Hogarth India, a WPP content experience company, grew more than 60% in 2023 in terms of revenue as compared to 2022, sharedKarthik Nagarajan who took over as the CEOin January last year. Nagarajan also shared that Hogarth India grew more than 70% in terms of the number of employees in 2023 from the previous year.

In conversation with exchange4media,Karthik Nagarajan, CEO - Hogarth India, shared his journey with the company and focus areas for the new year.

Excerpts:

You have held different roles at GroupM. How has this role been different from your other roles? How has the journey of leading Hogarth been? 

The role is quite different. The only continuity is that even in GroupM, most of the responsibilities I had in terms of establishing social media, data and insights practice, and content have all been at the confluence of creative, data, and technology, so that continues.

Hogarth is a totally different organisation, both culturally and in terms of capabilities. It is, in reality, one of WPP's few pure content companies. GroupM is all about connecting the dots, whereas in Hogarth everyone is a subject matter expert. It's a place where I saw creativity and cohabitation for the first time. Making the craft of it is almost at the centre of everything we do at Hogarth, and creativity goes hand in hand with that. Only a few organisations have that mix, as well as practically everything we do, which has a tech angle in some manner. So it's a different environment than I am used to.

What was your primary goal when you first started at Hogarth in January last year? 

Undoubtedly, growth was a top priority. Even before I joined Hogarth, there were some interesting clients, but several specialisations needed to be scaled. One of them was production, which required scaling back, and required overall growth. Growing as an organisation without losing the distinct culture that Hogarth has - both in India and around the world - was a big job. Compared to the majority of other organisations in this category, Hogarth is very progressive in terms of the innovation culture, putting technology first, and even inclusion. So, growth without diluting, and I believe everything is going great.

How has the year 2023 been for Hogarth? 

Hogarth India grew more than 60% in 2023 in terms of revenue, compared to 2022. In terms of the number of employees in 2023, the company grew more than 70%. Our technology team and our design team are of equal size (25% of the workforce each). This is probably the best reflection of our approach to creativity and gives you an idea of how Hogarth is uniquely placed as a Right+Left brained company. We look at Diversity and Inclusion not as a tick mark but as an actual growth driver. The fact that our leadership team has a 50% gender split is a great indication of this.

Can you talk about some of the key clients Hogarth has signed in the last few years? Also, how many clients has the agency added this year? 

Hogarth has very tight client relationships globally and the way we structure also, it's seamlessly delivered in different parts of the world as a global relationship. Dyson is a good example. It's a global relationship, but in every market, what we do for the client is very different. While it is very process-led, it is also fairly customised for each of the markets.

In India, we have been very strong when it comes to technology practice. We work closely with clients like Coca-Cola, where we are part of the WPP team, Dyson, and major brands in the telecom category as well. So that has been a strong suit for Hogarth and we've only become better.

In terms of clients, our biggest victory this year has been the global win of Mondelez, where Hogarth and Ogilvy work closely together to bring to life content of almost all kinds across all platforms and mediums. That's been an exciting journey this year. Unilever is another big win this year where we work with many brands, especially in the beauty and wellness category on commerce, content and production.

Commerce content is now as important as social media was a decade ago, and it is one of the most important bottom-funnel assets for businesses. What is Hogarth doing in that area? 

Commerce is going through a period which, in my perspective, is the most similar to what social media went through in the early 2010s. A lot of clients are now focusing on this medium. It has a significant impact on the brand experience as well as the lower funnel. As a result, brand investment in commerce, content, and the overall user experience, both in marketplaces and D2C platforms, will be extremely high. A lot is going on in this arena, and it is with this insight that we introduced Hogarth commerce in India. It consists of multiple aspects, including the advisory, analytic, creative, and the design component. We don't realise but we buy content, we don't buy products, on e-commerce. It's important to invest in content, especially now that the number of platforms you're working with has exploded. That's why this is critical.

Can you tell us more about the company's first-ever 'creation' to 'life cycle management' strategy, to content business? 

Back in 2014, a brand could only work with a limited handful of platforms. Now, in the last 6 to 7 years, content has become an enormously complex undertaking for a brand in terms of the number of platforms you're producing for, and the number of platforms you're managing, expedited by the lockdown as most other categories are. So, the need of the hour is not so much content production, which will occur, but rather content lifecycle management. We collaborate with digital asset management systems and other technologies to ensure that you can manage content during its entire lifecycle.

What will be the focus areas for the year 2024? 

The three key areas for the upcoming year will be – commerce content and we have some great case studies on how large, complex brand journeys can be managed. The second is scaling production. When I say scaling production, I don't just mean primary or post-production because production is also an area that has been deeply impacted by what's happening in Gen AI. Whether it is the post-production piece or creative operations piece, a lot of that is being revolutionised by Gen AI and that's a big part of the conversation we're having with clients. As we move into 2024-25, clients want to be in a position where they control production, much better than they do today so that they can deliver the consistency that they want to deliver across different platforms. So, production will be a very big bet.

The third key area will be technology overall, and that has many different parts to it. One, of course, is we're moving towards an era of brand-owned platforms, largely driven by first-party data agenda. So, tech, the transformation of production and commerce content will be our three key bets for the next couple of years.