Medulla has been using its credentials to get more international work: Praful Akali

Praful Akali, Founder & Managing Director, Medulla Communications, is among the most awarded healthcare advertising professionals since 2015 – close to 50 shortlists and over 20 awards, including a Grand Prix at the leading awards like the Lions Health, Clio, Global, LIA, and Spikes. Akali demonstrates how creativity and effectiveness work together. This comes from his years as a client, last at Pfizer, before founding Medulla. 

He led Medulla to win the Healthcare Agency of the Year in 2016 at Cannes Lions. In fact, Medulla has been the only agency globally to feature in the top three agencies of the year, each year of the Lions Health. 

Akali has served as a jury member at Clio Health and at the Global awards. He has been a speaker previously at Cannes, and his opinion pieces have frequently been published. Akali is constantly expanding his creative horizons and also encouraging his team to come up with communication for new technological platforms like websites, e-learning, social media and Android/ iOS Apps. He constantly emphasis emphasises the need of each communication to have a “unique idea” at the core and nurtures creative thinking as an on-going process even for scientific content. 

In an indepth interaction with Adgully, Praful Akali, speaks at length about the state of pharma and healthcare advertising in India, why he is confident that Indian creative work in the pharma sector can be the best internationally, Medulla’s global ambitions, and much more. Excerpts: 

After the spectacular show at Cannes two years ago, what have been the developments at Medula?
We have been focusing a lot more on maintaining those credentials. In the year 2017, we were the No. 2 agency of the year and so we became the only agency in the world to be in the top three agencies of the year every year since Lions Health was introduced in 2014. They had the first agency of the year ranking in 2015. This kind of consistency is something that Indian agencies are not known for. The most consistent healthcare advertising agency in the world is Reliance Health, and it is an Indian agency. That is one big thing in terms of proving that we can do it again and again. 

The second thing we have been doing is using those credentials to interact with the who’s who of the healthcare advertising fraternity globally. Between Amit and me, we have been jury members of every big healthcare advertising award across the world. We’ve been having conversations with these guys and there has been a lot of learning. When we did a session this year, Cannes actually chose Medulla to talk on their motto and tagline, which was a nice change in creativity. No other agency has been selected to talk on the Cannes tagline and motto. We looked at some of the biggest winners over the last three years at Lions Health and then we were connected to each of these winners by the Lions Health team. We interviewed each of them and based on those interviews we presented case studies and quotes from each of them about life changing creativity. When it comes to healthcare advertising, India comes on the global map a lot more today. For the last two years the Cannes Lions Grand Prix has been an Indian Grand Prix and it is a matter of great pride that India has been consistently performing well in the Lions Health and other healthcare advertising awards. 

The third thing that we’ve been doing is using the credentials to get much more international work. We just put out a US TV commercial, which we will officially announce in a week or two from now. It is a commercial for a global pharmaceutical company that will then be taken globally. This is the first time someone is doing something of this level for the US TV commercial which has been done completely out of India without global partners. The kind of work that we’ve been doing in over the last year is slightly unique in the pharma-healthcare advertising crossover. Hopefully we’ll build on that even further. We want to do some of the biggest work in pharma advertising across the world out of India. 

In a previous interaction you had mentioned Medulla’s plans to build the international business. How far have those international plans progressed?
The idea was to get international credentials and then use that to get international business. It wasn’t just awards for the sake of awards, it has to convert into business because you can’t invest in it forever. That forced a constraint on us and made us go out there and get international business. More importantly, I think what’s happening is across the world more than healthcare advertising as a whole, pharma advertising is where no one has really cracked it. People get too stuck by the regulations and the complexity of the science and start using that as an excuse to do less creative work. 

Second is that pharma advertising needs to feel a lot more real and the polarity of their advertising cannot be like a spectacle advertising. We need it to feel a lot more real. The kind of creative liberties you can take in other advertising you can’t take in pharma advertising. Thirdly it is a far more complex model because there are multiple stakeholders involved – healthcare professionals, payers, patients, caregivers – and we need to have a role to play in that. This complexity is something that a lot of people don’t get. We have focused on that niche and while in India we worked on consumer healthcare as well, internationally we have been working in the pharma space and cracking some of the biggest work in that space already. Hopefully there is a lot more to come. 

What is your view on India’s performance at Cannes Lions this year? Which are the areas where India agencies stood out and the areas where they could have done much better?
I think it’s superb that we got two Grand Prix awards. I think the quality of the work stood out even as the volume was very low. The quality vs quantity dynamics was really heartening to see. The second thing that I was really proud of was that we enrolled into a completely new category. We have been winning Grand Prix in Glass Lions and Lions Health for quite a while and it feels that these stages were made for India. But its the creative effectiveness that makes us really proud and hopefully has opened the floodgates for Indian agencies. 

