Agencies look local but where are all the Asian faces?

The past two  years in Asia have been a turbulent time for regional networks, with one recurrent theme - movement at the top. During this period, nine of the 18 major creative networks have made a change to their regional leadership, while seven of the 14 largest media agencies have done the same.

But despite the high level of churn, there has been a curious and worrying anomaly. In almost all these cases, the incumbent and their successor have been white, expatriate, males, either Asia-based or imported from Europe and the US. Diversity, it would seem, is seriously lacking.

The current make up of regional network CEOs reinforces this state of affairs. Of the leading creative agencies, only one has what could be classified as local talent in place - Grey, headed up by Nirvik Singh. Media agencies fare little better, with Stephen Li at MEC, Ashutosh Srivastava at Mindshare and Vishnu Mohan of Havas Media leading the Asian charge, while PHD is run at regional level by Cheuk Chiang, an ethnically Chinese Australian. 

Women find themselves at a similar disadvantage. At the time of writing, there are no females in  regional CEO roles, although Frederique Covington took over as MD at Bates 141 following the departure of Digby Richards earlier this year.  

Of even more concern, in two of the most recent high profile regional departures — Jeffrey Yu, who resigned as chairman of Bates 141 and Maggie Choi, who left OMD — the industry lost two of the region’s most experienced and time served agency leaders, both of whom were Asian. 

Without question, the people running the region’s networks are a long way from being representative of the countries and cultures they work in. And as global clients become inceasingly diverse in terms of their Asia-Pacific leadership teams, the obvious question to ask is whether this uniformity of  leadership is sustainble, or even desirable?

Tony Wright, chairman at Lowe and Partners thinks not.  “Asia still suffers strongly from a ‘jobs for the boys’ syndrome and, as an industry, we are under-serving our clients and consumers,” he says. “It has traditionally attracted not merely white males, but the sort of white males whose view of society is also deeply outmoded in their home countries, with patronising views of how Asian consumers relate to brands, the culture of agencies and everything that follows.”

The lack of diversity at the top in Asia is to a great extent a legacy issue. As global brands expanded into Asian markets, agencies were set up to service these accounts, typically staffed by Western executives based in Hong Kong or Singapore. Fuelled by the rapid addition of new business, regional networks were formed. “It is a hangover from when Western agencies first entered into Asia - expatriates led almost all agencies then and this is still the case in some networks,” adds Wright.

While Wright undoubtedly makes a valid point, the blame for the lack of local faces at the top cannot be laid exclusively at the door of the agencies. In terms of global exposure at least, imported talent still has some advantages.  “You have to realise that talent from the ‘West’ -US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand - has been a very mobile global workforce for many years,” says Hamish McLennan, global chairman and CEO at Y&R. “We tend to find the advantage of expat talent is that they understand the global system and its workings. Talent at a local level often doesn’t see regional leadership as a path they wish to take.”

Jean-Michel Wu, regional talent director, WPP Asia-Pacific, expands on this saying that in some cases, he has seen senior talent opt for country-level positions rather than regional roles, due to a preference to maintain well-established client and professional networks and to stay closer to family.

An alternative theory is put forward by Richard Pinder, global CEO at Publicis, who at the start of this year installed Kevin Ramsey - previously regional head at both McCann and JWT - as APAC head. “It’s rare for someone from within the region to be easily accepted by others within the region,” Pinder says. “Sometimes it’s easier to accept someone who is foreign to all rather than someone who might be a favourite to one country - of their origin, for example. I would push hard to continue to localise local roles.  But regional ones by definition are hard to localise, wherever in the world you are talking about.”  

Pinder adds that the enormous demands on travel and being away from home that come with a regional role also tends to play a part in the lack of gender and age diversity at the top, accounting to some extent for the predominance of older males.  “Younger males and females have younger families and being away so much can be very difficult.  I know. I was a younger guy when I ran the region for Leo Burnett and I ended up divorced because of it.”

