In conversation with Ashok Shinde, Vice President-Media, PivotRoots

In today’s rapidly-evolving digital world, programmatic advertising has become a core component of a comprehensive marketing strategy. During the interaction with Ashok Shinde, we discussed how Programmatic advertising is constantly evolving to help brands effectively reach their target audience through various methods. Brands can create relevant user segments using predefined segments based on demographics and psychographics, custom input segments using their own data or platform inputs, and third-party data segments. This allows brands to optimize their marketing campaigns and ensure their messages are delivered to the right users.

AR- How does programmatic advertising connect brands with the right audience in this interconnected world?

Ashok- Programmatic advertising is always evolving to enable brands to relay their communication to relevant users in an omnipresent, orchestrated, and optimized manner. 

Relevant users may vary from business to business and the objective of marketing campaigns. Programmatic platforms allow brands to construct relevant users through a combination of predefined segments, custom input segments, and/or third-party segments. In predefined segments, brands can create audience segments using demographics and/or psychographics (affinities, interests, activities, and behavior). In custom input, brands can either input their first-party data to target, exclude, or to expand their seed audience; or leverage platform in-build inputs such as search, apps, and URLs interest of users to define custom audience segmentation. Lastly, brands can define the audience by tapping the closest audience segment from the numerous third-party data providers.

Omnipresent –  Programmatic allows brands to reach their relevant target audience on connected personal or household devices such as computers, mobile phones, connected TV, smart speakers, connected cars, and many more. And, now programmatic allows reaching audiences in the public environment through Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) screens such as hoarding, and display screens in restaurants, malls, and airports.

Orchestrated – Programmatic advertising allows brands to design sequence, time, placements, and brand safety levels in which the communication (creatives) is served to relevant target audiences.

Optimized – Programmatic advertising can help brands achieve efficiency with frequency capping across different buys whether video or display, direct or indirect, guaranteed or non guaranteed.

AR- With programmatic advertising on the rise, the role of ad networks has transformed over the last couple of years. What factors should be kept in mind while choosing the right ad network?

Ashok- In India, 50%-60% of digital advertising expenditure is in non-programmatic or direct buys form but over 90% of these advertising dollars are spent on walled gardens in form of search and social. The majority of ad networks are now part of programmatic advertising equations and estimate less than 5% of advertising expenditure is currently going to non-programmatic or traditional ad networks.

Ad networks can be evaluated on basis of expertise, reach, targeting capabilities, buying model, transparency, and integration. 

Expertise – There are broadly four kinds (or expertise) of ad networks namely horizontal ad network, which offer publishers or audiences across categories; vertical ad network, which has publishers or audiences pertaining to select category (e-Commerce, BFSI, Auto, Gaming, etc); Premium Adnetwork, which has popular sites as publishers; and specialized ad network, which has specialization either for the environment (web, mobile and app) or creative formats.

Reach in terms of addressable users the ad network can connect through its supply side (publishers). Ideally, advertisers should invest in nurturing relationships with ad networks that can help them connect over 10% of the addressable user base. 

Targeting options available with an ad network and how well it can allow defining an audience. 

Ad network offers a variety of buying models (CPM, CPC, CPV, CPA, CPT, etc) and whether they allow self-serve or managed service. 

Transparency has become increasingly important and ad networks providing the same have been often preferred over their counterparts.

Ad network ability to bring data from varied verified sources or allow layering of their inventory using demand-side platforms data insights.

AR- The fear of recession has also had a ripple effect on every industry. How should marketers redefine their GTM strategies in order to survive amid complex market scenarios?

Ashok- It’s a tough decade with marketers barely taking a breather after navigating through pandemic-led rescission and now certain markets are staring at an imminent possibility of financial slow-down led recession. 

The recent pandemic recession clearly established the need for brands to focus on key pillars of value, quality, and sustainability.  

Identifying consumers that are important to your business and it can be a combination of factors including but not limited to their income levels, risk appetite, life needs state. 

