Social Beat has got Arunima Singh on board as the executive vice president – growth in Mumbai. She will help the agency drive success with existing and new clients for the west region. Singh will work closely with the core team to drive growth and move closer towards the company’s vision of being India’s top independent digital agency by 2021.
Singh comes with more than 19 years of marketing experience, on both client and agency side. A media professional, she has a background in brand management, and marketing. Throughout her nearly two decade long career, Singh has held multiple positions, her last one being business director at Wonderman Thompson. Her journey also includes stints at AdFactors PR, L&K, Saatchi and Saatchi, and Mirum in the past. She brings with her experience in content management, SMM/SEO, website building and management, and business development.
Singh said, “Joining Social Beat, a young & agile agency, beautifully nurtured with a class apart culture and an apt environment where creativity is nurtured and nourished, is indeed a challenging platform for widening my portfolio in digital advertising. It is said that when a drop of waterfalls in the pool, it has no value, whereas if the same drop of waterfalls on a lotus leaf, it can shine like a pearl and a diamond. I am excited & looking forward to working with Social Beat and contributing to taking it to the next level with my team.”
She has worked on brands like Pidilite, Kalpataru, Godrej Group, Essar, KPCL, Parle, HCC, Lavasa, Magma Fincorp, Force Motors, Kotak Mahindra, HUL, Apollo Clinics, Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Tata Housing, Intel, Piramal, Kellogg’s, HSBC,Colgate, and Flipkart during her career so far. She has also won multiple awards during her career.
Social Beat co-founder Vikas Chawla said, “We are ecstatic to have Arunima on board as an EVP in Mumbai. We look forward to working together towards realising our 10X vision to being the no.1 independent digital agency in India. With her immense experience in mainline and digital, she will be a great addition to the team and our journey.”
Social Beat is delighted to strengthen its leadership team by bringing on board Avinash Shenoy, Pratiksha Sinha and Tuhina Bapuli as Executive Vice Presidents (EVP) for Mumbai and Bangalore. They will be working closely with the team to drive growth and move closer towards the company’s vision of being India’s no. 1 independent digital agency by 2021.
Avinash Shenoy hails from a core advertising, brand management and marketing communications background. His professional journey spans across management and execution of strategies for various marquee brands. His 17-year-long professional journey includes working at various key roles in brand marketing and customer marketing at PepsiCo, in addition to managing key personal care brands for Unilever at Lowe. He was also a part of a key online jewellery brand where he worked towards delivering their growth hacking and digital marketing initiatives.
Talking about his new role as an Executive Vice President in Mumbai, Avinash stated, “The new world of the consumer is fast evolving in terms of consumption and communication, thanks to digitisation and e-commerce. It is imperative that brands and businesses are on top of the game to match these needs. I really believe that the team at Social Beat has the right passion and purpose to deliver these evolving digital needs. I am delighted to be a part of this journey and look forward to working with this young and dynamic team to create winning ideas, and solutions to build business for our clients.”
Pratiksha’s career in marketing took shape 6 years ago, with her gaining expertise in creating and executing GTM strategies for known brands across various verticals, including building client relations and business development. Her stint at Sokrati and Anarock has been instrumental in shaping her career in performance marketing. In Anarock, she was also given the opportunity to onboard and work with established brands such as Piramal Realty, TATA Housing, Mahindra, Shapoorji, Viacom, Swiggy and AJIO, to name a few.
Joining Social Beat as an Executive Vice President in Mumbai, Pratiksha shared, “In Social Beat, my key focus area would be to grow our business by almost 10x in the next 18 months, by helping our existing clients scale their customer growth through paid marketing and also onboarding new clients who are looking at driving significant scale through digital.”
Tuhina Bapuli has over 10 years of experience in the craft of core marketing having worked in brand awareness, consumer marketing and brand building. She has also gained exposure in corporate events including MICE and trade meets, and managed dealer engagements with CHA, IT, FMCG, Apparel, BFSI and automotive brands. In addition to this, she has explored structured social and digital marketing attributed to her stint at Autumn Grey - WPP.
Expressing her excitement, Tuhina said: “The digital marketing field is ever-evolving, with the need to stand out in the crowd. It is indeed exciting to step into a new journey in my professional career, working with a company that recognises talent and brings the best results. I look forward to contributing my skills and expertise at our Bangalore office, and utilising digital marketing’s dynamic nature to the fullest.”
