Experiment Is Key: Taking Marketing From Retro To Revolutionary

As people continue to shift towards online streaming, ecommerce shopping, D2C websites, marketing and media continue to disrupt the industry for good. This growing trend is why advertisers previously using analogue advertising are shifting more towards new digital mediums to run their advertisements and reap maximum benefits.

“There is an explosion of content on all channels and emergence of media – OTT, web and more. The time has changed as to not only how we consume content but also how we shop,” mentions Anand Thakur, Head of Agency and Mid-Market, Criteo. Speaking about the challenges of being a marketer, he said, “On newer channels the number of visitors is huge. The digital space is a multi-touchpoint, multi-channel, how do I identify my audience?” He further highlights the significance of the unification of consumer data.

Commerce media is the fastest growing media channel that is known to understand shopping behaviour to many specifics. “D2C websites realised that they need to park more money in digital branding. OTT always tried to portray itself as digital marketing or branding platform. In order to match the pace, I believe that advanced AI solutions would help brands,” Hitesh Malhotra, Chief Marketing Officer, Reliance Industries points out.

Advertising using newer channels is set to make more disruptions and is introducing a paradigm shift in digital brand marketing. OTT advertising has a bright future in India and around the world.

Duroflex’s CMO Smita Murarka believes that CMO’s role would not be replaced by AI any soon. “Buzzwords are complicating it for new marketers. Keep it simple but allot your budget for experiments monthly according to your brand’s capacity to invest in experiments,” she advises. She added and shared that this space is quite fragmented and diverse, the problem is being able to find a suitable spot.

Panellists agreed on a common point that brands are looking at a media mix approach coming with a full funnel to invest in and also from the opposite side, the consumers certainly do not want to be bombarded with hundreds of ads on every platform they choose to be on.

*The speakers were present at a recent industry forum