At the same time, the history of advertising in Asia has contributed to a situation whereby much of the overseas talent in the market can actually point to regional experience which rivals or even exceeds that of their Asian counterparts. These are the marketers who came to the region when the industry was still young and have since made Asia their home. 

Chris Jaques, CEO of M&C Saatchi Asia, for instance, began his Asian marketing career in 1987. Matt Godfrey, who this year took over the reigns at Y&R, ousting Indian-born Ambar Brahmachary, and who was previously CEO at Publicis, has been working in Asia for 15 years. Similarly, the likes of Kevin Ramsey at Publicis and Ogilvy’s Tim Isaac can both point to top-level Asian experience dating back a decade or more. 

But as markets - and talent - in the region grow in sophistication, the legacy excuse is looking less and less tenable. Markets in the region are changing fast, and advertising needs to catch up. 

The most obvious comparison to make is with client marketers. While many of the global brands went through a similar legacy period as their agencies, the shift to a more diverse leadership has been more pronounced. Unilever, for instance, has local talent spread across its regional leadership, including Rohit Jawa, who in effect heads the brand in Asia. Similarly, P&G earlier this year appointed Sumeet Vohra as head of marketing for Asia-Pacific, replacing Maile Carnegie.

At the same time, MNC brands have invested in grooming staff by seconding them to international markets. The likes of Coca-Cola or Johnson & Johnson (J&J) make a point of exposing their most promising Asian executives to their US or European business and then bringing them back to utilise that experience in Asia.  For example, Steven Li, currently marketing director and franchise head at J&J China, was relocated to the US from 2007 to 2009. 

With a much larger portion of agency business is now accounted for by international brands headed up by Asian marketers, and given that many argue that it will not be too long before some international brands relocate their head offices to Asia, having a CEO agency head with ties to the global headquarters and an understanding of global strategy and operations is still useful, but is no longer necessarily a market advantage. 

Even more pressing is the emergence of home-grown brands in markets such as China and India that often have exclusively Asian marketing teams schooled according to local corporate culture, rather than US business models. China is a strong example, with the growth of powerful brands such as China Mobile, Lenovo, Yili and Bank of China. On the other side of the equation in China are the huge media  operators such as CCTV, Shanghai Media Group, Tencent and outdoor specialist Focus Media that are accounting for an increasing amount of media spend. As these brands spread outside of the domestic market and start to target regional and even global ambitions, a entirely new kind of regional CEO may be called for, wherein an understanding of Asian culture and business relationships becomes the most important consideration.

But is Asian talent is ready to step up? Michael McLaren, regional CEO at McCann Worldgroup. sees no problem with the quality of local advertising talent.  “So much innovation is being driven out of this region,” he says. “Japan, Korea, India. It should be seen as a centre of excellence, which should be translated in terms of talent. However, this is not something that will happen organically; it is something you have to plan for and make happen.”

Certainly agencies do appear to be readying the talent for the next step up the corporate ladder. While white males may dominate the regional network positions, at country level it is an entirely different picture. 

“We’ve been focusing on localisation in Asia-Pacific ever since I joined Leo Burnett 12 years ago,” says Nadia Pan, regional director of people and culture at Leo Burnett Asia-Pacific. “Today, nearly 80 per cent of our MD, ECD and senior planning positions are held by Asians.”

Indeed, at country level an imported CEO is now the exception rather than the norm, a sharp contrast to the situation several decades ago.  “At the country head level, we have strong local talent,” says WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell. “China and India, our biggest markets in Asia, are run by local talent, such as TB Song and Shenan Chuang at Ogilvy China, and Piyush Pandey at Ogilvy India. Strong leadership in those markets is crucial because they are are among our most important globally.” 

On the media agency front in China there is a compelling, and much welcomed, number of women of Chinese origin leading the major holding companies and agencies — Bessie Li at GroupM, Elaine Ip at OMG, Bertilla Tao at Starcom, Annie Hsiao at Maxus and most recently Siew Ping Lim who took over the CEO China role for OMD. 