Co-Founder, Suneil Chawla said, “As we move towards our goal of being the no. 1 independent digital agency in India, we are really excited to have Avinash, Pratiksha and Tuhina join us and play a crucial role in our growth journey. With each of them having varied experiences across branding, storytelling and performance marketing - we look forward to them accelerating our growth, nurturing talent and taking our work across some of India’s best brands. We are delighted to have the three of them be a part of this journey.”
It is safe to say that the user experience offered by the digital assets of a brand either makes or breaks its online image. The exponential growth of mobile users in the past few years has made it imperative for companies to up their game while engaging with the next billion internet users. This need gave rise to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for faster and easy access to mobile-responsive pages. However, Google has now introduced the “Swipe to Visit” option for AMP-enabled sites to seamlessly direct users to your website from an image search. Here’s all you need to know about this recent update.
Say, you search for an image in Google. Once you key in your inputs, you land on the result page showing multiple images pertaining to your search. Now, when you click on a particular image, it enlarges and suggests related images in the bottom. However, with the new update, there is a preview of the AMP-enabled website in the footer of the image search page. Users can swipe up the preview option to quickly view the corresponding web page that contains the original image listed in the search results. While reading the AMP article, in case you want to get back to the image search result page, all you have to do is to swipe down.
Recent data shows that nearly 63 percent of users performing image searches on Google, click on the image to visit the source website. Leveraging the Swipe to Visit option will now enhance user experience, which, in turn, will help in improving organic traffic to the website. This provides a chance for brand awareness and will lead to the domino effect of increased time spent on the website, due to the high-quality content available to consume. Hence, it is crucial for the website to load quickly and be SEO friendly for better results. On the whole, the Swipe to Visit option enhances the conversion rate of the product which is vital for the success of effective digital marketing. To add to that, web pages that are already AMP-enabled need not take an additional effort to update the Swipe to Visit option as it is automatically upgraded.
Although images are not the most common types of search, since a picture speaks a thousand words, your website will receive increased number of clicks due to this convenient option. Therefore, Swipe to Visit is an important break-through to naturally channelise traffic to your website and improve the quality of leads generated.
Suneil Chawla recently participated in the Pitch CMO Summit 2019 held in Bangalore. The Pitch CMO Summit is a flagship property of exchange4media group, and the presenting partner for the event was The Hindu. Each year the summit focuses on current and relevant marketing topics, in the transforming global market. This year's theme for the event was ‘Demystifying Brand Building Experience’.
The discussion started off with the topic ‘Survival of the Fittest: How Brands can win in the Digital Age’. The panelists for the discussion were Aarti B Iyer, Marketing Head, Unibic; Ashutosh Vaidya, Chief Marketing Officer, Kurlon; Mangesh Panditrao – CEO, Shoptimize; Meera Iyer, Chief Marketing Officer, Medlife.com; Samyukta Ganesh Iyer, Head of Marketing, Baskin Robbins India, and Suneil Chawla, Co-Founder, Social Beat & Influencer.in. The session was moderated by Ramesh Jude Thomas, President and Chief Knowledge Officer, EQUiTOR Value Advisory.
The discussion started off on a political note which then moved towards recognition of a brand followed by how brands need to constantly adapt to changes and keep up with new trends. Suneil Chawla speaks about the importance of gaining the trust of a customer by reaching out to them and how digital makes people create shortcuts which helps in a faster response.
The event was a grand success with insight being shared by industry leaders, helping in understanding the role of digital marketing and brand building experiences.
2nd April 2019: Social Beat, one of India’s leading digital marketing agencies, bagged two top awards in the ‘Digital’ category at the recently held ‘Maddys 2019’ in Chennai. The first, a Gold Award, is for the Best Use of Digital for Klay Schools, and the second, a Bronze, for the Best Digital Public Service for Social Beat’s road safety awareness video.
‘Maddys 2019’ is an annual award event organised by the Ad Club of Madras to honour the most creative minds of the Indian advertising industry. This is one of the top advertising awards recognising path-breaking campaigns in various categories such as Print, Radio, TV and Digital.
Commenting on the digital initiatives for Klay Schools, Vikas Chawla, co-founder of Social Beat, said, “Klay is one of our premier clients in the educational sector and our specialised digital initiatives have played a significant role in establishing them as one of the preferred pre-schools in India. We began with a refresh of their website keeping in mind factors like design functionalities and user - experience. We also leveraged their YouTube channel with a series of videos highlighting the environment and the approach adopted by Klay schools in nurturing future generations. The center-specific digital campaign strategies proved to be a great tool for increased visibility, creating brand awareness and driving walk-ins.”
