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Tag: Vinish Kathuria

  • 2014 – The Year of the Mobile

    2014 – The Year of the Mobile

    2014 was a new era in the rise of mobile, content marketing and big data for many businesses. Right in its embryonic stage, mobile has irrevocably transformed digital marketing. It’s been an eventful year for marketers with the rise of omni-channel, mobile-first marketing, and a rapid growth in geo-tagging management – to name, but a few. The digital marketing industry will evolve even further in 2015, bringing a new set of marketing strategies and opportunities to look forward to. Here are some recent trends marketers should be attentive to for the year ahead.

    We have already heard a lot about the mobile craze everywhere but 2014 bucked that trend. We are now going to witness major consumer transactions happening via mobile driven by mobile payment options such as paytm and freecharge. There is a perfect atmosphere of strong consumer evolution to mobility for every aspect of their lives, as well as enterprises treating mobility as a strategic advantage. We also saw mobile usage of social media overtake desktop usage. The mobile-centric Instagram, grew to over 300 million active users. There are more mobile phones (7.2 billion) on planet than number of people (7.16 billion).

    It happens very rarely that a prediction in digital industry comes true. There were a lot of talks about 2014 being a year of mobile and that statement has come true, with 2014 witnessing an enormous growth in smartphones and so will 2015. Mobile presents a huge opportunity for marketers to reach their target audiences. Google research shows that 7 per cent of mobile searches led to a purchase within 24 hours, rising to 18 per cent for local searches. Smartphones are also changing communication habits – particularly for younger generations – with 94 per cent of communication time for 12 to 15 year olds spent on text-based activities such as instant messaging and social media, and only 3 per cent spent on voice calls.

    In 2015, we will see the widely discussed mobile-first marketing approach finally develop to take advantage of these high consumption levels. Retailers will push more high-volume, low-cost products through their mobile commerce platform, to gain enhanced data on consumer behaviour, locality, adaptation, and ROI.

    In the 2014 elections, we saw most politicians using social media for campaigning. Not only Indian politicians used social media but during the presidential elections in 2008 and 2012 president Barack Obama’s team most effectively used social media campaigns. In India, we saw the Modi selfie on voting day, live rally broadcasts on mobiles, AAP using it for driving new member joinees and for getting citizen participation in its initiatives.

    Global revenue from app stores is expected to rise 62 per cent this year to $25 billion. From ecommerce companies to travel outfits to government departments, everyone is launching mobile apps and driving significant sales and user engagement through same such as paytm, free charge and other mobile centric means for micro small payments. It’s almost like a DoTcom evolution of 15 years ago – no one wants to miss the bus. The same followed by a rise in the mobile handsets sales, led by newer and fancier smartphones is a major catalyst in making 2014 an era of the mobile and paving way for the coming year. India is already the 3rd largest market for smartphones and will overtake USA shortly.

     Telecom operators have finally started to see a lot of data usage from their customers and their 3G infrastructure investments have started to show financial results. Consumers are in a happy mode with lot of choices – lot of people have more than one handset and kids and teenagers are not the only one using them for social media.

    India has emerged as the strongest market for digital companies who see a huge growth opportunity here. For Facebook, Whatsapp, Google – India is one of their top markets. Regardless of where an Internet company is launched today, India very quickly becomes a large user base for it.

    Rural India is also not untouched from this craze and has started seeing relevant information and entertainment services readily available to them via mobile. Venture capitalists and investors are willing to bet long term on sustainability of mobile led digital evolution and are pumping in millions of dollars.

    So what does all this mean as a marketer?

    1- Jump on mobile bandwagon quickly, else you will lag behind

    2- Gear Up for Big Data & analytics to play a bigger role in next phase of mobile evolution

    3- Gut based decisions will start getting replaced by more number driven decisions

    4- 3Ms need to be central to your marketing plans –i.e., Millions of people engaging with Multiple offerings on their Mobile devices.

