Experimentation Is Key: Unny Radhakrishnan, Digitas India

In the ever-evolving landscape of the digital age, businesses all over the world are increasingly turning to digital marketing agencies to help them construct the intricacies of the digital world.

In an exclusive interview with BW Marketing World, Unny Radhakrishnan, Chief Executive Officer, Digitas India sheds light on the agency's strategies, challenges, and the critical role they play in helping companies navigate the complexities of the digital age.

Excerpts:

Digitas India is notable for embodying the concept of a "connected marketing agency. What role does it play in connecting brands and consumers?

We name ourselves the connected marketing agency, and the term "connected marketing agency" has two meanings. One way to look at it is that our role as an agency is to connect brands and consumers. The other is that we create solutions offering that fundamentally combine all of the disparate digital disciplines. So what I mean is that it is about integrating creative strategy, data, and technology together and assisting companies and marketers in making the proper interventions in a consumer's journey. 

Our services include creative communication, media, designing digital experiences, whether an app or mobile, marketing operations, sales automation, CRM, and loyalty. So, as we continue on our journey, our clients will continue to grow and scale expertise in all of these areas. And for the majority of our clients today, we are not only working on one line of service but on numerous lines of service.

In today’s digital age, what would be the key challenges that marketers face and how does Digitas India address them?

To begin with, today's consumers have a lot of options. There is a massively cluttered media ecosystem, and getting to the right audience and message is one issue in this scheme of things. Another factor is that, as the number of touch points and digital channels has grown, so have the operational issues for marketers. Third, digitalisation enables customers. Today, customers are significantly empowered in terms of communication and feedback in the digital age. One can change brand loyalty when standing in front of a product or a retail store since one can check their product preferences online. To be fair, from a marketer's perspective, there are multiple challenges today for both brands and agencies.

How do you confront technological disruptions in the industry with the advancement in technology in the present-day scenario?

Technological disruptions are the brand's responsibility for delivering its promise and message to consumers and ensuring that brand awareness and accessibility are high. So, from an awareness standpoint, there are many options these days with digital platforms and immersive storytelling, and from a distribution standpoint, online commerce and ecommerce have become essential. From the standpoint of an agency, this essentially means keeping your eyes and ears open to changes in the market and recognising the right technological interventions in the consumer journey. 

How does Digitas India cater to hyper localisation in today’s times to expand the brand's customer base? 

With varied languages and local nuances, hyper-localisation surely adds a communication angle. Personalisation is also an essential component of hyper-localisation. It can happen on several levels. There are solutions that allow you to deliver personalised content on a digital platform, whether it is a website or a mobile app. You may also consider personalised sessions from the standpoint of media distribution, which is driven by data and targeting the proper audience. If our clients require it, we’ll get onto it.

With AI entering the market, what would be your strategy from an agency point of view, how do you see it shaping up? 

AI can be used in a variety of business scenarios. For Digitas India, it is twofold. One, it is our internal work, and second, how does it affect the work that we do? The work that we do is a creative output or generated material. So some of those things are experimentative. We work closely with some of our clients on this because there are issues such as copyright violations because it is trained on current data sets. It is a conservative approach, but it will undoubtedly have an impact on all of our work.

In the continuously rapidly changing digital world, how do you foster innovation & creativity within the organisation?

Our mantra is "Experimentation is key." We sometimes collaborate with clients who are willing to participate in those experiments, as well as certain projects are conducted internally as well, from a solution experimental perspective, such as constructing a product prototype. As a result, this is a continuous activity for us. For example, last year we performed some experimental work on the metaverse, which we knew wasn't widely acknowledged or mainstream yet, but we went ahead with it nonetheless.