In addition to this, Social Beat also won an award for their unique video highlighting the importance of maintaining good road etiquette. Speaking about this recognition, Suneil Chawla, co-founder of Social Beat said, “The video titled ‘A Day in the office ft. Bad Drivers’ highlights the bad behaviour of drivers on the road compared to everyday work life. We projected basic road safety rules such as ‘Don’t text while driving’ and ‘Don’t drive on pavements’ using some common professional etiquette examples. This video was a huge hit on all our social media platforms.”
These awards follow close on the heels of the prestigious ‘Best Digital Marketing Agency of the Year’ that Social Beat won at the Marketing Maverick Awards held in Mumbai.
Social Beat recently concluded the Digital Leadership Summit for 2019 held at Bangalore. The event was a grand success. With industry leaders sharing their insights. Mr. Atin Chhabra - General Manager, Marketing at Schneider Electric shed light on the digital transformation of B2B Customer Experience for large and diverse organizations like Schneider Electric. Here are some of the highlights of the session.
Gone are the days when companies introduced a product in the market and it had to be accepted by the consumers. Times have changed, today there are more platforms for consumers, more architectures to experiment on and more connected products. This gives rise to a demand-side play, consumers these days do not demand more products or services but a more engaging customer experience.
Mr. Atin speaks about how it wasn’t long ago when the competition was determined on the basis of products or services. Another company selling similar products or services they were considered as competition. However, that isn’t the case anymore. For a company like Schneider which deals with energy, management, and automation, the competitor for Schneider would be Amazon. This is solely because of the customer experience offered by companies like Amazon. The thin line between who competitors are and who offers a better experience is diminishing.
Traditionally competitive advantage was factored in on the basis of 2 key points which are:
However, gone are the days when competitive advantage meant low cost and differentiation. Today there are a number of companies that offer both lower costs while also being highly differentiated. One of the most important takeaways from this differentiated competitive advantage is the scale of operations and the experience they have within the specific domain. This indeed is competitive for any traditional company.
To adapt to this companies may look at case studies on big internet giants like Google, Uber, and Amazon, but this constitutes only 6% of the total companies in the world. Other than these big companies that make the 6% while the rest of the 94% of companies which have existed for more than a century or two. What is it that these traditional companies that make up the 94% have done? How do they compete with the big names? According to the statistics, these traditional companies who have implemented digital transformation strategies have seen a 9% increase in revenue. They have seen a whopping 26% increase in profitability. Not only does the digital transformation for companies help in money making but also helps in saving costs. These companies are known as digital masters.
Digital Masters look at digital transformation on two dimensions:
Digital Capabilities today are spread across 3 different functions.
According to public data, close to 70 percent of digital transformation investments go to digital customer experience. This is because over the course of time customers have also changed, this change is not limited to B2C but also B2B customers.
The change is such that 57 percent of the B2B customers have decided what to purchase even before contacting the vendor. Almost 55 percent are looking for B2B products on social media platforms other than LinkedIn. The most astonishing fact is that 86 percent is willing to pay 16 percent more price for an amazing experience. While a good digital experience is important for the digital footprint, it is important to have content to offer a good experience.
DCX or Digital Customer Experience is becoming the forefront to interact, engage and transact with customers. It is very important to get the basics of user experience correct.
Here are the four pillars for creating a digital customer experience function or strategy.
These four pillars need to be kept in mind while creating a digital customer experience strategy. As each pillar looks into important aspects of a digital customer experience this ensures the strategy covers these aspects.
Here are 4 pillars looked upon for the digital transformation agenda at Schneider:
Digital Marketing was considered to be the future of marketing until a few years ago but of late it has all boiled down to digital customer experience. This digital customer experience works across the entire company. It is important to increase the competence of the people, while hiring is possible, the most effective way is by upskilling and strong digital community program. The top-down approach helps in building a stronger digital community within an organization rather than hiring a small group.
Over the last two years, LinkedIn has become a go-to advertising platform, especially for the B2B segments. With new features such as lead ads and matched audience, advertisers have been able to reach a qualified target audience at a competitive cost per leads. In an effort to constantly improve the ad platform, LinkedIn has recently updated its ad targeting options, providing three new features – Lookalike Audiences, Interest Targeting and Audience Templates. These new options afford marketers the chance to scale their marketing efforts and improve ROI. Let’s take a closer look at these features.