The third very interesting finding this year was that the bigger agencies have obviously cut down their entries, so all the usual suspects that win a lot of awards have gone slower. A lot of new agencies were present, it’s not that they hadn’t sent in their entries before, but the volumes that they were entering now were a pleasant surprise. Web chutney is one example of that. One is really hoping for a few surprises from there in terms of some dark horses winning. It has not happened yet, but I think it’s in the right direction in terms of the democratisation of the guidelines for India. I think that’s a really big one. 

I remember when Medulla started doing this 4-5 years back, there was no Tier 2 guy entering from India. There was a lot of doubts in our mind when we entered – maybe others weren’t doing it for a reason? To see this democratisation maturing to a large extent over the last four or five years has been a superb trend for India. 

Following the recognition that the Indian healthcare sector has received in the pharma and healthcare sector globally, how has the perception changed now?
If you look at Indian clients specifically, I think while it is still a brand generic market, we are beginning to see the leaders in the healthcare sector getting the logic of investing in communication as well as investing in agencies that specialise in pharma communications. In India, the pharma sector moves on medical representatives, who take on the role of relationship building and sales. There was not much scope for communication agencies. But now, we are beginning to see clients willing to do work that’s not been done before. The kind of experimentation and the limits that we see in pharma advertising in India has been completely redefined in the last 4-5 years. And you see a reflection of that internationally as well. 

So, while there was a lot of investment in marketing and communications internationally among pharma companies, it was seen more in the case of researched manufacturers and innovative pharmaceutical companies rather than generic branded ones. The focus is more on impactful communication that works across media. Interestingly, Medulla is getting a sharper image in terms of doing that work, so we’re fitting in quite nicely in that pharma advertising space. 

GroupM’s Media AdEx forecasts that the service sector, especially healthcare, is expected to perform well in 2019. What are the factors that will keep healthcare advertising buoyant?
I think hospital advertising will definitely face challenges this year compared to earlier years because of market conditions. Big hospital organisations like Apollo are facing issues at the market level, at the regulatory level and at the business level, where they might end up cutting down their spends. Within the healthcare sector, this is one market that is going to go down. 

On the other hand, we are seeing a lot of VC investments in building specialty hospitals – such as eye hospitals, kidney hospitals, cardiac hospitals, etc. These require a lot of marketing investment to follow through on that. That’s going to be a big builder of results. VC investments are also seen in the area of diagnostics and other healthcare delivery pieces. These healthcare deliveries are going to be a big driver of advertising spends in India as a whole, probably going on to become one of the biggest categories in the next three years or so. That’s one part of it; the second part is the fast moving consumer healthcare goods. If you look at cooking oil brands, they are selling on the basis of health benefits. So, that’s going to become a bigger field and will see a growth in advertising spends. 

The challenge for healthcare advertising agencies will be to get a bigger piece of that pie. We’ll have to demonstrate to clients that they need a healthcare specialist advertising agency for both these sets of business. At Medulla we’ve been focusing a lot on that and we are building clients in that space. We have a diverse set of clients – from sports shoe brand Muscle Blaze to Apollo. We look at them differently and have been growing each of them separately. 

How creative can healthcare advertising be?
Just because its healthcare advertising, it doesn’t have to be any less creative than regular advertising. A lot of value for Medulla came in when Amit joined Medulla. From the perspective of one of the really good mainline advertising guys getting into healthcare advertising, that’s been the reason for our success and that continues to be the case. 

Do you believe that in this digital era with programmatic, AI, etc., technology will overwhelm creative thinking when it comes to pharma advertising or pure vanilla advertising?
It cannot. Unfortunately right now that’s how it is and you’re seeing that change across the world as well. For example, a new technology could be sold as a new idea and it would win something because it was a new technology. The technology could become the idea, but a large part depends on the application of that technology. It is not necessarily the new technology that is driving the award or the solution; it is still the creative thinking that is driving that solution that you want. That is going to continue to happen across the world even if you fear that it will grow in the wrong direction like it did a few years back globally. The debate will always be around creativity vs technology, where technology will always be the enabler of the end idea and end goal. 

What are the key focus areas for Medulla in the next five years?
Over the years we’ve built a brilliant team; a consumer healthcare marketing team leads our consumer marketing pieces in India. We want that to grow and become the agency of choice for clients. We want to play an educational role in the industry and explain to them the need for a specialist advertising agency and what we can provide that a mainline advertising agency cannot provide. There is a lot of time and investment that we are putting into education and working together to define what needs to be done. 

The second big thing is the international pharma marketing business. I want the best work globally to be happening out of India, and ideally out of Medulla. It is already happening to some extent, and over the years it will be beyond doubt the best and the biggest market – commercially and not just from an awards perspective. From an awards perspective it is already happening, but commercially I want the biggest stuff as well.