 and creative zone. My guest today is a creative powerhouse whose designation interestingly says Chief Business Officer. We are pleased to have with us today Sudeesh Balan, the Chief Business Officer of Tonic Worldwide. Hi Sudeesh, how have you been holding up? Thank you Mr. Gaut. Great to be here. Yeah it's been tough as we all know. It's tough for all of us but yeah it's good. So far so good is what I would like to say that. So tell us how has life changed, how is working changed for an agency like yours most long now? Right so you know we all agree that we are going through tough times and it's unfortunate but as I like to put it never waste a good crisis and that's the mode that we have been in. As a digital agency we are in a position to make the best out of it. So if I throw some numbers so there's been a 4x growth in searches for a better internet plan. Now time spent by Indians on smartphones have increased 24% it's it's approximately around 4.3 hours you know. So all that says or shows that you know everyone's got on to digital because of course you know you're locked up lockdown you don't have much other options right. So things may change things may change in the future case in point China where after the lockdown the time spent has reduced once the lockdown was lifted off but for now everyone is going to digital need for work from home entertainment shopping education and what not much more you know. So it's a it's a most optimal medium for brands to connect with their consumers in the current scenario. As a digital agency the expectations from us is to be more agile and on a feed to turn things around in this volatile environment. Lockdown has brought the teams together broadened collaborations. It's kind of fanciful and you know they transform their business digitally you know taking digital marketing ahead by couple of years you know in the marketers black book. The silver lining I would say the nature of our business has always prepared us for the scenario. Digital agencies are in a better position than ever before to perform maybe you know now we don't need large offices. Our teams always had the option to work remotely for a few days in a year but the lockdown has validated that remote working actually works and it can be optimized as well. We could offer always on options to teams which choose to work remotely and talent no longer needs to be bound by office locations. Right. But to be honest there's been a flip side to this too. Boundaries on work-life balance are further blurring out. So we have to balance our time better so that it doesn't spill on to our personal time. Working from home gives us ease but we need to learn to switch off from work so that we can switch on and crack maybe the next award-winning campaign. Yeah that's what I think. Interesting I've heard a lot of that. So you had you had creative nationally what would you what have you experienced regards to creativity and what have your teams been telling you and you know what is your advice to them in terms of streamlining work because everybody's telling me there's a stream of deadfall news affecting our lives there's video filter there's so much happening. Yeah so you're talking in terms of teams right how have they been poking up right that's what your question is right. So you know we have been you know you know as I said earlier you know you're accustomed to you know the chaos you know being always on toes and evolving rapidly as per situations and challenges and most of us have managed to transform a way of functioning as well as you're thinking but yes the real challenge is for our teams you know and honestly we are only as good as our people they are our biggest asset and as I mentioned earlier it's been it's been tough on them it's been a shocking change in terms of work culture for them you know confined to a room stuck to a laptop or phones and delivering 24-7 you know and we identified this much early and consider it considered it as an you know as a priority to support and guide them so we never had a timesheet system per say in our agency because we believe that it's counterproductive and it kills motivation but once the lockdown started we implemented a timesheet system you know equipped with some machine learning to track and alert us of members who are putting in more hours than expected so it does help us in curbing team members from getting fatigued and exhausted I again let me be honest here I wouldn't say we're 100 successful but we are working our way towards it we've been trying to keep them in better spirits by regular interactions apart from work thanks to our HR team weekends are still fun for our people with Friday evening live performances and games and all those kind of activities that you do super so you can take us through also you know any one of your campaigns executed during lockdown and how did it all come together despite the barriers to creation right so you know as I say constraints bring innovation so we executed several innovative campaigns during this period found innovative ways of shooting and making video content and build deeper engagement for brands and with consumers so one of the examples that I would like to take up is of Glucon D you know it's a most one of the most iconic brands in almost with the category you know the task force to build relativity and deeper bond consumers on digital so we leveraged Mother's Day as a platform to not only connect emotionally with our consumers but also build top of mind recall to fuel e-commerce we launched Glucon D Salute's hashtag energy ghar ki because of premises that Glucon D believes that a mother is the epitome of infinite energy and is the only one who can match Glucon D's energy now no one can deny that right and for the first time for the first time ever the iconic brand replaced its name Glucon D in its logo unit with the word ma