Lookalike Audiences is a feature already used by Facebook. This powerful tool helps you target and reach audiences who are similar to your ideal consumer. LinkedIn’s new tool combines traits of your ideal consumer with their company and member data to help you reach newer audiences that are similar to your existing customers, website visitors and target accounts.
Here are the benefits of Lookalike Audiences:
Extend the reach of your ad campaigns to many more qualified prospective leads. Lookalike Audiences can help improve your campaign reach by 5-10x, while still reaching only high-quality audiences that matter to your brand.
B2B marketers can use this tool to target their ads to companies they may not have considered before. These new companies will match a similar company profile to their ideal customer. Here’s more on how small businesses can leverage LinkedIn to generate leads.
LinkedIn introduced its Interest Targeting feature in January of this year. This tool gives marketers the advantage of reaching LinkedIn users with relevant ads that match their professional interests. LinkedIn has further expanded its marketing capabilities by partnering with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. This adds an additional level of interest targeting whereby you can now reach users via the topics or content they search for and consume. All this is done in a way that completely respects members’ privacy.
Audience Templates are a boon for marketers who are new to advertising on LinkedIn or for existing marketers looking to reach newer audiences. With this new feature, you can choose from 20 predefined B2B audience templates that include characteristics like job titles, skills, groups and so on. With just a single click, you can create a set model to target specific audiences, without wasting too much time at set up.
Lookalike Audiences, Interest Targeting with Bing and Audience Templates are now available to all LinkedIn advertisers. Leveraging these three new features will help B2B brands bolster and scale their ad campaigns to reach a more extensive number of highly-qualified leads via digital. You can also read our blog on LinkedIn Showcase Pages and why you must use them for more information on LinkedIn’s marketing tools.
2019 marks the 11th year since YouTube’s entry into the Indian market. To help marketers and creators understand the massive impact YouTube has made in India and its importance in the digital ecosystem today, Youtube hosted the 2019 Brandcast in India.
YouTube currently has over 265M users in the country and this number is expected to reach 500M by 2020. This incredible number is in relation to the increase in the total number of internet users in India that has grown from 15M just five years ago to 100s of millions of users today. Its ability to provide a personalised media experience and offer content in various languages has made YouTube one of India’s most-used platforms.
Over the last 11 years, YouTube has become a platform for storytellers and creators to share content in different languages and reach an engaged audience in rural areas and big cities alike. It has become a success story for numerous YouTubers like ‘Mostly Sane’ who uses YouTube to discuss social issues such as mental health (the channel is currently at 3M subscribers) and more recently Priyanka Chopra, who chose YouTube to extend her audience reach with hew new show ‘If I could do just one thing’.
Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, says it is the preferred social platform for creators and businesses alike due to its ability to reach out to a large audience pool in a personalised way. When Pepsi ran an ad campaign on YouTube, it saw a 14% increase in sales and 3.3x return in ad spend. Alternatively, Hyundai’s ad campaign had a massive audience reach of 221M. The ability to scale and impact on YouTube can result in business leading results. Currently, vernacular content is taking centre stage and has helped increase engagement across all channels.
Mark Patterson of Group M discussed the video revolution in India and how it has changed the way brands communicate with their customers. Group M is a media advertising company that has had a presence in Asia for more than 2 decades and is responsible for 1 in 2 ads in India.
Mark highlighted the evolution of the media landscape and how mobile video has become a secret weapon for many marketers. One of the main reasons for this is the change in the way users consume content and seek entertainment. They look for three things: convenience, customisation and choice. Statistics show that 60-70% of people in India consume content on mobile video every day.
The digital spends in India remain comparatively low when compared to China where 64% of ad spends is digital while this is only at 18% in India. However, India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world at a 14% GDP and digital ad spends is expected to catch up soon.
Mark Patterson also discussed the three main themes on the why and how of digital advertising in India and how YouTube affects these themes.
1. Driving results across through the funnel
YouTube has allowed marketers to have a mass reach and gain more awareness of their brand with tools such as YouTube Masthead.
2. Unlocking creativity
YouTube allows for personalised messaging that has helped deliver performance. This has resulted in a 20% uplift inconsideration, a 31% increase in awareness and a 900% increase in search queries.
3. Cross channel planning
While this is still a fairly new concept for most media agencies. Group M has taken a step in this direction by integrating YouTube reach data with Group M planning tools. This has helped them optimise maximum reach across multiple devices.
It is no secret that Youtube has become the secret weapon for many marketers to reach their target audience. To take advantage of the immense reach that Youtube offers, Social Beat collaborated with our client Sundaram Mutual to create a masthead ad to promote their new fund. This campaign generated incredible results, proving the effectiveness of Youtube as a medium to reach out to the target market.
