minded creative professionals. A year later The Advertising Club Of Bombay was set up in the same mold. Veterans like Patel, Mundkar, Leyden, Sista and Dhondy, gathered once a month to host gatherings and discussions on industry matters. As Bombay started flourishing with top agencies and brands setting up their main offices here, The Advertising Club Of Bombay grew in importance.

Over the years, The Advertising Club Of Bombay has worked towards bringing together several stakeholders of the industries such as marketers, creative shops, media agencies, publishers, and now even a few digital shops. To be a pan India industry board, in 2012 the club dropped Bombay from its name. However, a founder of an independent creative shop tells us that it is still a body for Mumbai-based agencies.

The Delhi-based advertising executive says, “The Advertising Club hasn’t managed to be inclusive in terms of involving the youth, agencies from other cities and smaller companies. You see the same set of people running the show and the same set of agencies participating in the club’s activities.”

The full picture

With 1600 members, The Advertising Club represents the Indian advertising industry and in addition to key activities like hosting the country’s top ad awards like the Abbys, Emvies, and Effies. These events are led by veterans and often younger CXOs get involved only during award seasons, say agency executives.

Shashi Sinha, CEO, Mediabrands India, who is also the current secretary of The Advertising Club, has been a part of several industry bodies. The veteran adman and industry leader agrees the club needs more young players. However, he candidly shares his views on younger leaders when he says that “the young agency CXOs are focused on their work and life. They don’t want to take extra work.”

Sinha says that members like him who are also running companies voluntarily put in a lot of effort to run the club. “A lot happens behind the scenes. What I have noticed about the young people is that they don’t want to commit to something that they can’t give their 100 percent,” he reasons. 

Ajay Kakar, chief marketing officer, Aditya Birla Capital and a managing committee member of The Advertising Club has similar views. Kakar, who was once an adman and now leads the marketing function of a leading Indian financial services company, is of the opinion that the club is an open platform. “Anyone can reach out to us, share ideas, collaborate and bring in new energy. There is nothing stopping anyone to take these steps,” he says.

Laeeq Ali, president of The Advertising Club Bangalore, is actively looking to involve and participate in meaningful conversations with the young agency professionals too. “The work that is coming out of new agencies is a reflection of the new generation. They are seeking purpose in their personal and professional lives. Their clarity of thoughts is impressive,” he tells Storyboard18.

“However, if you want to give back to the industry you need to take that extra effort, complain a little less, and join hands with us,” says Ali. 

Currently, The Advertising Club Bangalore has over 500 active members. The numbers dropped post-Covid, indicates Ali. The club is planning to bring back its quiz show, football league and a few other upskilling workshops for the interest of adlanders in the South. The Advertising Club Bangalore gets engagement from agencies and marketers during Big Bang Awards, its annual award show.

So what’s stopping the new blood?

Younger executives at agencies told us no invitations have been extended to them to be a part of organising committees or in even creating collaborative projects, in the recent past at least.

Harshil Karia, founder of independent agency Schbang, says, “With younger agencies missing out from the organizing committees the bodies will not understand the pulse of the talent that are currently entering the industry.”

He also observes that the youth have the ability to drive execution flair at the grassroots levels with social initiatives, making the industry attractive as a whole to graduates from different pockets of the country. That’s an area that’s not explored by advertising clubs in India. 

Karia hopes advertising clubs start roping in creative tech communities too, as advertising is no longer a business run by only creative and media agencies.

These executives running newer agencies tell Storyboard18 that industry bodies can help startup businesses in various ways. Gautam Reghunath, co-founder of Talented, which is one of the newest agencies in the country, says it’s the right time for ad clubs to be truly inclusive.

“There are several issues and areas of improvement that young agencies need to take care of for their workforce. Industry bodies can be instrumental in making the right work cultural changes,” he opines.

He believes what will also help if industry clubs and bodies drive real change in areas that matter to the workforce today.

For instance, the new generation of ad women and men are facing burnout, pay disparity, toxic work cultures, etc. Bringing their concerns to the fore and discussing these areas and giving equal representation to all sorts of businesses related to the industry will be the first right steps that ad clubs can take, says Reghunath. 

Pooja Jauhari, group CEO, VMLY&R India, says everyone should be learning from each other. Collectively, it’s time for bringing in “perspective, representation, varied experiences,” to the table, she says. 