Different consumers may have a different channel influence and footprint knowing it and incorporating these in product and marketing is important.

Digital paved the way for growth for many brands (even for legacy brands) but omnichannel experience continued to be the preferred way to shop for products.

AR- Although marketers are leaving no touchpoints to engage with the customers, how do you think the fear of recession will impact the brand loyalty of consumers?

Ashok- The pandemic recession has unveiled some of these behaviors. While pandemic rescession had a some distinct priortization such health, essential products and safety outside of people rationalizing their spending and reducing discretionary spends. However, in a phase of limited or low earning, the customers are expected to be seeking affordable, heavy discount products. Brands will have to establish comparable or better value to achieve consumer loyalty.

AR- The industry is witnessing an increased focus on consumer privacy and the impending cookieless future is forging the way for an ecosystem that is driven by first-party data. Since this is understandably leaving marketers worried, what advice would you give to marketers who are seeking ways to better connect with the customers? 

Ashok- The cookieless future is likely to have limited impact for advertisers largely relaying on first party data for running their marketing campaigns. However, marketers must identify, deploy and comprehsnsively integrate CDP to minimize the impact of cookie deprecation.

Marketers should become biggest advocator of Customer Data Platforms (CDP) in their organization. This can potentially allow organization harness potential of first party (prospects and customers) data. CDP must capture all key interactions across different touchpoints such as physical store, call center, website or app. 

Marketers must explore the possibility of creating frictionless and rewarding interventions to facilitate capturing interactions across all touch points. For example, when customers make purchases in EBO, an attempt of capturing their phone number that allows customers to earn reward points, discount coupon,s or a free products. Or if you are in a business wherein a large part of interactions with potential prospects is in the digital world then the focus can be on getting users to sign in / log in to deterministically identify users and provide personalized and tailored recommendations at each stage of their interactions. 

AR- Data-driven marketing has become a necessity in today’s time. How do you think the National Data Governence Policy by the Government of India would impact marketers across the country?

Ashok- National Data Governance Policy is big step to accerlerate digital governance and eventually achieve potential of data driven goverance in India. This includes mechanism of collection, storage, processing, security, access and use of non-personal and anonymized data collected by government, government appointed agencies and even private companies. The policy is intented to create vibrant, diverse and large dataset for research and innovation. It is intended for start-ups to uncover opportunities, solutions and create products or services using the data .

It may help marketers understand demographics and behaviour of most closest dataset representing their core users. For example, an automobile marketer wanting to understand demographics of people who have purchased a car (or sub segment of car type) in the last one year from a specific city or state. This demographic may include age, gender, income, sub locationlocaiton (locality or city). This helping them building customer profile and craft their marketing strategy more sharply and effectively on this deterministic data. A pharmaceutical company marketer may benefit by understanding rise in specific health condition in their core markets and accordingly recalibraterecalibirate marketing focus and start aligning production capacity.

AR- What trends do you expect to see in the digital marketing scenario by the end of 2023?

Ashok- While the digital media is constantly evolving, the few trends that I am looking forward to includes:

Digital media is poised to overtake TV advertising this year marking a big milestone and testament of digital becoming table stakes for brands looking to stay relevant in this rapidly evolving world. 

Brands and platforms will continue to innovate to create seamless omnichannel phygital experiences to interact with prospects and customers.

Sports live streaming is emerging as an viable alternate (or compliment to broadcast or TV live sport consuming users). In India, nearly 41% of fans indicated preference to watch live sporting events online, in a survey conducted by YouGuv.

Web 3.0 will continue to see increased interest and exploration from brands in form NFT, Augmented reality and virtual reality will see continue to see higher interest and adoptiosn by brands. However, Metaverse may experience lukewarm growth given Meta is likely to no longer push this agenda or focus on product.

AI aided marketing becoming big can’t be ruled out after the hype and interest seen for ChatGPT other AI based tool such as DALL-E-2. Generative AI enabling large scale customization of creatives. Marketers experimenting with AI and ML to assist in communication, creative production and planning.

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