Inside FCB/SIX’s Indian Ambitions

“I think India was a natural business expansion for FCB/SIX,” reflects chief business officer Ankit Banga. For FCB’s creative, data, and CRM agency, India, with its vast market and well-established FCB presence, makes sense as the next step in FCB/SIX’s global expansion, which saw it open its doors in Brazil in 2021 and the UK in 2022. 

But, says Ankit, the ‘catalyst in this whole conversation’ was FCB’s acquisition of a majority stake in digital agency Kinnect this year after an award-winning partnership with FCB. 

“Kinnect always had a media and CX arm, which we thought to leverage with FCB/SIX in its offerings. It’s a more powerful team when we are able to augment it with global resources to offer a better solution to India and to be established, ourselves, as a centre of excellence for our global counterparts as well,” says Ankit, who has known Kinnect’s CEO Rohan Mehta for several years. The pair, he says, share many of the same ideas around the direction of digital marketing.

Ankit says the initial strategy involves digging into the pre-existing foundations, as he thinks there’s plenty of opportunity to grow by building deeper relationships. “The idea is to see, in the first one or two quarters, what we can do with our existing clients in India. How do we strengthen our relationship by getting deeper into conversations with our clients?” he says. “The idea is to take this as a starting point and look at growing the business, at least for the first two years at about 30-35% growth. And that will largely be fueled by our existing clients and then a few new clients.”

For Ankit, himself, the scope of the opportunity for FCB/SIX gives him a real kick. Prior to joining FCB/SIX, he spent many years in the finance sector, particularly at Dhani (formerly known as Indiabulls Group) where he did everything from running marketing campaigns, launching apps, creating e-commerce offerings and even heading up an inhouse agency - but now he’s excited to immerse himself in the sheer diversity of FCB’s clients.

“Working gives me a good kick in terms of what I’m doing and what value I’m adding to people. It’s very exciting to see how many CMOs look at their brands, it gives me a very good perspective and also [allows me to] add learnings from one category to the other,” says Ankit. “There are some who are very deep into their brand and you’re able to go deeper with them. There are some who are largely at the very top level and you guide them to how they could look at things in different ways. So the change I’m able to make in terms of the overall ecosystem of advertising and digital marketing genuinely gives me the best kick to be in an agency today.”

When it comes to adding value, much of what Ankit believes FCB/SIX can bring to clients is around helping marketers navigate the constant waves of new tech and oceans of data in a way that’s strategic and useful, considered and robust. “It’s about simplifying life and simplifying data and technology. Sometimes brands get, for the lack of a better word, overly excited about technology and hop on multiple platforms, multiple tools. My view would be that people need to pick up the right kinds of tools and the right kinds of data points to make meaningful changes in the way they function,” says Ankit.

He also thinks that clients are tired of juggling multiple specialist agencies and finding resulting disconnects in their customer experience - and he believes that FCB/SIX’s set up can answer that need for specialism and cohesion.

“There have been specialist agencies as part of the world today, right?” he says. “What we as FCB/SIX’s offer is specialist units unified under one umbrella for our clients. When I meet clients, they’re talking to 10 agencies for 10 things. When you’re solving that problem, unifying these specialist units under one division, I call it the ‘power of and’. That’s what I think is the most exciting part about the SIX launch in India. You don’t have to go to 10 partners for a great customer experience - that’s where you’ve lost the customer experience in translation between partners.”

But there are other places to add value too. One of the priorities of the past few months has been connecting to the other FCB/SIX offices across Canada, the US, the UK and Brazil, as well as the broader FCB network. Ankit’s finding that international connection invaluable, learning about the tools they’re using, the engineering work they’re doing, and learning from ingenious use cases. He hopes that, before long, the India team will be able to reciprocate and to share insights and unique ideas from one of the buzziest tech scenes in the world.

“I’m 100% sure we will be able to do that as well. That’s why we want to make an Indian centre of excellence for the global FCB/SIX offices. What I’ve invested in in the last quarter is to just understand what’s happening in the group, and we’re also understanding where we could add value to our global counterparts,” says Ankit. “I see exciting conversations around CRM, around commerce, around creative production, around AI that we’re having with the global teams. Maybe in a quarter or two we’ll be able to add more value from the India divisions.”