“I'm pretty sure there would be leaders of all agencies interested in helping our industry bodies take initiatives to help our industry do better. Be better and be more attractive. That’s something we all need to work on – actively,” she adds.

Finding a way to be truly relevant to the next generation of advertising and marketing professionals is what’s immediately required of the legacy ad clubs and bodies, and the people who run them. At the same time, the younger industry leaders need to look at the bigger picture, roll up their sleeves and volunteer to be the change they want to see in the system. Because, as one agency head put it, there’s no bouncer at the club door.

Why are next-gen ad executives not a part of Indian advertising clubs?

Chat with IPG's Arun Kumar and Plum's Shankar Prasad and actor Ananya Pandey

Arun Kumar who serves as IPG’s Chief Data and Technology Officer makes a plea to all marketers to stand up and talk about the value of marketing otherwise people are "going to dub you ‘the next tobacco’." He elaborates, in a world where data privacy is a concern, marketing is getting a bad name. According to Kumar advertising is seen as manipulation rather than a free speech of a brand. He says a part of the fault is a lot of marketers don’t talk about what they do and why advertising is valuable.
 
Kumar's role at ad holding company IPG was created back in 2017. He oversees the development and implementation of global product and technology solutions across the network. Kumar's mandate also covers Kinesso and Matterkind, which bring together top talent in data, technology and addressable activation to deliver data-driven marketing solutions for IPG clients. 

During a recent visit to India, Kumar spoke exclusively to Storyboard18 and shared his views on the influence of big tech, data privacy and regulation, and how global marketers view India. He believes this is the right time for India as a market because many global advertisers are starting to see it in the same context as they viewed China a few years ago. “I think there is an increased realization that you have to approach India on India’s terms. I feel this is the time when a lot of solutions can scale because there is a demand for those solutions.” 

Edited excerpts. 

What are the kind of solutions that a market like India needs?

In India you don’t have a proper reference graph. Whereas in other markets there is a common understanding of the consumers, there is a reference graph that connects the offline data set to online. You don’t have that in this country. Therefore, what I would call establishing identity of people and connecting the offline to the online world is absent. In a market like India where retail lives both in the physical world and in the ecommerce world, tying those two together is going to be important. Managing identities is also going to be crucial for keeping reach, because India is a market that is heavily dependent on third-party cookies. And when that is going to go away, it is going to be replaced by identifiers that are far less effective in helping marketing and therefore driving growth for a lot of the ecommerce industry.

What are the new age identity solutions where third party cookies are phasing out? How disruptive is it?

It is going to be very disruptive and what you are going to find is that there is going to be a greater concentration of power in the hands of the ‘walled gardens’. They are going to have the information about the consumers and it is not going to leave those walls. And it is essentially students marking their own homework or marking their own exams. There is going to be no one who is going to tell you whether  what they are claiming is right or not. They are going to get granular data whereas you are going to get aggregate data. 

What is happening around the world, and I think it is going to start to happen in India as well, is that every single brand or marketer, whatever category they are in, are focused on building their own first party data sets and having their own private graphs. This means that if the platforms are going to undermine your relationship with the consumer then it is incumbent on you as a brand to make sure that every time they do come in contact with you, whether it is a store, site or a call center, whether they complain or they buy or return the product, you get all these streams of information. 

What's the challenge then? 

The problem is that these streams are never unified. A very simple use case is that I can be registered in two different databases with the same organization under three different names, four different addresses. And there might be no recognition that me and my wife belong to the same household. You may not know the relationship. All of those need to start getting tied up. Because if you don’t tie them up, the ‘walled gardens’ are going to tie them up. So how are you going to say that your campaign hit the reach and frequency goals? Reach and frequency is most fundamental to media. If you can’t go across platforms or across devices to measure reach, then how are you correlating that to marketing effectiveness? 

So how can you correlate?