    Mobile has started to impact almost every sector of our life – payments, healthcare, shopping, eating, travel, investments, and education etc. and it is important for marketers to understand the changing trends and design their marketing strategies accordingly. Mobiles provide a personal connect to user base and customers which helps impactful brand engagement with the audiences, which is all a brand campaign is about.  It’s an era of dialogue creation, with integrated campaigns across platforms made even more convenient via mobile. 2015 promises to ride this wave of momentum as smartphones will become more secure, more contextual, more location-aware, more targeted, and more integrated. We will witness the most engaging mobile experiences till date come to life in 2015. There will be an integration of Mobility, the cloud, and the Internet of Things creating significant opportunities for businesses to expand and for consumers to enjoy. But these opportunities will also come with newer challenges.

    (These are purely personal views of Digital Quotient chief operating officer Vinish Kathuria and indiantelevision.com does not necessarily subscribe to these views.)

  • Digital Quotient launches audience marketing platform – ‘arQ’

    Digital Quotient launches audience marketing platform – ‘arQ’

    MUMBAI: A data-driven social and mobile marketing firm, Digital Quotient, has launched arQ, a audience-marketing platform that analyses integrated data from various sources and creates real-time actionable – audience marketing intelligence.

    arQ’s audience marketing intelligence helps marketers to create customised digital user experiences. The marketing intelligence derived from arQ can be integrated across multiple mediums – social, mobile, web and video, ensuring maximum impact and ROI.

    The key differentiator for arQ is its holistic analysis and transformation of gathered data into real-time unique audience buckets. These buckets enable marketers to segregate the target audience and reach out to them with the right message at the right time. This approach eliminates all the guesswork and media spillover of the traditional digital marketing approach based on inventory. 

    “In a world where consumers are using multiple devices and are flooded with endless choices, it is not surprising to note increasing spends on digital advertising by brands. There is a paradigm shift occurring in the digital marketing world which now demands customised marketing experiences not functioning in silos but integrated across multiple platforms. At Digital Quotient, we are committed to improve the user-experience across multiple mediums by focusing on the audience rather than inventory. arQ promises to translate online user behaviour into actionable intelligence for marketers. Thus, helping marketers to make the most effective business decisions and strategies by incurring the minimum cost,” said Digital Quotient (DQ) COO Vinish Kathuria.

    arQ deep dives into the user’s digital journey and transforms heaps of complex data into valuable real-time marketing intelligence. This precision of marketing intelligence, we believe is a revolutionary step in the current scenario. The innovation team at DQ is always focused at solving the intricate issues of digital marketing, delivering the best results and ensuring high ROI,” he added.

    With the launch of arQ, Digital Quotient focuses on an audience-first approach in all marketing strategies. arQ aims at reducing the time and effort required by marketers to deliver impactful, functional and engaging user experience which converts a user into consumer. In a complex and crowded Digital ecosystem this turns out to be a rather pressing need for most CMOs and marketers. arQ not only provides to run cross channel campaigns,  but also enables real-time bidding and audience buckets from which a marketer can find its most relevant target audience and reach out to them bang on time.

    Digital Quotient says that in the current stage, the arQ platform will offer a reach of 50 million monthly unique users globally, with plans to expand  reach in coming months. Digital Quotient has been able to recruit top tier talent from IITs & other premier institutes for this initiative  who are focusing on Data Science, Machine Learning & Statistical modelling aspects. Company plans to scale up though build, partner and buy approach and is in active discussion with partners and investors.

     

  • Is there a market for advertising on feature phones?

    Is there a market for advertising on feature phones?

    MUMBAI: When HUL’s ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’ campaign came back home with a Gold Lion in the mobile category from Cannes this year, it took the whole industry by surprise.

     

    The campaign rolled out by the FMCG giant was an effort to reach out to the media dark areas. ‘The Kan Khajura Station’ a 15 minute free, on-demand, entertainment channel was a service where people could give a missed call and then get entertained for free.

     

    The brand created a new media through a rudimentary mobile phone that brought people out of media darkness and connected them with the world. According to the brand, the activity was done at a cost of Rs 6 per person. This campaign was executed in Bihar and Jharkhand.

     

    This is not the first time that the country’s largest consumer good company had executed a campaign for people with feature phones in the country. It can be recalled, couple of years back the company’s detergent brand Active Wheel had also used missed call as an advertising inventory to catch the attention of consumers in UP and Bihar.