Sundaram was launching an open-ended equity scheme and wanted to create awareness around their product within a short period of time. Digital marketing has been proven to provide finance companies with the reach they require so Youtube was the obvious choice when it came to achieving the objective.
Mastheads are usually charged on a daily basis so we used the 24 hour period we had as effectively as we could. To enable maximum viewership we ran the campaign over the weekend. For the entirety of the day any individual that accessed Youtube through their desktop, tablet or mobile device saw the masthead ad at the top of their pages. This helped us increase our subscriber base and drive traffic to the website.
The 20-second Sundaram masthead achieved phenomenal results. Sundaram’s subscriber base grew from 356 to an outstanding 56,000! It has increased since then and is currently standing at 57,000 and growing every day. The video also generated 14 million views in a span of 24 hours.
To achieve these incredible results, we adopted a digital-first marketing strategy to reach the target audience. We were also able to track and measure our results to scale the brand to new heights.
You can read more about our Youtube ad campaign with Sundaram Mutual here.
Ben Jones, Creative Director at Google says that 30% of ROI is driven by media elements and targeting data. The other 70% comes from creative. There are three elements that affect ROI in digital:
Many people assume that with all the content out there, the consumer’s attention span is decreasing but this is not true because people today prefer long-form content to short-form content. What has changed is how quickly consumers reject and accept the content they consume. The content needs to be longer, richer, deeper and grab the attention of the viewer faster.
Another way a brand can improve ROI is by understanding the customers better with more personalised messaging. They should change content according to the target audience and in a way that will allow the brand to relate to the customer better. Statistics show that customisation of the ads specific to the target market can result in a 10% lift in ad recall.
Research has shown that In India 60-70% of content is consumed via the mobile device. Therefore, when creating content, brands need to keep in mind that the shots framed and the stories told are optimised for the mobile user. It is important for agencies to rethink their digital content strategies this way so they are able to get the brand message to the target audience better.
To help agencies adopt the above strategies in their content plan, a new Rethink Council has been created to identify how brands can rethink their marketing and targeting to measure and maximise creativity to connect to the customer.
YouTube Brandcast India 2019 ended with an insightful discussion with world-renowned director Zoya Akhtar. She highlighted the importance of the role YouTube played in her recent film ‘Gully Boy’ and how she was able to discover and do in-depth research for the movie through YouTube. YouTube also played a huge role in promoting the supporting content for the movie such as trailers and interviews.
YouTube has played a crucial role in the evolution of digital media in India and YouTube Brandcast 2019 highlighted the importance of the digital platform and how it has changed the way people consume content in India.
Road safety has become more important over the years as the number of cars on the road has continued to increase. Traffic safety is essential as it helps prevent drivers of vehicles from causing accidents and hitting pedestrians. Laws are enforced to ensure the safe and efficient flow of traffic.
Social Beat recently did a video on road safety titled ‘A Day in the Office ft. Bad Drivers’. The objective of the video was to mirror the bad behaviour of drivers on the road in our everyday office life. It took a hilarious stance on road safety and covered rules such as ‘Don’t text while driving’ and ‘Don’t drive on pavements’ with the use of common office etiquette as examples. The video aimed to communicate the message that the rules you follow at the workplace should be followed on the road as well.
The video was promoted on Facebook and Instagram and had a total reach of 26,264.
It helped broaden our presence and increase engagement on social media and increase the number of subscribers and followers on different social media platforms. The video also demonstrated our expertise across different video types.
As a part of our Second Digital Leadership Summit at Mumbai, a panel discussion was held on the future trends of digital marketing - AI, augmented reality and vernacular content. The two panellists were Ms Channan Sawhney - Head, Digital Marketing, Johnson & Johnson and Mr. Prathyush Kukreja – Head, Product Monetisation at Haptik. The session was moderated by Mr. David Appasamy, Head of Brand & Strategy, Social Beat.
Prathyush from Johnson & Johnson enlightened the
audience on how the perception of AI has changed over the years. He said that
in 2015, AI was just a buzz word and no one really knew what AI was. The
preconceived notion was that AI will automate everything, leading to
unemployment. But, in 2018, the scenario has changed. Expectations have become
realistic and technology has come to a place where it can add value to
achieving the necessary business objectives.
