Exit interview: Prashant Kumar reflects on his career and the future of adland in Asia

Prashant Kumar has worn many hats. He's the founder of digital marketing company Entropia - now Accenture Song Malaysia, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert, published author, and a mentor to successful start-ups in Southeast Asia amongst many others.

However, after over 25 years of experience in ad land, Kumar will be bidding the scene farewell to discover new thrills in the non-profit sector. Wrapping up with Accenture Song in June, three years after it acquired Entropia, Kumar sits down with A+M to share his highs and lows. 

"I just left Accenture at June-end. You could also say I earned out my freedom three years after the acquisition of Entropia. Entropia had been a dream. Over the last eight years, we built it, we loved it, we hitched it to a bigger ship, and then I said goodbye to it," he said. Describing the feeling as happy and sad, he said, "life is short, and we have to move on. It is a wonderful story, and I feel so grateful it turned out the way it did. It was perfect in so many ways." 

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When Entropia was acquired in 2021, Kumar assumed the role of Accenture Song's head of artificial intelligence, growth market. In this role, Kumar lead the areas of AI/Gen AI, data and extended reality for Accenture Song across Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Middle East and Africa. 

He was responsible for building the practices including developing leaders in the space, honing delivery maturity, enhancing and socialising reputation, driving and influencing client partnerships, innovating offerings and deepening competitive advantage across these opportunities.

"Accenture wanted me to continue leading Generative AI for growth markets, a role I had been doing for some time. It was a stimulating role and am very thankful for that, but I felt I needed the thrill of uncertainty and discovery all over again. As I said, life is short and maybe once in a while we need to draw a wider arc and see what brings more meaning," said Kumar. 

Moving forward, Kumar will be focusing in the non-profit sector in India. He had been involved in sponsoring charity projects over the years, and now intends to try for a "bigger and more direct impact." 

Kumar will also be continuing his speaking and teaching roles in the AI, branding, media and data space. In addition, he has been invited to the board of Astro as an independent non-executive director. 

The highs and challenges of his career 

Reflecting back on his career, one of the biggest challenges he faced while building Entropia was building trust around the vision of bringing the future of marketing to its clients, and ensuring that the company had the right leaders, collaboration and operating models to deliver. 

"We were not perfect, but we went much farther than most because we listened carefully, responded fast, key leaders trusted each other, and we built a culture obsessed with new learnings and future. That’s how within three years we had the most sophisticated portfolio of services that included an in-house metaverse studio, AI and data consulting unit and even an IOT team," said Kumar. 

When asked to describe his career, Kumar said he's "had a very happy career, and there really are very few regrets." Some of the factors that contributed to his happiness was when he presented the Malaysia Airlines MH17 crisis management case study at Festival of Media Global in Rome and received a standing ovation and when it won its first lot of businesses - Tesco, Etika and Nippon Paints - in the very first month.

Other highs for Kumar include, "sweeping every award show - local and regional" in Entropia's first year, when his book, Made in Future by Penguin, hit and remained on the bestsellers list, when Accenture global CEO mentioned its extended reality project in Thailand in her quarterly call and when Entropia closed its final earn-out at the max level, fulfilling his last duty to all of Entropia's stakeholders.

Malaysia's unique advertising and marketing market

In his years working in the Asia advertising industry, Kumar has learnt that it is a highly diverse region that requires tailoring when approaching it. 

"Asia is not one region, it’s many regions. Culturally, economically, politically - it’s highly diverse - so any successful approach to Asia needs to be cognisant of that. Also, any global approach – whether in terms of customer behaviour or workplace culture or enabling ecosystem, needs some tailoring to ensure we maximise the original intent," said Kumar.

He added that there is tremendous curiosity about new innovations and a lot less legacy thinking in much of Asia which allows it to frequently leapfrog typical maturity curves. Kumar explained that there is also a lot of affluence accrued in the last two decades, creating tremendous optimism and energy.

On top of that, management is expected to be that ample bit of a caring patriarch, beyond the adult-to-adult relationship that modern western management styles are premised on, explained Kumar. 

"Accommodation rather than adversarial approach still pervades many negotiations. Close control may sometimes prevail over trusty enablement in even the best of Asian organisations," said Kumar, adding that:

Harmonious cultural behaviour is encouraged even in advertising, say over extreme provocations.

Then again, Asia is evolving rapidly and the generational norms are shifting in ways never imagined, added Kumar. "Pioneer generations are giving way to greater work-life balance, more disruptive thinking and better tolerance for failures." 

In Malaysia, particularly, the most stand-out feature of the market is the multi-cultural society itself. "That means at any point of time, you are thinking Malays, Chinese and Indians, at the least. It’s a small country, but is highly exposed to the global waves of innovation, so the propensity to try new things is high," said Kumar.

However, Malaysia is also "very Asian", so creativity that rudely disrupts the sense of social and cultural harmony is not always encouraged, he added. 

"It’s a great market to pilot your success in Asia, as it offers different racial bases, is open to innovation and a learning here can be highly scalable," said Kumar. 

The future of adland 

The future of adland, according to Kumar, is generative AI. "There is a lot of hyperbole around this at the moment, but eventually the future is blended teams of gen AI and people." 

"More and more the day-to-day tools we already use will be thoroughly pervaded by various AI and gen AI applications, we have only seen the early signs so far," said Kumar. This will span across eCommerce, marketing, digital product design and customer service and sales interactions.

Synthetic content creation will also infuse more and more of advertising too, he said. Text-to-video and text-to-3D tools is still in its early stages but should eventually become pervasive, spurring greater personalisation by bringing down the cost of content. This may also spur the onset of the metaverse vision all over again, if the hardware can keep up. 

"The full content to influence to commerce loops will become commonplace. What’s on TikTok today is going to pervade different platforms, but more importantly the mindsets and approach to marketing. Marketing and sales will get crunched in many categories into ‘Marselling’," he added. 

Kumar is optimistic of the Asian ad industry, noting the region's growth, optimism and openness to try new models. The diversity, according to Kumar, also makes it more interesting. 

However, more and more commerce and influence seem to be the twin engines around which the industry seems to be getting recast.

"It’s interesting, however it’s also important to not forget that sustainable margins derive from share of mind and share of mind requires both right brain and left-brain appeal," explained Kumar. 

To expose is easy, to get reaction too sometimes, but to connect in a memorable way, to win someone’s heart and mind is a lot more profitable.

To do so, people-to-people connection is required. "Most return on investment in consumer business is return on empathy, and it’s tough to bot it," said Kumar.

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