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In 2008, advertising agency Lowe Lintas talked about launching a tool called 'context planning' to help the communications process. But the channel planning kit finally comes to India only now after traveling to various international destinations. Lowe Worldwide's chief strategy officer Bert Moore was in India recently to launch to roll out the process and train executives in India. In an exclusive interview with FE's Pritha Mitra Dasgupta, Moore explains how this tool works. Edited excerpts: .Tell us about your workshop on channel planning.Our model of channel planning is called context planning. Whatever an advertising agency creates are great ideas that they run certain campaigns on. These campaigns now need to work more than just 30-second TV spots. The tool kit or the methodology that we built around this context planning helps us to understand what audience we want to talk to and through what channel it will be most effective and efficient to talk to those different audiences—whether that's retail or investors or consumers.Tell us how the tool works.If you look at the nature of the company we have got very strong indigenous cultured agencies around the world. The question is how do you bind those agencies together and get them to work in a particular way. So we devised a methodology which we call 'problem buyer's thinking' and the nature of it is, we believe that to get the best creative ideas they have to be focused on a particular business or brand problem. And when we work out those two things then you work out whether the idea is going to live. That's the context planning piece.So for a big global brand, 'dirt is good' I know, but you have to look at the cultures where the idea has to come to life, you need to look at the audiences it needs to engage—retailers to moms to whoever else. And you look at the channels that are the most efficient and effective to bring that idea to life. So it's a four-stage methodology—narrow down the problem, have the idea, how and where it's going to live and the complicated end—how do you manage the phasing of all of the communication. That's the fourth stage. And in each of those four stages, there are a set of thinking tools. There are two aspects to the tool. One is a seminal piece of thinking. And then there is a conceptual model that helps you take a lot of data and put it in a format that you really have to understand to work with it. So the training takes people through each of the stages and all the tools underneath it.Have you implemented this anywhere else in the world?Yes. This is our fifth or sixth major regional roll-outs and I think 36 or 37 countries have participated so far. We started off with China and South East Asia.How do you think this tool is going to benefit the clients or the agency? Give us an example.Take the example of the Hangman ad (the campaign done by Lowe Lintas for Havells), Balki's (chairman R Balakrishnan) most recent piece of controversial genius. This isn't really about the hangman. The idea behind this is whether there is a way that you can look at your life and balance the good things and the bad things. What a beautiful idea! Now, how does that idea translate into a 30-second piece of advertising? In Hangman, it's a fantastically dramatic piece of communication. How it will work in retail is different because it's a different problem there that it will address. How it will work on social media is completely different.How was 2009 for Lowe?We held and slightly grew. I think one of the reasons for that is it depends on your relative exposure to the categories that really suffered. So if you have a big client base in banks, cars and the major industries that suffered, your business would suffer. A large percentage of our business is toothpaste, toilet paper, kitchen cleaner—whether it's a major growth or a deep recession, you still need to clean your teeth, go to the toilet, clean your ears and do whatever else you do. So FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) sales held fairly strong. So we were lucky.Which are growing markets for Lowe Worldwide?Its India, China, Vietnam, Venezuela, Brazil. Argentina is growing really well and some of the European markets are doing well. So we are witnessing growth from all the emerging markets. I think Lowe was built through acquisitions of local jewels. These agencies are built out of their local cultures. So in those growth markets we have very strong brands. It's a very, very strong local agency. It's now connected to a network. Of course, it has got its own problems and that multi cultural diversity—that's the nature of Lowe. So we have strong local businesses in those growth markets that are connected to a global network. And that process puts us in a very strong position to weather the recession.
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