Inspiration Is Everywhere: Ekta Relan, Mullen Lintas

MullenLowe Global
广告/全方位服务/整合传播
London, 英国
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Ekta Relan
National Planning Director Mullen Lintas
 

Tell us a bit about yourself and your current role? 

I am someone who is always keen to interpret and reinterpret life, people, stories, technology, culture, past, future, contradictions and everything in between. Someone who loves a comprehensive analysis and then flip to lateral flights of fancy with equal ease.

And this is thanks to my diverse experiences that span across categories, countries and roles, which give me multi-dimensional perspective to everything. I have led key marketing roles in Unilever as well as held strategic positions with advertising companies, with one common passion, which is, to build brands.

In my current role as strategy head as well as the founding member of Mullen Lintas, I have helped shape the dynamic culture of the agency while leading the strategic thinking for all its clients and new businesses. At Mullen Lintas, we are passionate to anchor all our thinking and ideas at the intersection of commerce, culture and content and that’s where I spend my energies.

  

How did you get your start as a strategist? What led you to pursue it as a career?

I think my love for planning started while working on the Pepsodent; Dishoom-Dishoom campaign, back in the year 2000 as a management trainee at Lintas. As part of consumer research for the brand, in one focus group, a kid animatedly re-enacted how his mom nags him. Then in one meeting where everyone was discussing the research, especially about the kid being fed up of his nagging mom, came the idea for ‘Dishoom-Dishoom’. I attended the focus group where the kid role-played as his mom, I saw the idea hatching based on that, which led to the overnight success of the campaign. That campaign changed the trajectory of the brand. I felt part of something big. That’s when it was clear, this is what I want to do. Observing people, culture, behaviour, anything and everything with which I can help creatives crack ideas that are not just conversation worthy but ones that build brands. This was my purest love that led me to become a strategist. And then I moved to Unilever, where I learned and practised a more holistic, market driven approach to brand building. And now my joy is to use all that learning to create stories and experiences in today’s dynamic new media landscape for brands at Mullen Lintas.

  

What set of skills do you believe it takes for a strategist to thrive in the current advertising landscape?

Fundamentally, strategists still need to look for that insight into human nature, one that dominates action. But where you find this insight, how you find it, how often you need to find it, what you do with the insight; everything needs to evolve. You can still understand people by watching them in cafes or on a train. However, the truth is that when you enter a café, most people are looking down into their phone. So, you will probably understand them more if you know how to look at Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Netflix data to unlock people insights. Strategists still need to research human behavior. It’s just that today this behavior is happening in a different arena, an arena where the behavior is mapped by algorithms. More so now, when we have vaulted 10-years forward in digital adoption in the last year alone. Therefore, if you want to observe behavior, you have to look at data. And then distill this data into information and then into insights.

If we look beyond the poetic side of life, it is nothing but flow of information. Thus, a new way to look at our job is to gather human insights through the understanding of evolving popular culture, alongside data about desires and abilities, then turn this into decisions in favor of your brand.

 

What’s the most challenging aspect of the job? What helps keep the work interesting for you?

Two challenges actually. First is a collective challenge for all senior people in the industry irrespective of whether you are strategist, creative or business, which is to keep the allure of advertising alive. Our industry is going through a tough time. There are challenges at multiple levels. Clients are no longer committed to any one agency for long tenures. Other related sectors like media, technology are looking more attractive and paying more. So how do you keep advertising attractive to young talent? This is how we’ve ended up in the middle of an evolution about the role strategy plays within an agency and have to reinforce the undisputable role that the right agency partner can play in building a winning brand.

The second interesting challenge, is that today cracking that one big idea for the brand, that holy grail of an insight or point of view for your brand, isn’t enough. It’s still important and gives the brand an anchor, an ideology, but it’s also about creating a brand world made of stories, experiences and conversations that continually entertain and tickle the curiosity of your audience over and over again. You have to make your brand boredom proof. And this isn’t just marketing on certain cultural days, you have to do it in a meaningful way that genuinely builds the equity of the brand. This is also what keeps the work exciting.

 

Is there a part of the role that you feel is often misunderstood? 

If there is a PowerPoint presentation to be done, then it is the job of the strategist.

 

Do you have any advice for those looking to work in a similar role?  

Master strategist, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, once said: When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the life of strangers, making them happier or healthier or safer or better ,and when you do it all crisply and efficiently the way everything should be done but so seldom is; you are participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you are helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, alright, call me a businessman.”

This is what strategists do. Be unabashedly proud of it.

 

How do you keep your finger on the pulse of culture? Where do you look for inspiration? 

I don’t think I do anything consciously. But a few things that help me is having many friends from outside the advertising industry, watching my teenage son and his friends, of course watching, reading all kinds of content and social media. All of these things help me look at life from different lenses. Inspiration is everywhere.