Another positive development for diversity in Asia can be seen in the number of Asian faces heading up key regional specialties. 

McCann has Amar Urhekar leading their healthcare arm. DDB has Mohammed Sirajuddeen installed as CEO at Rapp. WPP has Paul Soon in charge of digital agency XM Asia, while Susana Tsui was made regional president of Neo@Ogilvy in 2009. There is also no shortage of strong regional creatives - Prasoon Joshi (McCann), Eugene Cheong (Ogilvy), Calvin Soh (Publicis) and Tay Guan Hin (JWT) to name a few.

It is just a matter of time - and opportunity - argues Grey’s Nirvik Singh, before many of these strong local leaders make that transition to regional level. “Opportunties have to open up in a network in order for this to happen,” he says. “If a person is running the agency well, why change? There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But the industry does need to groom people, to make sure the next generation of leaders is ready.”

Tony Wright agrees: “I think there is a great deal of local talent operating at the secondary level in agencies in Asia and networks need to be much braver at giving them the opportunity to actually lead. In that sense, this is the absolute crunch moment. So although it is true that local talent often does not have leadership experience and credentials, there is no doubt that, if given the opportunity and then support, that the situation in three to five years will be radically different.”

The challenge for agencies, though, is how to ensure this talent rises to the top. Key will be making sure Asian marketers are able to gather enough multi-market exposure to give them the tools to run the region. But as McLaren, notes, this will only happen through active industry initiatives. “We expect over time to see more Asian talent rise to the top,” says Sorrel. “At WPP, we have several training initiatives, including our Maestro programme which teaches leadership skills to senior staff, that we believe will help grow our local talent.  The long-run key to our continued growth in Asia is the identification, nurturing and development of diverse, indigenous talent from the region.” 

Tim Love, CEO of Omnicom APIMA, points to the Omnicom University leadership development programme, which was held in Shanghai this year, as an instrument in the ongoing commitment to train the next generation of talent and expose it to global best practice. “The best investment we ever made - more than any acquisition - was in 1995 when we started Omnicom University,” he says.

Singh argues that a  step-by-step approach to nurturing regional talent will have its rewards. “Step one is putting local talent in local roles. We have made significant changes in most of our geographies. Apart from Korea, in every single other market I have local home-grown managers.”

Singh’s own career trajectory reflects this. He went from country leadership roles in India to taking responsibility first for South Asia, then Southeast Asia, before taking over at G2 Asia and finally settling at Grey Group. “There has to be a clear career progression. It is very important that people work in different markets and cultures.”

However, compared to the US or Europe at least, talent in Asia is still going through  a steep experience curve. “Leaders are not rotating around different markets,” says McLaren. “To be running the region you need to have experience in several markets. Managers need to leave their comfort zone. Exposure is key - the juxtaposition of different levels of development and taking learnings from one market to the next. We need to make sure our people are getting exposure and are able to take advantage of these learnings.”

It could be the changing dynamics of the Asia market itself, in particular the fast growth of emerging markets, necessitates a more diverse leadership model. “As China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan and Africa take on a larger role in an inter-dependent global economy, in a more transparent, borderless communications landscape, a tipping point is being seen in terms of talent diversity and interest in our profession,” Love observes.

But agencies had better translate words into action soon.  Advertising is competing with a host of other employment opportunities in the region, and an increasingly mobile and impatient workforce is not looking to hang around waiting for the outcome. “It is crucial for us to encourage talent in the industry,” says Singh. “In India there is a drain taking place as people move into new industries. If talent cannot see a future regional role, it is going to be very difficult to persuade them to stay.” 

Nevertheless, agencies make it clear it is not nationality or race that determines candidate’s suitability for a regional role. “The gold standard for us was Matt Godfrey,” says McLennan. “But we would be open to any talent from any country as long as they are good.”