Making Advertising Great Again!

Interview with Farhan Khan, CEO, Brainchild Communication on media evolution, retaining talent and changing mind sets.

GLAM: Could you walk us through your professional journey briefly and tell us how did you get into advertising?

FARHAN KHAN: Well I had no intentions of joining this industry. I did my masters, MBA in sales and marketing about 24 years ago and then left for the US to do another masters from the Florida International University in Miami. At that time the media industry was very small and very few people were associated with it. Only two TV channels existed back then including PTV and NTM. Unfortunately I could not complete my masters to some challenges in the family and had to come back to Pakistan. There were a few friends working in advertising and asked me to join, and without any second thoughts I did. I began working at Pak Media Com, the same company I work for now; the legal name is Brainchild, which was the same earlier too but back then it was affiliated with WPP Group and not with Starcom or Publicis, and here I am working for the same company after 24 years as the CEO, where I started as a management trainee.

I worked for three years at Pak Media before moving to AC Neilsen – a research agency. Here too I worked for three years in retail audit and worked a lot with numbers, which I really enjoyed. Then I moved to Adcom, which was back in those days more of a creative agency than media agency. This was year 2005 and it was a great time for telcos; Telenor and Warid were coming to Pakistan with huge investments and the industry was growing. I joined them and moved to Islamabad to service my client Telenor. Again stayed there for three years, and then moved to Starcom Middle East in Dubai in 2007 where I served a year before joining Starcom Saudi Arabia, based in Jeddah. Here I stayed for almost nine years; so a total of ten years in the Middle East with the same group. What followed was a call from Raihan Marchant, a colleague and a mentor, who asked me to come back because he wanted someone who had seen the initial days of the agency. I joijned Starcom Pakistan as COO in 2017 and after three years, in October 2020, right after Covid hit, I became the CEO, a position that I still retain. We represent five media agencies of Publicis including Starcom, Mediavest, Publicis media and spark and one local creative agency called Blitz.

GLAM: Since you worked in various international markets, as a CEO, what expertise did you bring to Brainchild Pakistan?

FK: While working for ten years in Starcom Middle East, I saw a stark difference when I came back, the first being the disorganisation, of not just agencies but the overall broader prospect of the media industry. From a channel, client, agency perspective we were not disciplined in the way we should have been. Working in the Middle East I had hands-on experience on how all the processes worked and it appalled me. So I made sure to make the client organised because they were the key stakeholders they needed organising o that we could work properly. After that we needed the channels, partners and agencies to do the same. This was a major gap. Also, when I came back I realised, the media industry in Pakistan was about three to four years behind when it came to digital marketing or media. In the Middle East, all the big guys had a presence such as Meta, Google, and Tik Tok, but here they were non-existent. So I stated with training my team and at the same time educating my clients on how things were done internationally. I am glad to tell you that the way Pakistan’s market has caught up with digital is remarkable and we now are perhaps a couple of years behind. So I leveraged knowledge and expertise that I brought in from the Middle East and translated here not only for the agency but clients and the industry at large as well. The results speak for themselves.

GLAM: How has the media planning business evolved in Pakistan and the consumer patterns changed?

FK: As I said earlier, when I joined there were only two channels and a couple of radio channels in year 2000 and now there are over a hundred. That was one way we could see the evolution. Then came so many new genres to news, entertainment, sports and music. We introduced food channels and kid’s channels, hence adopting to everything that was happening in the West. Earlier whatever happened internationally came to Pakistan with a delay of 10-15 years. So that was another change. However, on the industry side what we did not evolve on as we should have, especially on the broadcaster side, was technology –and it is still not happening unfortunately. For example, if you remember on PTV around the time of prime time drama, the reads would go empty, but now the consumer has evolved. Though he/she is watching the same show but they watch it on YouTube; this is how we look at the evolution of our audience. With more platforms emerging such as Facebook or meta, it changed trends and habits. Now if you observe, with Tik Tok’s advent audience’s receptivity level has further shortened. From a 45 minute drama, to 25 mins and to eventually a minute or minute and a half clips. The attention spans are rapidly decreasing.

But despite the adoption we could not create a platform such as YouTube on our own. In the Middle East, there were a few platforms which did a little to fill the gap of content creation, not that YouTube is small there but if were to give you a split between international broadcasters and local (digital), you will see a 80/20 or 75/25 split.