so it was not written Glucon D it was written ma so the campaigns on overwhelming response from a consumers and community you know 3000 plus virtual packs were generated in just over two days where people were coming and adding their mother's name and picture on the pack virtually it fueled e-commerce growth around 204 percent you know it was the campaign was much talked about amongst consumers and generated buzz with over three million impressions and an example that I would like to pick up would be of one of the brands that we did work for all wow skin sciences it's a homegrown skincare and wellness brand you know that is natural and eco-friendly we created a we created memorable experiences around the brand we caught the millennials to contribute to the environment from the confines of their homes lockdown times of course with one simple step trash your spam so trash your spam encourage millennials to adopt a cleanliness drive cleanliness drive to combat environment pollution by addressing digital pollution so influencers started changing their bios with the number of spam mails deleted how to videos did rounds of social you know video and post so wow skin sciences team then converted this number of you know deleted emails converted them into coupon codes you know for a month's what skin product for lucky winners who knew you know just by deleting mails from your inbox or mailbox you could contribute to the environment so the pranzon increase of interaction by 165 percent and increase in sales of course with the coupon codes generated yeah that's that's a great progress yeah and these are two great examples so these are two lovely examples of thank you thank you and the brand grow so also speaking about clients i want to ask you that uh how are clients client budgets now what is the general mood like are they still tightening their first strings or you know do you see green shoot now so you know honestly they've been walking the talk you know and they've been setting benchmarks before expecting agency to do so so most of our clients like uh kotak maindra bank or sony entertainment network who always believers in the medium of digital and themselves have been driving the agenda so so we didn't have to do any convincing to put more efforts on digital to connect with their consumers and it's so inspiring to see large companies have transformed their business digitally overnight you know and for large companies it's much tougher and difficult but they've they've gone ahead and done that you know some have also pivoted their businesses and gotten into new product clients which are which is inspiring you know so clients have been pushed to reinvent look at communication from new lens and be performance student and what better you know medium than digital for it so it has not been that difficult because i feel clients you know completely understand this and are doing everything that can be done yeah that's nice so also one more question so i see you know even creative agencies conventional creative agencies now getting into digital and getting into things like lead generation and you know social engagement and all that so what gives digital agencies an edge over the over them agencies like tonic actually yeah so uh now edge in the sense of as i said in the start it's you know we are more nimble more agile per se the agencies per se the culture has been more nimble or more agile right uh we make the break and then make again you know so it doesn't take much time and of course the medium is such you know where you don't have to start off you know months back you know if you've got a great idea you can start off now and take it live maybe tomorrow a day after and it's up there and out there if it's if it's great communication you cracked it and you can put it online and be there so uh digital always has that advantage right uh i wouldn't want to or wouldn't you know wouldn't compare digital to other mediums but yeah digital has gotten i would say call this as an undue advantage right now to uh you know to you know function during these times and function really well because of the in nature of how digital agencies work so lastly i wanted to give out a message to brands and to agencies on how to cut through the clutter rather than being it right so uh i'll tell you uh the challenges of brands and agencies uh wants to play it safe uh of course you know you know why uh because already we are in certain uncertain times and you know even more worried and don't want to take any more risks so we prefer to work on formulas which have proven to be successful that makes us so what does that do that makes us part of the clutter so i could give cliched solutions like be different shelve an idea if it sounds like me too etc but if you really need to cut the clutter the most important thing you need to do is be brave you need to break the category code which might make you look different or be considered crazy but then isn't that the whole point break conventional perceptions and thinking you know take the case of a brand which launched an mp3 here right it was better technology and people found it different and could easily identify it by the color of its earphones it was white in color while all the other earphones those tanks were typically in black color i don't even have to mention brand here do i right so do what you wouldn't have done otherwise in advertising or communication an idea that seems completely off is possibly off because we are used to doing it in a certain way be open to a different way you know because success cannot be duplicated it needs to be creative wow thank you so much thank you so much for this very power packed conversation it was a pleasure to have you and thanks for your time stay connected hope to see you soon if at all things get back to normal at your office and we'll have a nice chat again thanks