Mindshare’s Amrita Randhawa Reveals the Secrets to Video Pitching | GroupM’s The ReGroup Ep. 2

The ReGroup is a limited series hosted by GroupM’s Global CEO, Christian Juhl. It’s an intimate conversation with the people who bring great advertising to life everyday—GroupM team members. The series features guests from GroupM and its portfolio of brands, including Mindshare, MediaCom, Wavemaker, Essence, m/SIX and Xaxis.

In episode two, Christian speaks with Amrita Randhawa, Mindshare’s Asia Pacific CEO, who takes us to her Shanghai office as China gets back to a new normal, shares with us how her teams have been her source of inspiration and why everyone should spend part of their career in China.

Now, as people in that region – particularly in China – are beginning to head back to work within this new normal, Christian Juhl, GroupM’s Global CEO, caught up with Amrita Randhawa, Mindshare’s Asia Pacific CEO, to find out what it was like to begin to go back to work in China, how her teams have been her source of inspiration and why everyone should spend part of their career in China.

It’s in these types of moments that we really get to see the best of our people. Our teams made some fantastic adjustments and, as business was still functioning as usual, new business pitch teams had to adjust. Randhawa and her teams rose to the occasion and, as she put it, remote pitching seemed to be “arguably much less stressful. All you have is the screen to talk to. People felt a lot less intimidated… they could have their notes next to them and there was no issue. But you have to prep on the tech with main and backup computers! We had masking tape on the ground so people would stay in their box and not go out of screen. My favorite tip is we put a set of eyes on the camera on computers so they would still remember to look at who they were presenting to.”

But, now that China is heading back to work, they are excited to get back to that “new normal.” Randhawa, however, recalls her time spent working remotely.

“We’re at the stage where you have fond memories of when you were at home working remotely,” said Randhawa. “We did everything remotely, including pitches, and it seemed to work. But it’s surprising how quickly you get back to normal and how quickly you get back to everything being almost exactly the same as it was before, apart from being really careful in elevators and public spaces.”

And it’s in looking back that Randhawa is able to pull inspiration from her teams for their adaptability and resiliency. “The team members from Wuhan and in the Hubei province are really my gold standard for inspiration because they were the first to go through everything, but my God, what amazing people,” she said. “For everything they were going through, they didn’t let it bother them work wise.”

For all that is going on for Randhawa and the rest of our teams in that region, though, she wouldn’t change a thing. She called going to China to work “the most significant career decision I made.” She then went on to say that “whoever I talk to within the company, I always tell them, come do a year, come to two years, come do three years, come spend a part of your life here because you just have no conception of the pace of change here and how you, how you really get challenged in new ways.”

And, finally, Randhawa closed with an incredible piece of career advice: “When somebody puts down a career opportunity in front of you and maybe you’re not ready for it in your own head and you think that, you know, I don’t know whether I want to do it, it’s going to be hard to just embrace it, try your best and you never know what you can do.”