In Pakistan whether it is Business Recorder, GEO or ARY, comprise only 5-7% of the total adex, so about 95% of our adex on digital goes to international broadcasters, such as Meta or YouTube. And this is a mind-set problem. Let me give an example of HUM TV. They make the best dramas, from conceiving ideas, to writing scripts, incurring costs on production to eventually airing it on the channel. Once the drama is aired, they put it on YouTube and will generate a good number of impressions. All these big three channels do the same; HUM, ARY and GEO, and the revenue they generate amounts to $800- 1 million. Now the question is: is this a due share? Because no one knows the answer. But all these channels are very complacent with the amount they are getting. I ask them what if this share is or could be over 3 million? They will not know unless they launch their own platform, put the dramas there, and then whether you earn $3 million or 15 million, you will know its true value.

About 14 years ago, YouTube was banned in Pakistan, let’s say that happens again, then what would these platforms do. They do not understand the challenge and will not do anything proactively about it till it happens.  On the other hand, mbc is the biggest media group in the Middle East, which had various channels. Ten years ago they began while sharing their content on YouTube, began simultaneously sharing it on their newly launched platform titled shahid.tv. Their strategy was to share their content on YouTube and their platform and once they have migrated their audience completely to shahid.tv, they will abandon YouTube. This strategy turned out to be a success. As to how they sold it, they told the TV people that if they were giving advertising worth Rs 100 for example on television, they should give 5% more and they will share the ad on shahid.tv as well. They started off with 5% and later kept on increasing the rates. This is a successful case study that I share with everyone to replicate but unfortunately it has not yet happened, because we are a nation of the rent-seeking mind-set; not willing to invest, innovate, no risk taking.

Take newspapers also, everyone keeps saying print is dying and they ask my take on it as an advertiser. I believe news is not dying but the paper is. The news has moved to other platforms. Jang.net has all the news it has on paper, but they are servicing to just 1 million people and no one would make an effort to increase it to 1.5 or 4 million. When they ask us to advertise, we start with $3,000 and we get the impressions worth the money, we increase it to $4,000 we get the impressions but once we cross the $5,000 mark, the target impressions are not delivered because they do not have that much traffic, and they will not work on increasing bandwidth and bringing in more audience. So we are not making its infrastructure to see that if they are servicing one million people as a viewer, we should increase to 1.5 million to 2 million or 4 million.

GLAM: Tell us how effectively is the advertising industry using technology? Does advertising have the right resources to use tools such as AI or programmatic?

FK: Look we are third world country. We do not have the required data to become a data-centric agency as there are certain data points not available in Pakistan. I can say that with confidence because I have worked in different markets. When I talk to my global clients P&G and Starcom teams in the region, they quote a certain type of data to which we do not have access to, so that is a challenge. However, as an international agency we do have certain tools at our disposal and we try to make do with them.

As for resources, the advantage is that we train our resources not only locally but at Publicis global as well. Two years ago, in order to train our people and make money as well, we started doing international business for Publicis remotely from Pakistan. Covid taught us all that the world could work remotely, and building on it, since I had worked in the foreign markets, I asked them to outsource their work to us, especially digital. It was beneficial for the talent because they were excited that sitting in Pakistan they were working for L’Oreal or Neom City as well as updating their skills. Moreover as an organisation what was beneficial was that I started billing them in dollars. It was the time when dollar prices increased from Rs 100 to Rs 300, so we became cheaper for the West but locally we made profits.

What was beneficial for me as an organisation was that I started billing in dollars and this is a time when the dollar shot from Rs 100 120 to Rs 300 directly. So we became cheaper for the west but locally we were making profits. So we took this opportunity and went to the Publicis team and said we have the required skillset, we further need to brush up their skills for which we need your help. If a project is costing you a hundred dollars an hour I can do it for you for 80 dollars an hour. So it was 20 dollars cheaper for them but 80 dollars more for me.

GLAM: What are the challenges that lay ahead for the advertising industry? How can you make people love advertising again?

FK: We are far behind when we compare ourselves to international advertising, both from a creative point of view and the creative side as well. First we need to gear up for embracing the change that we foresee. We need to change mind-sets and for this, we first have to identify where we stand and understand where we lack. We frankly are in denial and we take the most imminent challenges very lightly thinking we will bypass them and do something else.

Furthermore, 40 to 50 years ago, agency was separated into ad agency and media agency, but now it is coming back together. It has started in the West and now we are implementing it. We are diversifying our services to our clients in the sense that we are not just communication consultants, but also sports marketers, ad developers, website developers etc. I have a full-fledged team internally to address that because clients do not have the time to talk to 6 people separately now. They want the DVC, the app and ad from the same agency. So since three years we have started making in-house teams, as our next evolution will be to offer one-window solution.

As for making adverts great again… we need to change our mind sets. We make a 30-second commercial on TV first, and put the same on digital. We are not thinking platform agnostically. Creatives need to be made separately for different formats as the environment dictates the content in order to stand out.