mSix&Partners, which is one of the youngest GroupM agencies, was born out of a partnership between The&Partnership and WPP. Earlier it was called M/Six. But last year in March, this agency was rebranded to mSix&Partners’, designed to better reflect the agency’s “best of both worlds” ownership structure, and belief in ‘true partnership’ with its people, clients and sister agencies. The agency currently has 49 offices across 41 countries including Singapore, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Japan. The agency chief execujtive officer Jack Swayne also took charge of the agency around the time when the agency was undergoing restructuring. He was visiting India this week. Storyboard18 caught up with him on the sidelines of his visit.
This is your first visit to India and WPP campus in Mumbai. What are your first impressions and what are you hearing from your clients and colleagues?
Swayne: The clients and the people have been friendly, kind and welcoming. Such incredible talent here. I get to see a lot of talent around the world and I have to say it is absolutely exceptional in this office and mSix&Partners teams. I have spent lots of my time seeing as many clients as I can. They are telling me the same thing which is, how can we continue to use media and more broadly marketing to keep driving this accelerated growth? They are all seeing incredible headroom in this market for faster growth and we as their partners have a huge opportunity to be drivers of that.
By becoming CEO you took the wheel of the agency in your hands about a year ago, this was the same time when mSix&Partners underwent rebranding. What were the goals that you set for yourself back then and how far have you come?
Swayne: The goal has been about making our vision of the power of ‘&’ sort of real everywhere around the world. When I say ‘power of &’ what I mean is that we want to truly transform the way brands are built, we want to bring together diverse thinkers and makers and creators together. When we think about it in simplest terms, we have to be brilliant at media and all the things that it involves and includes in this increasingly complex world, but we best show up and solve our client issues when it’s media and content or media and commerce or media and customer. And that has been a big focus for me wherever we go, whether it is India or the UK or the US.
Considering the wide scope of work being done by agencies today, what capabilities does mSix&Partners need to hone?
Swayne: We have to ensure that we are at the forefront of all things media, whether that’s in performance or within digital or increasingly within artificial intelligence and all that goes with that, but also within content. Our content team is increasing in size here in India and we are also launching new products within content. A couple of months ago we launched our &Studio and that was really at the back of talking to clients; clients were saying that they have got an asset for the top of the funnel, but where I am really struggling is content for commerce. Because I need thousands of iterations to fix either the platform or the ad format or different messaging, etc. So we used a piece of tech to allow us to take a single asset and reform and create that into different variations. We have to plug that directly into media and optimise it in the best-performing commerce environment.
In what ways do you see AI and Generative AI impacting and reshaping your business?
Swayne: Impact is huge on media. We have been using AI in media for a long time. Generative AI is going to be important. When I think about the content studio &Studio, generative AI is going to have a bigger role in that. Once we plug in generative AI into it, it’s not humans making those changes but it is artificial intelligence that is creating all those different assets out of the bank of the data that is showing what is performing. That is something really exciting for us. I have to say, right now what is coming out of generative AI is good, not excellent yet, but it is getting better every single day. We are excited about it.
How do you win the battle for attention in today’s media landscape?
Swayne: I think there are some technical answers around measuring attention. But honestly, I think the answer is in creativity. Because I think creativity is always about how do I grab somebody’s attention for as long as possible and I think in media only way we often think let’s say on Instagram, we got 1 second to grab someone’s attention, put your brand logo right in the beginning but what I actually think is that we need to be more creative in our approach. It is how we use creativity to really grab attention so that it is not just maximising ‘the 1 second’ but extending that. So rather than getting stuck around numbers around attention if we apply numbers plus creativity that is the magic formula.