Vikas Mehta, CEO, Ogilvy Africa, spoke with Waithera Kabiru about adopting a healthy disrespect for a company’s best practices and embracing failure as part of the path to success.
Here are four lessons learned from the latest episode of the iMarket Podcast.
The Importance of having In-House Department: Creative Agency
Ogilvy partnered with the East African Breweries Limited (EABL) to form an in-house Creative Agency, DigiTribe. This was necessary because EABL had a lot of brands that were being actively marketed to consumers. There were also multiple agencies handling those brands which made connecting with consumers difficult. There was need for change. Vikas shared that when a subject becomes mission critical, there’s a tendency to in-house it. So, in EABLs case, the solution to handling many brands and agencies, was to create an in-house creative agency. The DigiTribe model hits the sweet spot of something that’s “in the house” but not “in the house”. It provides access to talent capabilities and competencies where needed, while allowing for subject matter experts to sit in their respective companies.
What It Takes for Agencies to Become Partners and Not Just Vendors to Clients
The mutual support and confidence that agencies and clients have in each other allow a trust to form and that trust and mutual dependence becomes high. Agencies and clients become closer, and the closer you are to your clients, the more likely they are to treat you as real partners. When it comes to clients there’s a lot more focus on outcomes, rather than outputs or inputs, which impacts commercial models.
Best Practices Are Not the Best
When marketing companies rely on best practices, they are looking at an old playbook of things that succeeded at that point in time. Start having a healthy disrespect for best practices because the flaw with every best practice is that the evidence comes from the past and most best practices are an example of disruption when they are done for the first time; it’s the mass adoption of disruption that makes them best practice. Don’t let following best practices be the hinderance to your innovation.
Don’t Be Afraid to Fail
Culturally, we’ve put a very high price tag on failure. Leadership should create a culture of frequent failure so that people are encouraged to try things which are a little beyond the book and give them the permission to fail. If you look at some of the most innovative companies in the world, the failure rate of abandoned pilots is high. Think about stealing from the playbook of Silicon Valley; it’s full of startups and failure is hardwired into startups, but those startups become Fortune 500 companies, because they learn from the failure, pivot, and recalibrate the experience into an opportunity.
Don’t miss out on new episodes of the iMarket Podcast hosted by The Digital Diva, Waithera Kabiru. Tune in live on 98.4 Capital FM at 22:00 on Monday’s!
