DDB Mudra's 22feet Tribal Worldwide gets future ready

With the merger of digital marketing agency 22feet with Tribal Worldwide, DDB Mudra's new digital entity, 22feet Tribal Worldwide, will now be one of the country's largest digital marketing companies with 130 employees.

"I am not sure if we are the largest, but we are definitely the best," says Madhukar Kamath, Group CEO and Managing Director, DDB Mudra.

Kamath hopes that the contribution of digital marketing and advertising to his company's revenues will go up to 50 per cent in the coming years. He is also clear that his network's focus from now on would be to put digital at the centre of all brand-building strategies.

"22feet Tribal Worldwide will constantly demonstrate how creativity and technology can add immense value to a brand," says Patrick Rona, President, Tribal Worldwide Asia Pacific.

In fact, digital is also the driving force of DDB Mudra's parent company, Omnicom.

While 22feet Tribal Worldwide is a full-fledged digital agency, Kamath says that the focus on digital has gone up manifold across all the verticals of DDB Mudra. "Even the teams focusing on traditional media are being pushed to think digital first. Every single person is being made to undergo a mindset change," he adds.

The media and advertising company on a regular basis organizes training programmes to make its employees digital savvy. One such programme is DDB Catalyst, which is a DDB patented digital marketing training module.

In order to drill the digital mindset into the teams specializing in traditional media, Kamath claims that every team has at least one person who has expertise in digital media.

Does Kamath see traditional print and television becoming redundant sooner or later?

"Digital is definitely the future. Having said that, people had written off print even 10 years ago, but print continues to grow. The traditional media will never be redundant."