Mumbai: India is in the grips of seisnic changes regarding video and broadband consumption. Pay TV cord-cutting is rampant even as free TV subscriptions are on the rise and OTT buy-ins are churning with the signs up for certain platforms stagnating even as others are seeing rapid increases and some are seeing cataclysmic drops. Aggregators of OTTs are popping up on the horizon promising cheap bundles along with value-added services for cable TV and DTH. There’s a rush to set up free advertising-supported TV channels by TV set manufacturers and smart TV device makers. There’s the Jio factor where it seeks to convert most pay TV customers to free streaming of video content by offering free access to consumers at no cost. The consumer continues to demand bandwidth higher than ever imagined even as prices drop. Margins are under pressure as every player goes one-up on each other to acquire and retain customers.
The video and broadband distribution landscape has not been as vibrant as it is now.. How long will this pot-boiling continue? What will the magic potion of video and broadband look and taste like? And what’s the end game? Indiantelevision.com has held the 20th edition of Video and Broadband Summit better known as VBS at Sahara Star Hotel, Mumbai.
The session chair for this panel was EssenceMediacom India managing partner Deepak Sonpar along with the panelists: Colgate-Palmolive (India) Ltd director – integrated brand experience lead Priyanka Khaneja Gandhi, ICICI Lombard head- marketing, corporate communications & CSR Sheena Kapoor, and Carat India VP- West Amita Srivastava.
Sonpar kicked off the session by asking Srivastava of what is the latest ongoing trend which she is witnessing currently in the landscape.
She said, “ I will be talking about the advertising landscape right now by saying the first thing over here is that there is so much fragmentation right now that it’s an era of choices for the consumers. TV continues to be a very important medium for everybody. But digital is something which has been jumping and leaping its way to the top largely because of the exponential growth of the internet. Mobile smartphones, have given us this option of targeting our audiences. Mobile content is something which is growing very strongly, in fact, a lot of websites now need to be mobile compliant.”
She also briefly touched upon programmatic advertising because from an advertisers perspective, it is content which is speaking well from the agency perspective, programmatic becomes really important because that helps us deliver efficiencies the best find which is possible to reach out to the kind of audiences which they are looking at.
She also talked about native advertising, “While we have a lot of content, which is going on, which is a little brash in terms of you’re exposing our brand and talking very specifically about random use pointers, there are some brands which prefer the approach of slightly more seamless integration. And I think they are the ones who are going into this middle of advertising space and utilizing it very well to speak to their audiences.”
Sonpar then turned towards Kapoor on the question of notable changes in the new age programmatic and artificial intelligence to which she replied, “ In terms of trends overall and how it is changing, when we are talking about proliferation and disintegration of devices because earlier we used to sit around with the family in front of the idiot box when there was certain program where everybody in the household were consuming and therefore was forced to consume the advertising that was being played.”
She continues, “Today in the same household there are multiple devices not only TV but mobile, laptops etc. The other change is everybody is heading towards content. I will consume what I want to consume, any genre that I like, which makes the task for brands a lot tougher because a) You’re talking about buying the same kind of attention span to the consumers and 2) Social media and the influencers space. “
She also talked on her recent campain which was completely Gen AI driven and also talked on how personalization is also the new ongoing trend.
Sonpar then asked Gandhi on how brands have impacted the video content and marketing strategy to which she said, “Let me break it into three parts. One is the narrative of video storytelling, what you want to tell the consumers and when we talked to urban audiences with benefits which are premium, all the way down to rural audiences and then we look at states. Second part is the multiplicity of format and video. The bigger challenge is how you tell a story and what story you tell in a 30-60 second format. The third part of video creation is also you looking at the consumer journey and as a brand what’s the funnel that you really target.
At the end, Sonpar summed up briefly the key talk points of the session to the audience, “Three words to take away are that the world is getting more and more impatient. We need to plan for smaller, shorter content. Second is brands need to tie up a bit of trust which is the influencers which the people like us look up to. The essence of all innovation and new content is between the attention and engagement which would be the third point. Anything that drives attention and engagement will work and that we need to chase.”
