When a creative visionary could champion a young manager’s wild gamble

Soon, IPG will be history. The Interpublic Group, the first holding company in the advertising business, once the biggest and most powerful in the industry, will be gone, the way of the dodo and JWT. 

I spent over 12 years in IPG, in two networks across a span of 26 years. 

My first encounter with IPG was career-defining, a baptism by fire that served me well for the rest of my career.

1979. I was 27, a Senior AE at HTA in Madras. I had just been assigned on Pond’s, the most prestigious account in the agency and by far the leading FMCG account in that market. Ram Ray in Calcutta would oversee the account, and I was to report directly to him. Life was good.

Then, one afternoon, I got a call from Lintas, inviting me to meet Bagu Ochane at breakfast the following morning. He offered me the job of Branch Manager, Madras. My prospects at HTA couldn’t have been better, but a jump to Branch Manager, and that, too, in the agency of Hindustan Lever…!

A few days later, I made a day trip to Bombay to meet Gerson da Cunha and Alyque Padamsee; and shortly after that, on July 1, I joined Lintas.

In the interim, Gerson moved on to UNICEF, and Alyque became Chief Executive.

The branch was an outpost, a lovely little office with a staff of four, including me. Vijay Xavier was the Account Executive, and we had a secretary and a peon. All work – creative, media, everything – was done in Bombay.

From the start, from my first meeting with Bagu, the task at hand was clear: to grow that office. Open brief, no deadline. Alyque said, when we met in Bombay, “We are offering you a chance to go into business. Do what you would do if you owned the agency. The only difference is, we’ll pick up the losses and you’ll get paid every month.” Why they picked a 27-year-old Sr AE to do that job, I had – and still have – no idea.

The office was eight years old, and had lost money all its life. We had two clients, Pond’s and MRF. What no one had told me was that MRF had already sacked us and we were serving out the notice period, until the end of that year. I knew they had appointed Rediffusion (I had been in that pitch while at HTA), but no one outside knew Lintas had been sacked. Well, that’s how it was, and there I was.

In September of each year the Regional Director, Jean Francois Lacour, visited the offices in his territory – in India, only Bombay – in preparation for the Annual Plans meetings in London later in the year. I went to Bombay to meet him. My office was too small, and I was too new, to merit a presentation to him, so this was to be only a getting-to-know-you meeting.

It was not quite that.

After the pleasantries, and the getting-to-know-you bit, came the bombshell. My boss, Bagu, was clearly as unprepared for it as I was.

Lintas was then owned jointly by Unilever and SSC&B, a New York agency. Lacour told us IPG had acquired SSC&B, so it was now part owner of Lintas, and Unilever was selling its share of Lintas to it. By the end of March 1980 – 6 months from then – Lintas would be wholly owned by IPG, the American holding company that owned McCann.

So, what did that mean for me? “We will not be a European company anymore. It’s no more Mr Nice Guy.” IPG, as an American listed company, was profit-driven, he said, and did not carry loss-making operations. “Your office must break even in 1980. If it doesn’t, we will close it. I’m sure you will do your best, but that’s it.”

The budgeted loss for that year, which had three months to go, was 150% of revenue. I had to bring it to 0 in the following year, or lose my job.

Three months ago, I was a happy young account manager. Now, the ignominy of failing and losing my first profit centre job was looming, and the dream of being a young, go-getting agency head threatened to turn to ashes. And I learnt the loneliness of command: three other people, three other families, would go down with me and mine, but the impending threat was mine alone to know.

Back in my office, I knew I had no time to lose. What’s the first thing you do in that situation? Cut costs, of course.

I studied the P&L. Rent and salaries were 80% of the cost. Rent was, of course, a fixed cost in the short term; and as for salaries, there was no scope to reduce our headcount from the four we were!

If you can’t cut costs, increase revenue.

The market was well provided with full-service offices of national agencies, from the venerable HTA and OBM to the Madras-based R K Swamy, then just 6 years old, and a host of others. How was this little outpost of ours to get new business?

But there is no business like old business, as they say. So, the first thing we did – and it took not only Vijay and me but also our two colleagues – was to relentlessly, tirelessly, service the MRF account. No effort was too much, and cost – mainly of travelling to Bombay, where all the work was done – was no consideration. My break-even target was for the following year, so I did not have to bother with the current year’s costs. In any case, given the scale of the budgeted loss, we wouldn’t make more than a small dent in it, in the remaining three months.

As the year drew to a close, MRF withdrew the termination notice: we were back on board. So we closed the year by retaining the MRF account. More, early in the year they awarded us additional business. We were off to an encouraging start to the make-or-break year of 1980.

So far, so good, but a good start is only that: a start. As the year went on, with more business from both MRF and Pond’s, we were set to break even and to survive 1980, but what then? Where would we go from there?

Growth was clearly the only way to profitability, and that meant new business. While our two clients had reposed their faith in us, we had to get more business and diversify our portfolio, for sustained growth and to spread our risks. That, of course, led back to the same question: why would anyone in that market place their business with an outpost?

So, with the naïve optimism of youth, I developed and presented a proposal: develop the branch into a full-service office, starting with the addition of a creative team. Far from cutting costs, add costs, in the expectation – or hope? – of building business. I sent it up for approval, not without trepidation.

Alyque Padamsee loved it! He not only bought it; he sold it to his bosses in London. If anyone could do that, Alyque could.

That was the rebirth of Lintas Madras. By the time I moved, at the end of 1983, to the Bombay office and my next challenge, we had grown in four-and-a-half years from a 4-man outpost to a full-service agency of 35 people, and hugely profitable.

When I presented that seemingly madcap proposal to invest in growth rather than slash costs during a crisis, anyone else would have dismissed it as the reckless response of a desperate young manager. But Alyque saw something different: he recognized that sometimes the most counterintuitive moves are the most necessary ones. His ability to not just embrace that unconventional strategy but to sell it passionately to his bosses in London was the kind of leadership that made him legendary in Indian advertising. He knew that great agencies aren’t built by playing it safe, but by backing bold ideas and the people brave enough, or foolish enough, to propose them.

As IPG prepares to exit the stage after decades of reshaping the global advertising landscape, I can’t help but think about leaders like Alyque who embodied the entrepreneurial courage that once defined this industry. In an era when holding companies are increasingly driven by algorithms and quarterly metrics, there’s something profoundly moving about remembering a time when a creative visionary could champion a young manager’s wild gamble in the face of potential closure. Alyque didn’t just save Lintas Madras that day; he demonstrated that the greatest business transformations happen when leaders have the vision and the wisdom to recognize potential in unconventional proposals and the conviction to fight for them.

IPG may soon be history, but the legacy of leaders who dared to bet on growth over safety will always be the true foundation upon which great agencies are built.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.