According to Prathyush, this is an era of Conversational AI, a subset of Artificial Intelligence backed with data collected by brands and advertisers. Brands must build conversational AI to communicate with the users based on their behavioural and transactional or historical behaviour. Unlike a television commercial or a radio advertisement, conversational AI is not linear and one-to-one. When you use conversational AI in advertising and branding, each and every customer is unique and the content will be customised according to the needs of that particular user. He further added that Artificial Intelligence considers several other factors such as the buying nature and purchase frequency of the user. This where AI is today. AI is no longer a buzz word today, but, it is a tool of competitive advantage. Currently, brands are competing with each other to develop better AI to deliver better ROI in terms of acquiring users and telling better brand stories.
Channan from Johnson & Johnson said that AI technology is not utilised to its fullest in FMCG industry. If used properly, AI has the power to break the clutter and make the brand stand out. Brands can convey right messages to the user in such a way so as to create a long lasting impact on the audience. Johnson & Johnson is employing AI technology rather than AR. Google and Facebook have already started their AI and AR journey. Other brands have huge benefits from this. But, for FMCG companies, implementation of AI technology is extremely important since this is an industry that communicates with its audience on a day-to-day basis.
According to Channan, consumers are always on a look out for good content on the Internet. In the case of Johnson & Johnson, there is a huge demand for content related to pregnancy and newborn care. It is observed that most of the customers prefer consuming the content in their own local languages. If you are a market leader in a particular industry, it is important to take the lead and provide the kind of content that the consumer is looking for. That’s why Johnson & Johnson has adopted an active native content strategy. One of the biggest priorities for Johnson & Johnson is to strengthen their regional content strategy so as to deliver the right brand messages for the audience in a manner that they want to hear.
Prathyush highlighted the importance of integrating voice search and vernacular content to build the effectiveness of conversational AI. Nowdays, majority of people are accessing the Internet using vernacular languages rather than English. The Internet has witnessed a commendable shift with the introduction of voice search. This technology is much user-friendly in the sense that users can directly talk to the device without even touching it. Hence the power of voice search is immense. According to data from Google, after the introduction of voice search, Hindi is the most preferred language for content consumption. Taking this into consideration, Haptik is also working on developing a conversational AI with vernacular capabilities. Many of the leading advertisers are also leveraging Devanagari scripts and other local languages in their lead generation and branding campaigns on various digital platforms.
Channan cited that one of the biggest wins of investing in AI is that market study has become easier like never before. With the adoption of AI technology, brands can provide efficient solutions to customers in a much faster manner. This technology has the huge power to transform the way in which data is processed and maintained for delivering business results
Prathyush spoke about an interesting campaign that Haptik had conceptualised for the Bollywood movie Thugs of Hindostan. Google Maps was a great digital marketing tool for this movie. When somebody asked for directions, instead of the usual voice, users could hear directions from Aamir Khan himself. These innovations by Google and Facebook can be adopted by companies specialised in AI technology in order to help brands and advertisers offer value to their customers.
Prathyush cited a recent case study on how HDFC Life
executed a branding campaign using AI. The brand wanted to create awareness
about importance on investing in Life Insurance among the millennials. For this
Haptik created an AI personality called Shayari
wala who educated the millennials on the importance of investing in the
form of shayaris. The main reasons why HDFC strategised their campaign in this
way is primarily because millennials love story telling and they consume
content that is fun and quirky.
According to Channan, Augmented Reality is a great
story telling tool for brands if it is used for delivering the right message.
For instance, some of the brands have incorporated AR for product packaging. A
well conceptualised AR lead can communicate great brand stories to the
consumers.
On the contrary, Prathyush said that the use of AR in
branding and digital marketing is still vague and unclear. There is no clarity
on how brands can measure ROI, drive sales and generate leads using an AR
campaign. Augmented reality is a great platform for education and can be easily
adopted by real estate and gaming industries. But, it will take a few more years
for AR to establish itself in the digital landscape.
AI plays a huge role in automation of ads, said
Prathyush. The time taken for education and lead generation have become much
faster with the use of AI technology. According to Channan, marketing
automation is all about programmatic ads, best custom audiences and precision
marketing that help in delivering right brand messages for the right target audience.
Channan also highlighted the importance for brands to
identify ways to migrate content users to vernacular chatbots. For this, brands
must focus on investing in real time machine learning and customised content
that can play a huge role in understanding your customers, drive sales and
generate leads.
This was indeed an insightful panel discussion and brand strategists from across sectors understood the need for adopting such advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and augmented reality to drive sales, generate leads and withstand competition.