Adcom Affiliates - Finally!

MARYLOU ANDREW: For years you have been resistant to the idea of an affiliation.

IMRAN SYED: Adcom was established in 1965 by my father, S. M. Akhlaq and although we did cutting edge work, we were a small agency and my father was happy with that; so much so that he never pitched for any business. He worked with a few brands but did good work – Binaca, Sanaullah, Honda, etc. Even in those days agencies would get network clients through affiliations, but we had to struggle and work hard to win and retain business and this helped develop a go-getter attitude and work was always centre focus. That was the context in which I joined Adcom in 1997. At that time I felt that not being internationally affiliated was perhaps one of our biggest weaknesses but I soon realised that being independent was better. I focused on this as a differentiation and on the fact that we understood the Pakistani consumer better than anyone else, and turned this into an aggressive growth stance. We won businesses from international agencies as well as internationally linked network businesses. We just put our heads down and said that we are going to focus on doing best in class work. We kept on winning awards and we grew. When I joined in 1997 there were 22 people, today we are 220 plus people strong.

MLA: What changed?

IS: About two years ago after I attended a Harvard Business School course on Leading Change and Organisational Renewal, I held a series of meetings spread over a year with about 15 of our senior managers, and started a process of introspection. Because we had focused so much on work in the past, we had not spent time on ourselves and our culture. We tried to chart out a plan for the future and two key opportunities were identified. Firstly, from an organisational perspective, our people are our biggest asset and we felt that in addition to doing best in class work, we need to become a best in class organisation in order to attract and retain talent. For the first time we defined our motto which is ‘winning hearts with a heroic spirit’. We didn’t have a people manager so we hired a People and Culture Manager in 2012. We also realised that if there was a channel whereby we could train better and gain an understanding of best practices, this would help us raise the bar in terms of talent and work. One of the channels that we felt could help was an international affiliation. Secondly, we were increasingly talking to a digitally connected consumer. We had to think integrated and we started infusing this thinking in all our teams across Pakistan and today we have 40 digital specialists on board. Even from this perspective, we felt that an international partner could help us by sharing experiences of integrated thinking. These were the two reasons we felt that an affiliation would help.

MLA: Why Leo Burnett?

IS: We had an opportunity to engage with Leo Burnett out of Norway for Djuice in 2006. Then in 2009, Jarek Ziebinski, Chairman and CEO of Leo Burnett Asia Pacific visited Pakistan and he met us. He saw some of our work and he said that our way of thinking was similar to Leo Burnett’s ‘Humankind’ approach to marketing, which is based around putting a brand’s purpose of communication at the centre to drive transformed human behaviour. Subsequently, Leo Burnett selected us for the Samsung business in Pakistan. Because of all this we found that our chemistries were similar; similar thinking, goals and aspirations. We were one of the biggest independent agencies and known for our work, so if we were to partner with anyone it had to do justice to our position in the market and be able to add value; we didn’t want a relationship that would just add badge value. Leo Burnett is one of the biggest networks globally, it is known for its creativity. For the past six years Leo Burnett has been ranked as the number one agency in new world thinking by the Gunn Report and has been named an Agency to Watch on Advertising Age’s 2015 A-List. We were already engaging in certain dimensions so we began talking about a deeper, more meaningful formal relationship, which resulted in this affiliation.

MLA: Does this mean that Manhattan’s affiliation with Leo Burnett is now at an end?

IS: Our understanding is very clear that we are the only affiliate of Leo Burnett in the Pakistan market.

MLA: What is the practical benefit of this affiliation for Adcom?

IS: People growth in terms of knowledge sharing and training; capability growth in the integrated space; and business growth from a network client perspective.

MLA: In this digitally connected age where everything is available on the internet, are affiliations needed to train people?

IS: A lot of material is available on the internet and we have accessed this aggressively; however, culture, way of thinking, expertise and excellence are not really things you can download. They need to be nurtured and cultivated. It is not that if we have a pile of information we will become a different company. This is an evolution that happens through relationships that have a common purpose.

MLA: Which network businesses do you hope to bring on-board?

IS: Any client which is part of the international network and who operates in Pakistan will find value in our services and benefit from our enhanced understanding of their brand and business through global understanding and inputs.

MLA: You will be changing the location of your Karachi office; how does this fit in with the affiliation?

IS: We want to become best in class as an organisation and continue to be best in class in terms of work. From the organisational perspective, we want to create a culture that has the finger on the pulse of the market and which provides an enjoyable and exciting environment to work in, without losing focus on work excellence. The office is very important. The concept is like a living space where formal workspaces are strongly intertwined with casual spaces to interact. A great deal of focus has been put on providing spaces for casual meetings and encounters because we find that some of the best ideation emerges from such environments. We have designed the office space ourselves. Our team has been part of the process; they have given their input and their wishlists.

MLA: What are the benefits of affiliation for Pakistani agencies in this day and age?

IS: Affiliations have been around for decades and we have been competing in our independent capacity and winning and retaining businesses against these affiliated agencies. We have been attracting talent from those agencies and we have been recognised for our intellectual rigour. However, to take a quantum leap forward as an industry, these affiliations need to be tapped more aggressively from both a talent skill building and organisational perspective and this is what we aim to do.

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