The only way you can do that is if you have a direct relationship with consumers and if you can map their behaviors and also a lot of the new regulatory laws coming through are saying get the consent from consumers. Which means you need to have a direct value exchange with them. They will give you information in exchange for something. And that exchange needs to be valuable otherwise why the hell would I give it. I think there are going to be categories or products for which this is not going to be important. For example if you are selling salt, you don’t need to know who people are. But if you are selling luxury vehicles you need to know. So the idea is to build private graphs and then connect them across main graphs to the rest of the ecosystem. So do I know everything about the consumer? That is my private graph, but how to find her in the wider ecosystem across all media sets of contact points that’s the cross to main graphs. And then you need to connect those two. And like I said for the private graphs and for cross to main, you need reference graphs otherwise you can’t normalize the data set. Those are some of the things that India needs right now.

In your view, what kind of understanding do marketers have, especially in a market like India, about this entire shift?

From what I have seen, I wouldn’t say that there is a lot of awareness. There is still a lot of focus on price. The problem with price is that price doesn’t necessarily translate to value. So a lot of the benchmarks that you have today are going to go away in two years. You are not going to be able to compare apples to apples. If there is going to be disruption anyway you are going to start to change the way in which you view the environment. Many marketers are not aware, some are asleep at the wheel others are hoping that there will be some kind of a solution to preserve the status quo. But I won’t blame them because even at a global level, we typically find that there is slowly a recognition that there is going to be transformation. Some organizations are faster than the others. But the awareness is pretty low.

Data privacy has become a hotly debated topic and a complex one. What could be a simple solution that will probably be win-win for both consumers and brands?

There needs to be a common set of standards. The best industry I would look at is the telecom industry. When you pick up your cellphone and you say I am going to make a phone call, you don’t worry about whether the recipient has the same phone brand, has the same network or has the same carrier. It is because there is a common set of standards. There is 4G and everyone is adhering to it and it doesn’t matter what carrier you have. You were to transform the digital ecosystem to telecom, what it means is you have to take out your phone and if your phone and other person’s phone is different, then it won’t connect because there is no standard. 

First thing is to set up standards and the standards cannot be set by Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. They need to be set up by a wide body of experts who are technically proficient and who are not pushed by any vested interest. There can’t be different versions of privacy. You can’t have Apple saying allow this information and someone else saying the opposite. 

Advertising increasingly in many markets is almost in the position where tobacco was many years ago. And it always astounds me when people look at advertising and marketing in the same light. There is this belief and even in regulatory circles in western countries where influence as a word is used conjointly with manipulation. So advertising is seen as manipulation rather than a free speech of a brand which says you need to buy me as opposed to somebody else. 



<blockquote>“There is this belief where influence as a word is used conjointly with manipulation. So advertising is seen as manipulation rather than a free speech of a brand which says you need to buy me as opposed to somebody else. Part of the fault is a lot of marketers don’t talk about what they do and why it is valuable.”</blockquote>



How did it get to that point? 

Part of the fault is a lot of marketers don’t talk about what they do and why it is valuable. But any law that comes up, first of all there needs to be a national law, there shouldn’t be state wise laws. There need to be some standards that balance both the interests. For example, define what are sensitive data types that are off the table. What are data sets that people can use and how can they use it? Some principles should be legitimized. Because businesses need to know certain pieces of information in order to service consumers. You can’t make it all conditional basis consent. Because how many times is the consumer going to give consent and to how many people? Any law should be cognizant of something that most people forget - marketing is a key factor that funds democracy. 

Let's unpack that a bit.

Sp, if you unpack that, think about the free press. Subscription revenues do not drive the free press. If you want multiplicity of opinions, the multiplicity of opinions needs to be funded. It is funded by advertising. So if you remove the ability to do precision targeting or for us to understand the value of online news sites, a number of these online sites are going to die. They are not going to get the funding. Therefore, many opinions in the niche are going to die out. That is going to fundamentally impact democracy. 

Back to the second point. All these regulations mean that the companies have to spend a lot of money on compliance. There are almost billions of dollars that are being spent in the US around the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018) for them to be actually compliant. Who do you think is paying the price for it? Do you think companies are not passing the price pack to the consumers? Suppose if I told you, in this inflationary time, that your grocery bill has just gone up by 5% because of the privilege of not having your cookie shared elsewhere. Isn’t that a choice that you should make? Whether you are willing to pay 5% more or whether I am OK with the data being shared? So there is a lot of lack of transparency from people who are demanding transparency. 

