Malay Dikshit is the Chief Communications Officer of Tata Sky Ltd. His role comprises being responsible for developing marketing and communication strategies traditional and new age mediums. He brings with him over 15 years of experience spanning across divisions like marketing, sales and operations. We present to you the ‘BTL Baatein’ of the week which is powered by VISCOMM with Anuka Roy speaking to him Below The Line (BTL) advertising, the focus of the company and the balance between ATL (Above The Line) and BTL
How important is BTL to your overall marketing plan?
It is an essential and it is not just important. Both ATL and BTL co-exist together with specific roles. Yes, it is an important leg of our brand planning.
Can you also specify the range of activities that you undertake as part of the below-the-line advertising and promotion?
We go to about 12,000 villages below 5,000 population towns to start with. There are many things we do but essentially we want to give a simple message to the consumer who has not seen DTH, to say that Tata Sky in particular takes your family entertainment to a different level. A simple message which says ‘TV banega super TV’ meaning you will get much more value out of your TV, is the message we give. It is a campaign in our BTL activations. We go to villages either in the form of vans, going to about 8,000 villages, displaying our content through huge TV screens, through mailers, showing the depth and quality of content that we have. We got some good results and we extended it to urban areas, seven or eight towns we have targeted right now. People who do not have a DTH connection at home and how can Tata Sky bring a lot of value to the household. So, that is the broad kind of activities that we do.
In terms of BTL, there is usually associated with just going on the field and announcing but taking some learnings from our digital marketing where we see influencer marketing in a very evolved stage. We have an influencer marketing programme even in the rural areas. Our people go there, they talk to a school, take a session with children which introduces Active Education for you, there is Vedic Mathematics, there is English that you can learn, there is classroom tutorial that fits the sixth, seventh or eighth standard syllabus seesions you can have on TV, you use the school Principal as the influencer there or the school teacher. Then you go to a housewife of a particular mohalla and talk to her about cooking, influence her so that she spreads the message that you can learn cooking. We talk to Pandits in the village about Active Darshan or Active Devotion; they become influencer in the town. So, there is an influencer model also in place.
Even our campaign extensions are in the BTL area. Once we ran a Kangana and Dhanushko missed call campaign, it got included in the same activation infrastructure we had. We keep on refreshing our messages also for our BTL activations.
Can you give a broad idea of your spends pie of ATL v/s BTL?
More important than spends is where do our acquisitions come from and I am very pleased that at least 50% plus of our new acquisitions come from rural areas. That is the sign of our BTL activations working.
Do you prefer to do this through BTL agencies directly or via your existing creative/ media agency?
It is difficult to isolate either or. Everybody has got to work in alignment because there is a brand message, there a brand priority that we need to relay to the rest of the world. The most important thing is you need to offer to the consumer, there has to be uniformity in the messaging irrespective of the medium we are using, whether it is BTL or ATL. Usually, we tie them up together- the BTL and ATL agency- and both of them together come up with ideas.
In terms of generating results especially from consumers and in B2B, do you find BTL a more sureshot avenue than ATL?
ATL plays a very specific role of driving consideration. BTL comes in to the loop when the person has got inquisitive; there is a demand, a pull towards the brand, it is the BTL activation which converts to buy a product. For example, if we even consider the rural activation programme that we are doing – TV banega super TV – the consumer gets to see our advertisement, he gets to see our message and here comes an activation team and starts convincing him to buy a conversion action, that is when the magic works. Both of them have to work in tandem and it is not one or the other.
While sales and salience are good indicators of its success, what are the attributes you look at to measure the success of a BTL campaign?
One is top to bottom consideration, how are they doing. Actual conversions: how are they moving and as I said share of acquisition. So, of my acquisitions in a month or a year coming from a particular geography is an indicator of the entire marketing mix. It is not just BTL which works; it is both of them together that work. It depends on where you want to focus as geography – a region or a particular consumer type- that decides how you want to lay out advertising and sales promotion plans. All of that put together works for us.
There are many organisations that often do new launches almost entirely on BTL aided with an outdoor and/or digital blitz? Your view on this. Given rising media costs, do you see BTL managing on its own, without ATL?
It is a mixture of consideration and conversion. So, many times BTL on its own if it tries to do becomes sub-optimal. Both of them have to co-exist. There has to be a consideration message and conversion message. Sometimes just an outdoor and a digital blitz might do the consideration job and BTL does the conversion job. It depends on who the consumer is, what the particular company is targeting and what it is not. For us, we have a huge range of consumers, right from people who are digital natives to people who have not seen DTH in their house at all. Different kinds of messages work, different kinds of marketing plans work there. When that happens it needs to be a mix of ATL as well as BTL.