With over 20 years of extensive experience in consumer banking and life insurance sector, across diverse geographies, varied markets and multiple customer segments, Vighnesh Shahane is the CEO and Wholetime Director of IDBI Federal Life Insurance. A postgraduate from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, Shahane has also represented Mumbai in the Ranji Trophy for three years. He has worked with well-known financial services organizations in India like ANZ Grindlays, Standard Chartered Bank and with Mashreq Bank in the UAE.  We kick off a new season of ‘BTL Baatein’ 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 activity to your overall marketing plan? And overall in the financial services sector?
I think BTL activity is important to us. We have a marketing budget, out of which we allocate some to ATL and lot of it is BTL. BTL is what we do at point of sales. We have a lot of sales coming from brank branches. So, BTL is very important to us. It has to be a combination of ATL and BTL, a clever tactical combination.
Can you give a broad idea of your spends pie of ATL v/s BTL?
Very ballpark, now, it could be 80-20. After we got in to sports marketing and sports branding, promoting sports at the grassroot level along with these foundations [like the IDBI Bowling Foundation], we are also sponsoring marathons. Now, with ATL advertising, we have been investing a lot more to create a balance. We want to build a brand and create some awareness about the brand.
Can you also specify the range of activities that you undertake as part of the below-the-line advertising and promotion?
These are regular activities- the brochure, the posters, banners, a lot of activation games and stuff like that, we keep doing as BTL.
Do you prefer to do this through BTL agencies directly or via your existing creative/media agency?
We do it internally. It is all inhouse.
In terms of generating results especially from consumers and in B2B, do you find BTL a more sureshot avenue than ATL?
ATL has a different purpose; BTL has its different purpose. ATL creates awareness, recognition. BTL happens at the point of sale. So, both have a role to play. A lot of business comes from branch of the banks. So, people who walk in to the banks, if visible in the branch premise, and then it helps. At the same time they should have heard about our product. They should be aware about IDBI Federal.
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?
What output comes out of a BTL campaign is how we measure. If not, fulfill sales but at least how many leads do you generate, how many people will make enquires, how many people are interested; so we measure a successful BTL activity across these parameters. It is not only the final output in terms of sales, it is also about how many people came, enquired and how many leads that you get. May be they did not convert immediately, they will convert later.
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?
Especially, for a company like ours, the first five to six years we were very BTL-centric. It is only now, in the last two years, that we realised that we need to create a brand and create more recognition for our brand that we have gone for ATL. Otherwise, a lot of our sales come from bank branches and we need to be extremely focused at the point of sales. But we need to create awareness also and hence in the last two years we have gone ATL centric. But initially we were very BTL-centric, 95% of our marketing budget would have been BTL.