BackHow are brands planning media in 2020?
A fragmented market, digital disruption and emergence of diverse communication channels have led to media plans getting revolutionized in the last decade. What are marketers doing to stay on top of it all? In the fourteenth episode of HT Brand Studio Live, Season 2, seven brand leaders shared their views.
PremiumWe have moved far away from the time when front-page print ads held precedence over every other form of brand communication. Advertising moved to television and before long, digital channels took over.
Archana Aggarwal, VP-Media, Airtel said, “I want to call this era the ‘decade of disruption’; the pace of change has been so fast. The way technological changes happened and the way they were adopted were far faster than any of us anticipated. The way consumers consume media and entertainment and the way they shop have all changed rapidly thanks to cheap data prices, the adoption of mobile phones and the explosion of the internet."
Aggarwal was speaking at the 14th edition of HT Brand Studio Live, Season 2. It is a series that gets the brains behind India’s top brands to decode marketing innovations and more. It is anchored by Rameet Arora, Chief Operating Officer, HT Digital Streams, and co-hosted by HT Brand Studio and DMAasia.
Add to this change the fragmentation in the market itself, with myriad consumer preferences. Anand Chakravarthy, Managing Director- India, Essence, said, “India probably has six different ‘India’s within it, if you look through a digital lens. The digital natives are affluent consumers who are on platforms like Google, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and, maybe, Tinder. Then there’s the middle class of India, where there are other platforms; WhatsApp plays a much bigger role. Google and Facebook are still there, with the latter probably taking precedence over Instagram. One level lower shows new ecosystems starting to emerge in terms of usage, there’s SHAREit, ShareChat, TikTok. These consumers could be across town classes, but they are still entering the Internet through very different touchpoints."
Needless to say, brands needs to be internet-savvy. Ashim Gupta, Head Consumer Communication, Uber India said, “Brand communication is entirely built around digital now. Print used to be predominant 20-22 years ago. But, right now, it’s just a very small component of the media mix."
Not to mention, it’s important to have an integrated approach where an unified brand message can be communicated with the consumer. Rajul Kulshreshtha, CEO, Madison Media said, “20 years ago, the most important thing for us was to get a front page ad in a national newspaper. Then we moved on to television and a whole bunch of other things. The media executive needs to be more integrated in his approach, he looks at life from a media-agnostic perspective, from a brand perspective. He needs to understand the needs of a brand in this changing environment and which media works better keeping in mind the brand objectives."
Mohit Joshi, Managing Director – India, Havas Media Group, held similar views. He said: “In this decade, we will see a M3 approach that stands for, ‘meaningful, moment, media plan’. At least the first two are extremely critical. According to our own research, 80% of the brands could disappear tomorrow and consumers wouldn’t care. The consumer connection is missing and that is where meaningful media comes into play. Connecting with consumers in a meaningful way, in the right context, on the right medium is crucial."
At the end of the day, it all comes down to figuring out consumer needs. Ashish Tiwari, Sr. Vice President - Marketing and Digital, Future Generali India Life Insurance, said, “Data provides a very black and white angle of looking at things; humans are not black and white, they are grey. Brands need to look at the ‘itch’ a consumer has, put consumers in the centre, and understand what they can do to solve that itch. Media planning today is all about owning the entire consumer journey. The communication plan has to become phygital."
Personalization is equally important, and the same can be achieved through thoughtful storytelling. Geetu Bhatnagar, Head of Marketing, Oracle India, said, “Storytelling brings out empathy, the brand itself along with customer need. These days, there’s softwares and black boxes available where brands -- through social listening, SEO, multiple digital body language readings -- can actually know who the customer is, what he wants, where he is consuming content so that the brand message can be personalised and given to him."
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