The privacy activists don’t speak about the economic cost, the jobs that will be lost. The fact that marketing drives a lot of opinions that exist in a democracy. This idea that it is all manipulation and influence - again, you have to specify use cases. And by the way, it all started with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and blew up with politics. Has political advertising escaped in the western world? No. Has the ability of hackers to get your data gone down? No. Has government surveillance gone down? No. 

None of the laws that have been constructed are actually focused on the problems that started the conversation. And instead cost consumers and are painting marketing as a bad act. And a part of the problem is that our marketers are not standing up and being heard. We are there in many regulatory bodies around the world. We have actually testified in front of the Senate in the US. We were the only people to do that from any holding company. We didn’t find any advertisers around us. My plea to marketers is if you don’t stand up and talk about the value of marketing, people are going to dub you the next tobacco.

There is too much power in the hands of Big Tech and even today for digital solutions the entire industry is dependent on a handful of big tech companies. Do you see that changing?

There is a concerted effort with all the regulatory changes in Europe and the US. They are also asking questions like should we break them up, should we change the business models, etc. I think some of it will come to play. However, I would again go back to- are you creating policies that would allow startups to grow? The reason why you would have those big tech players to grow in the first place is because there was freedom for them to grow. Those big tech players have now made it impossible for startups and VC companies to operate in that space.

Or will they simply acquire it?

Yes, in the VC world if you are operating in certain areas and it is very close to let’s say something like Amazon operates, it is called ‘Death Zone’. Because you are either going to be acquired or not be successful. That is what law makers need to focus on. Are you creating an equitable market? A lot of this happens because they are allowed to mark their own report cards. ‘I am a platform and I also sell my own products’. 'I am supply side, buy side, I am analytics and I also do attribution.' And a lot of these acquisitions were allowed. You have to undo some of them and you have to be very careful about the principles of the digital market. For example, in a non-digital market you have ‘antitrust’. The same principle is not applied in the digital world. The regulators block so many of the M&A opportunities in the physical world which they are very reluctant to do in the digital space. And now they complain that these companies have become too big.

You seem to have a strong opinion against the regulators?

My issue with the regulators is that they are engaging with very few sets of people which are largely privacy activists. There are a lot of privacy activists lobbying on one side and big tech on the other. And I don’t think this is truly representative of the entire ecosystem. There are no marketers or third party service providers who actually have an opinion on this. And in some cases they don’t even know that these conversations are on.

Advertising is in the position where tobacco was: IPG's Arun Kumar 

Home-grown conglomerate ITC has assigned its media and digital planning and buying duties to IPG Mediabrands. An agency executive has confirmed the development to Storyboard18.

A multi-agency pitch was called earlier this year. As part of the pitch, agencies had to present media handling and media buying strategies for television, print, outdoor, and digital. The Rs 600 crore-plus business has moved from GroupM’s Wavemaker. Wavemarker had been handling ITC’s media account since 2017. Madison, OMD, Publicis India are the other agencies that pitched for the account.

The Kolkata-based company owns multiple brands across its packaged foods, personal care, stationery, lifestyle retailing and safety matches and incense sticks categories. Brands like Aashirvaad, Bingo, Sunfeast, Engage, Fiama Di Wills, Vivel, Candyman, Yippee noodles, among others, are in ITC’s kitty.

The company is betting big on digital advertising innovation. Earlier this year, ITC’s Fabelle made its debut in the metaverse by being a part of two weddings hosted on the Yug Metaverse and the TardiVerse (metaverse wedding partner - CoinSwitch Kuber) platforms.


ITC reported an 11.8 percent year-on-year (YoY) jump in net profit at Rs 4,191 crore for the fourth quarter ended March 31 due to strong growth across all operating segments. Consolidated revenue rose 15.3 percent on year to Rs 17,754 crore. Revenue from the cigarette business grew 9.96 percent while non-cigarette FMCG revenue was up 12.32 percent.

The company is also investing in the direct-to-consumer (D2C) segment to diversify its portfolios. In 2021, ITC picked a 16 percent stake in online-first mother and baby care Mother Sparsh brand for Rs 20 crore. In May this year, ITC acquired a 10.07 percent stake in Blupin Technologies Pvt. Ltd, the company behind D2C brand Mylo, for up to Rs 39.34 crore.

According to reports, by bringing on board these brands, the company plans to fill the gap between more mass market brands - that Indian packaged goods firms have spent years building - and premium goods.