When A.R. Rahman became the first Indian to win a Golden Globe Award for his music score in Slumdog Millionaire, a movie filmed in Mumbai with a cast of largely local actors, Indian creative talent gained international recognition. But creative inputs from Indian studios, whether it’s storyboards for animated flicks or advertising copy, have been gaining acceptance steadily across the globe, albeit without the attendant media spotlight.
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“Slumdog Millionaire has proved that what India has to offer is now acceptable to global audiences; we are not defending India, we are selling India,” says Poran Malani, president of Hub operations, Ogilvy and Mather (India) Pvt. Ltd, Bangalore.
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Malani knows what he is talking about. In the last eight months, an Ogilvy and Mather, or O&M, team of 80 advertising professionals, in partnership with the Bangalore-based global marketing hub of computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd, has created six television commercials and 5,000 print advertisements for the multinational computer maker—these have been aired across the world. These commercials and print campaigns include the Ideas Everywhere series as well as the Lenovo brand campaign that ran during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. “We are putting a face on Indian talent,” says Malani.
Forging relationships: The aim is to create a core of global competence that can be adapted to local needs.
For Lenovo, the Hub is a unique experiment in setting up a single marketing communications engine for its global operations. This model of sourcing expertise from where it is best available, described as world sourcing, allows companies such as Lenovo that function across multiple geographies to create a core of global competence that can be adapted to local needs.
When it first started in 2007, the Hub had to develop credibility within the global operations of Lenovo. It began on a low key, delivering advertising services. But now, if the US operations of Lenovo wants a television advertisement, it partners with the Hub to work out a brief—the Hub then takes over. “We do the entire concept from here—be it a digital marketing campaign, television spot or print flier,” says Malani.
“It is not just the advantage of cost that India offers; it has a great reputation for very high creative skills and, of course, the language capability is an advantage too,” he says, adding that it was initially difficult to convince marketing professionals in mature markets to trust such culturally sensitive work to a remote location.