All Change

BPG Group CEO Avi Bhojani tells Austyn Allison how he is repositioning the company to embrace evolution and remain relevant.

- Austyn Allis

If you are not already heading up a vertical division of a marketing and communications holding group, imagine for a moment that you are.

You open up your Outlook to find the group CEO has invited you and your counterparts to a meeting. There is no agenda, only a title: “The Inevitability of Extinction”. Worried yet?

That is the invite that pinged into the inboxes of business heads and their top lieutenants at BPG Group in May last year. The man who hit send is Avi Bhojani. With 18 of his top management in the room, “it started a little negatively”.

That was deliberate. “I said: ‘Guys, we need to define who we are,’” he recalls. “‘Because the way we are going we are getting more and more silo driven, we are getting more and more classical, and getting very old fashioned.’”

Bhojani believes the best days of the media and communications business will soon be in the past. This could happen in a year, or it could happen in five. “The industry is going through a very, very dramatic change,” he says.

“The industry model is being reinvented,” he continues. “The archaic model was started in 1874, as an advertising agency getting 15 per cent in return for booking space in media. That’s where it started, but today the media business has become disaggregated from that and some people are finding it difficult.”