Tag: Sunita Rajan

By A Correspondent

The third India edition of digital marketing event, ad:tech New Delhi 2013 saw panellists deliberate on topics such as integrated mobile marketing, video integration, location-based relevancy, social media ROI, search and content. Alyssa Altman, Vice President, SapientNitro, in her keynote on the second day of Ad:tech New Delhi 2013 shared findings of their survey in which 88 percent of respondents said that today’s global marketing world has become challenging than ever before. She cited a Gartner study which predicts that by 2017, CMOs will purchase more technology than CIOs.

While the first day of the conference focused on marketers’ perspectives on the digital consumer; the second day hailed ‘gamification’ as the latest trend for this year and speakers predicted that it will become a major global experience by 2016. Globally, there are more than 500 million people playing games at least for one hour every day. Avinash Jhangiani, Vice President – Digital, Omnicom Media Group, explained about their game changing live collaboration platform for global media planning, ‘Source’, which can even create powerpoint decks automatically. He also shared examples of brands like Visa, Mahindra and Movie Munchies that have successfully gamified their campaigns.

Citing the example of Mario Bros, Rahul Avasthy, Director Strategy for Zapak Digital Entertainment, said that the same game mechanics can be applied to non-game real-life experiences to help solve the challenges of bounce rate and converting latent leads (CPL). He noted that successful campaigns require not just good content but also intent, citing the example of Arby’s Burger which leveraged gamification generated over 41,000 organic entrants and 3,00,000 actions.

Mohd. Imthiaz of Hoppr said that there are only 20 million smart phone users in India which is why marketers need to plan campaigns that can run on every type of phone. He said that location-based services can help make the typical lean hours into peak hours. He mentioned that for a consumer, the real benefit a marketer can provide is the joy of watching and sharing content.

Praveen Sharma, Head of Media Sales, Google India, insisted that with proliferation of multi-screens, apart from the opportunity, it also poses challenge for content creators since viewers filter out the mediocrity on screens other than the TV. T Gangadhar, MD, MEC India said, “As a media agency, we are moving away from media planning to audience planning. We consider YouTube as channel. Plans are increasingly becoming video plans.”

Prashant Singh, MD – Media, Nielsen India said, “It is important for a digital campaign to be based on three parameters: reach, resonance and reaction. Getting these three basics right would help measure the ROI.” Pratik Mazumder, Head Marketing and Strategic Relations, Yatra.com highlighted the fact that while brands are insistent on ROI from digital media, many brands do not move beyond ‘Likes’ on social media to engage with the consumer.

The event concluded with power-packed presentations from Sunita Rajan, Senior Vice President, BBC Advertising who spoke on ‘Revenue at the speed of User Adoption’ and Bettina Sherick, SVP Digital Strategic marketing, 20th century Fox International on ‘Marketing the cinema experience in a digital world’. She cited the example of global marketing initiatives for Life of Pi and how Fox leveraged the proliferation of digital platforms for marketing purposes, and also created innovations for consumers to disconnect and experience films on the big screen.