The ‘classical advertising' vs ‘content' debate with The Womb Co-founders Navin Talreja and Kawal Shoor

This lockdown has forced brands and their agencies to take a digital-first and content-first approach due to restrictions on ad film production and reduced advertising spends. Content, in this situation, has emerged as the saviour for brands and has become the new salesman. Many traditional agencies, designed to produce what we call “classical advertising”, have increased their focus on building capabilities to deliver content solutions to their clients.

Navin Talreja and Kawal Shoor, co-founders of The Womb, which was ranked the top independent agency in Asia-Pacific and No. 3 across the globe by the Global Effie Index of most effective agencies, believe it is all about idea-first and their agency is ready to deliver any solution, including content, to clients.

The agency is stitching partnerships with content creators rather than building internal capabilities. “We are the champions of understanding consumer needs and creating big brand platforms. And work across three or four big pieces of big touchpoints. And we now have a lot of partnerships where we can pull in resources that do their jobs well. We do not want to become a champion of TikTok videos. But we know people who do that very well,” Shoor told BuzzInContent.com.

The Womb is currently working on two pieces of content to be created by television channels for their clients.

“One thing we learned in the last five years is that never say never to anything. Everything is an opportunity and you just have to find a way to leverage it in a way that it will benefit the brand and the business and not just create it for random reasons,” Talwar said.

Refuting the notion that creative agencies cannot produce good content, which gave birth to many new-age content creators for brands, Talwar said, “The new-age content creators do not necessarily understand the brands.”

“Sometimes in content, there is no brand. Sometimes in branded content, there is only the brand and no content. We rather focus on keeping the brand honest in the branded content and use the entire ecosystem to create content,” Shoor added.

Amid the growing debate that the epitaph of classical advertising is already written, Shoor strongly believes content will not replace communication on classical advertising, at least for the next five years.

“If you look at the US and UK markets, they still look at the Superbowl and Christmas ads as the defining moment of communications. Why are these still pieces of conversations in those markets? Because those big platforms are the places where people do their best work,” he said.

“There is a difference in the way content contributes to brand building versus classical advertising. You do not see content twice. You see ads repeatedly. Brand building is part of perception building. Perceptions get built with reputation. Both classical advertising and content work together,” Shoor added.

“Just wait for the first cricket tournament to be announced on Star Sports and we will see how many people are making ads from mobile phones and how many people are talking content. It is just too much talk. Somewhere we forget the 30-seconder communication we run on TV is also content. And, that is branded content. I do not know why people say that is not content and everything else is content,” Talwar said.