US-headquartered independent advertising network Wieden+ Kennedy, which entered India by opening its eight office in Delhi in 2007, has decided to shut shop in the country. Yesterday, news about the resignation of the top leaders of the agency—Santosh Padhi, CCO, India; Ayesha Ghosh, President, India; and Shreekant Srinivasan, Head of Delhi—came to light, post which the agency has made its intention to discontinue advertising operations in India known.
The agency had only recently got a new lease of life following a significant move when W+K decided to open its second office in Mumbai, after roughly 15 years of operating in India, singularly through the Delhi office. Santosh Padhi (Paddy) came on board as CCO of W+K in early 2022, and was joined by Ghosh shortly after. As per old reports, in 2021, W+K Delhi had their best new business year in five years, adding clients like ABinBev, Delhivery, Hero Motorcorp, OPPO, PokerBaazi and Visa.
Sources IMPACT Magazine reached out to however say the PNL of the company was in bad shape back then, and after a fair bit of cost cutting, the agency managed to break-even, in its first year of leadership change and recently also registered a solid profit margin.
The move to shut down the agency thus comes across as a surprise, especially considering that India has been on the growth map for most global networks of late. Today the clients on W+K’s roster, either on project basis or retainer, include Vida from Hero Motocorp, Jindal’s Steel of Oman, Jockey’s Freedom or Nothing, G-Shock’s Rise Above the Shocks, Hero Cycles’ Cycle Hero Hai, Clove Dental’s Whistle, and Brownkind skin care, among others.
It can be noted that W+K doesn’t service any of the hallmark clients of the US-headquartered network, like Nike, Samsung, McDonalds, Ford— all of which are together believed to contribute to a bulk of the independent network’s revenue globally. Incidentally, most of the clients on the roster in the country are India-specific wins. It is a known fact that local agencies are barred from winning businesses that compete with the big clients the network handles globally, which perhaps resulted in keeping several key opportunities at bay in India, for the agency.
Sources have told IMPACT Magazine that there were talks of starting new verticals on the social and digital front to support the next level of growth in the country, but they never took off. There was very little support from the global team to expand services in India, which led to the differences that culminated into the shutting down of the offices here. IMPACT Magazine reached out to the global team of Wieden+ Kennedy for a comment but did not receive a response at the time of filing the story.
The advertising operations will come to a halt both in Mumbai, and Delhi, barring some backend divisions which will be retained for global support. In a press release, the network said, “Wieden+Kennedy is streamlining its presence in India, winding down operations in Mumbai (through the end of 2024), and scaling back its workforce in the agency’s Delhi office to a workforce of employees who will work with the agency’s global leadership to support critical shared services and global business operations—which will not include advertising services at this time.” Paddy and Ghosh will continue to work with the agency till the end of the year to complete the projects already undertaken.
Currently there are close to 45 employees working for W+K in India—20 in Mumbai and 25 in Delhi. Talking about their future, the agency said, “Remaining Delhi employees will report into global leadership as we are not rehiring leadership to replace Paddy and Ayesha, and we will be closing the Mumbai office (that they opened, which is where they are located). For the foreseeable future, we won’t be taking on client opportunities in Delhi or Mumbai.”
Wieden before Paddy and Ghosh took over has worked on brands like IndiGo Airlines, Royal Enfield, and the government of India. However, the biggest campaign to put the spotlight on the agency was the Nike - Da Da Ding work, which managed to win a Gold at Cannes Lions in 2017.
Dan Wieden, the man who coined the ‘Just Do It’ phrase, on his India visit in 2009 had said that they expect the India unit to be very crucial for the agency in the near future, and now as they bring down the shutters a decade and a half later, W+K clarifies, “The agency has been growing and setting up shop in places globally that are aligned with our current needs (clients and future) which at this time means not doubling down on India, instead scaling back and taking a moment to figure out how the Indian market fits into our future. Not totally out of the realm of possibility that we will ramp back up again in the future.”