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IPG Mediabrands boss Prashant Kumar to lead ‘marketing of the future’ consultancy Entropia

Prashant KumarEntropiaPrashant Kumar, who recently left media agency IPG Mediabrands where he ran Asia world markets for a long stint, has joined an “experimental marketing” company called Entropia that positions itself between the advertising agency and consultancy model.

The KL-based firm, which is slated for a full launch in July, proposes to find ways to “re-conceive the future of marketing” at a time of chaos for the agency business, and has been in discussions with data and tech players, content producers and marketers to lay a foundation for the business, which will have an inhouse creative capability.

In a media statement, Kumar said: “The advent of deep data and marketing technology has caused massive chaos and complexity in the marketing ecosystem. However no one has the final answer to what the right way out should be.”

“Entropia has started from a white sheet and seeks to re-conceive what the marketing of the future could be like, by playing with different models, skills mix, structures and processes. In all humility, we don’t claim we have found the God particle. It’s just going to be a very honest, unattached and interesting exploration.”

The name Entropia is a combination of the words entropy and utopia, which is meant to denote the movement from disorder to order.

Zuraida MohamadKumar has teamed up with Zuraida Mohammad, founder of Zuezen Consulting and a former senior marketer at Telekom Malaysia and New Straits Times Press, who will be chair of Entropia.

Mohammad, who has also worked on the agency side of the business for Grey and Bates, commented: “If you look at how Accenture, Deloitte and McKinsey are approaching this space, you realise that they bring industrial size left brain analytics. The likes of Adobe, and Salesforce are focusing on automation and owning the technology default. Agencies tend to be skewed towards the right brain with a sprinkling of research and inventory play. But each one of these sectors are weighed down by legacy engagement models.”

“We hope to bring to the play an agile, hybrid and ecosystem approach, which is native to the digital age – made in future. In the process we hope to break a few norms, and call a spade a spade, even if at the risk of being wrong,” she said.

Kumar said the plan was to bring together data architects and scientists, category strategists and marketing commerce experts with capability in long and short form content, experience design and experiential technology.

He said: “Brands must enhance human happiness. So must data and technology. In the age of anticipatory data, Creative prototyping and curative technology, there is a historic opportunity to be different. Entropia hopes to chance upon ways we can do that – with consistency and scale.”

Kumar left IPG Mediabrands after 13 years with the company in April, with the former boss of Carat Malaysia Bala Pomaleh replacing him. Soon after his departure, IPG Mediabrands lost key client Malaysia Airlines, which has moved to GroupM.

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