Mumbai: GenY Medium is a full-service digital marketing agency with offices in Hyderabad, Delhi, Bangalore and Toronto that has completed 12 years of operations this year. GenY has a team of 100 digital experts providing specialized services in paid media, creative, brand strategy, SEO, marketing technology and digital transformation consulting.
Sri Hari Cuddapah brings a great amount of experience as chief business officer of GenY Medium- a specialised digital marketing agency. With his five years of dedicated service at GenY Medium, he has been a great asset to the organization. His expertise covers a range of industries, including consumer goods, real estate, education, healthcare, venture capital, and direct-to-consumer (D2C) markets.
Indiantelevision.com caught up with Cuddapah where he shared more interesting insights on Al integration, performance marketing, digital transformation and a lot more…
Edited excerpts
On AI integration transforming performance marketing at GenY Medium, and some specific examples of its impact on your campaigns
AI helps us optimise various aspects of our performance marketing campaigns. Previously, most kinds of optimizations such as time of day, placement, audience subsegments etc. were done manually. We had to get a lot of campaign data and adjust bids to optimize the above parameters. Now, AI optimizes most of these hygiene parameters depending on the campaign performance. Secondly, when we give external signals such as offline conversions, existing audience lists etc., AI uses this to sharpen the campaign targeting, saving us many hours in creating and testing extremely niche audience personas.
On ensuring marketing strategies comply with privacy regulations while still achieving high performance
On the data security perspective – Most of our clients’ customer data does not reside with us. It resides on the clients’ servers. We access encrypted data, directly pushing it to advertising platforms to build audience signals.
On the privacy perspective – We do not collect any personal data without consent. All the collected data is stored securely in cloud infrastructure. Customers have an option to opt out of the funnel at any given point of time. We do not use personalized advertising practices which most people would consider an invasion of privacy. And finally with the phasing out of cookies, we use server side tagging to pass first party data securely, in an encrypted day to all data storage locations. With advertising platforms already having strong policies on data privacy, most of the concern is already taken care of.
On the frameworks and methodologies GenY Medium uses to revolutionize decision-making in digital transformation consulting
While building a solution, we take a top down approach. We start off with a high level questionnaire on the clients’ objectives and problem statements. We use the BCG digital maturity model to assess the current state of a company’s maturity and we classify it into one of the 4 stages – Nascent, Emerging, Connected and Multi moment. Each of these stages requires a different step of a customized action plan. We use that to build a customized solution for the client as a first cut. The first cut is then refined by putting in the clients’ current state of infrastructure. We complete the implementation of this as a first step to address low hanging fruits with minimal business disruption. We take on additional incremental enhancements to move them further on the maturity curve. There is no cookie cutter approach to planning a transformation journey. While there are guiding principles and must haves, most of the solution needs to be built around the current, unique situation of each company.
On the role of technology playing in improving decision-making processes for your clients, and specific tools or platforms have been most effective
We primarily use technology to build full funnel customer acquisition visibility for our clients’ campaigns. This starts from setup of unique IDs for audience cohorts to capturing touchpoints leading to a final conversion. While the entire funnel is set up, we can accurately establish the impact and ROI of each rupee spent on digital. One could pinpoint which audience cohort is performing better and which communication is driving the most impact. Once these measurement measures are in place, we use some of the bottom funnel signals to improve the overall campaign performance. We primarily use Meta and Google platforms for ad serving. The leads and conversions are passed to a CRM of choice using zapier. And again using zapier we push back offline events back to advertising platforms to improve the performance. We use power BI, SQL and looker studio to process and visualize the campaign data. These reports point to performance of each geography, audience cohort and many more such dimensions which let the client understand what to tweak.
On common challenges your clients face during digital transformation, and how do you help them overcome these obstacles
While undertaking these projects, there are layers of challenges. While most companies start off on the path to explore the digital path for their marketing needs, the management struggles to give sufficient bandwidth. A new channel of marketing cannot be established at arms length and it requires the senior management to be available to make changes to their operating processes to accommodate new workflows of digital. We set up milestones and cadences which enable them to mark off time and attention to oversee a step by step execution. Another issue is that many clients are not equipped to initiate transformation projects – both from an infrastructure and team capability perspective. This takes a bit of handholding and extrapolation of offline marketing principles to bring the client side team on the same page.
On future trends you foresee in AI that will further redefine performance marketing
AI will further reduce the heavy lifting from performance marketing. Most marketers would like to be obsessed with their customers, finding deeper insights, creating compelling stories and solving their everyday problems. Currently (an improvement from the past) performance marketing involves a lot of structured experimentation, tech implementation and number crunching. This practice favored the tech and number savvy to win at performance marketing. Now the balance is again shifting back to marketers who carefully study their customers’ buying behaviors. AI will further sharpen targeting, bringing down efforts to create hypotheses to find the right customers. It will also learn from your campaigns about your ideal customer, their likes, dislikes to influence their purchase behavior. It will help maximize sales by minimizing the time you put in.
