For Help With Work In U.S., One Shop Looks To Far East

First, computer programming was outsourced to Asia. Then retail customer support followed. Now one New York agency is looking to save money and leverage its creative connections in the region by shipping work to India and Singapore. Banerjee & Partners in New York, helmed by three Indians and one Asian American, aims to sell clients on the proposition of saving 40 to 60 percent in fees and production costs by outsourcing creative and some back-office operations to India and Singapore.The savings are found in lower salaries for Indian creatives, said founder and brand strategist Dave Banerjee. A copywriter making $70,000 in New York collects just $25,000 in India, he said. Top creative directors in India take in about $70,000, Banerjee said.The agency's 18-person staff manages accounts, outlines strategies and writes creative briefs before assigning projects to any of the 34 creative employees at offices in Bombay and Bangalore. (A Singapore office is slated to open later this year.) The shop is working on a campaign for Swiss luxury watch brand Alfred Hammel.It is a system Banerjee said worked well for his former shop, 1947 Communications in New York, where American teams formed strategies and sent work to Indian freelancers who created work for India. In his new venture, Banerjee wants to create ads for the U.S. market."India is a country with 30 or 40 different languages, all the advertising is created in English and people have gotten used to creating strong imagery as the main thrust of delivering a brand proposition," said Losang Gyatso, the shop's executive creative director. Moreover, many Indians now eat, drink and sleep American culture because of the pervasiveness of media, Banerjee said. "Hip-hop is the rage. People drink as much bourbon as they drink scotch. Marlboros are the standard cigarette brand," he said. While Banerjee said telecommunications technology puts him in constant contact with his overseas offices, some believe there is no substitue for the in-person give-and-take that's part of the creative process in a single office. "It's incredibly difficult to creatively direct someone who is thousands of miles away, even with modern technology and phones and faxes and the Internet," said Kevin Roddy, ecd at Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York. As creative director at Publicis Groupe's Fallon in New York, Roddy was responsible for directing teams in Minneapolis and now works on-site with BBH creative groups in London. "It's still not the same being able to walk into a creative team's office and sitting down with them talking through an idea."Still, India's increasingly sophisticated population makes it a natural for outsourcing, said Elizabeth Lloyd, an online direct marketing executive and international editor of imediaconnection.com. "All the multinational brands are in India, so Indian professionals are very familiar with them," she said. Piyush Pandey, national creative director at WPP Group's Ogilvy & Mather in Bombay, India, and president of the Cannes TV and film jury in 2004, said the "cost of living in India is lower and therefore there is ample scope of saving without compromising quality."India has a strong creative product, Pandey said. During the last three years, he noted agencies in the country's $2.8 billion market have won 13 Cannes Lions. "Good creative people make it a point to do that no matter in what part of the world they live, and the not-so-good ones often ignore the audience even if it lives around him or her," Pandey said.

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For Help With Work In U.S., One Shop Looks To Far East

Deanna Zammit

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