     

    Further to this, the company is now collaborating with local grocery shops and is working on making custom-made caller tune as part of a new marketing initiative. This means that when a consumer calls up the shop to place an order he/she will be informed about various promotions and offers on the various brands from the house of HUL. According to economic times, HUL has piloted this initiated in Mumbai and Delhi.

     

    If studies by International Data Corporation (IDC) are to be believed feature phones still hold over 70 per cent of the Indian mobile market. Experts in the space are optimistic that the scenario will change the game. A recent IDC report mentions that India is the fastest-growing market in Asia-Pacific, with a year-on-year smartphone shipment growth of over 186 per cent in 1Q 2014.

     

    Is there still a market for advertising on feature phones in country where smartphones are growing exponentially?

     

    Digital Quotient COO Vinish Kathuria believes there is a lot of scope of exploring this market. According to him, advertising opportunities on feature phones revolve around text and banner ads on WAP sites, IVR based outreach and SMS and missed call strategies which are being used interestingly even today by many big brands.

     

    Out these advertising options, missed call as tool looks to be promising to many other experts. In a recent development, Facebook announced that it has introduced missed call inventory to boost its advertising revenues in India that counts for the second largest user base for it.

     

    This advertising tool will allow mobile phone users to click a button that calls an advertiser, immediately hangs up and then receives a return call. The return call delivers pre-recorded audio messages about everything from sponsored cricket scores to information about shopping discounts, minimizing data charges for the user.

     

    The social networking site has partnered with ZipDial for this. In early tests of the missed call ads by L’Oreal-owned haircare product Garnier Men, the ads led to a 2.5 times year-on-year increase in online sales, according to Facebook.

     

    When asked how different is it to execute an advertising campaign on feature phone than on a smartphone, ZipDial founder and CEO Valerie R Wagoner mentions, “We don’t believe in thinking of it as advertising on feature phones but rather advertising to consumers who have feature phones.”

     

    Wagoner thinks media activations with these set of mobiles can deliver great results.  She is of the opinion that every media whether print, television, outdoor, or even digital ads should have a mobile call-to-action to make it interactive and to drive ongoing engagement with consumers in a targeted and personalised way.

     

    “While a QR Code is relevant to less than 1 per cent of mobile consumers in India, a missed call is the easiest thing that anyone could do from any phone,” adds Wagoner.

     

    She informs that ZipDial is collaborating with Unilever to work on expanding this success globally across emerging markets.

     

    Apart from this the cost is minimalistic. Running a campaign on feature phones might cost a brand anywhere between Rs 3 to 6 lakhs mentions a senior media planner.

     

    The Roadblocks

     

    Having said that, thought there is a huge opportunity in using mobile as a broadcast channel to directly reach consumers, it has to be done very carefully, especially for consumers on feature phones.

     

    “Advertising potential is significantly lower on feature phones because of two main reasons. One is the limited screen size and phone’s processing makes it harder to offer plethora of multi media advertising options. Two, availability of apps and usage of it are significantly lower. So, in-app advertising, one of the biggest mobile advertising categories, is almost non-existent,” says Kathuria.

     

    Brands should never spam users. Wagoner states, “Blasting SMS or voice calls can be extremely intrusive. However, SMS and voice Calls are a very powerful tool when you use them in combination with protecting consumer privacy. For example, standard industry response rates to generic push SMS blasts are around 0.1-0.2 per cent. However, response rates to SMS sent to ZipDial followers are between 9-56 per cent because users give permission and are in control of the content they receive.”

     

    It is extremely necessary to have personalised experience which targets the right message to the right consumer at the right time that will successfully lead to behavioural change, conversions and business impact across this segment.

     

    ”The difference is that there are thousands of companies designing for smartphones (especially companies in the West and developed markets), and there are very few innovative companies designing and building good advertising technology for emerging markets,” concludes Wagoner.

     

  • “Use of social media is good when it adds value to communication strategy”

    “Use of social media is good when it adds value to communication strategy”

    MUMBAI: Social-mobile-video marketing is an area waiting to be explored, at least in the Indian context. However, players like Digital Quotient – which already has a presence in the field with over 70 staff across key locations in India – will continue to enjoy a first movers’ advantage over those who come after them.

     

    Indiantelevision.com’s Priyanka Nair got Digital Quotient COO Vinish Kathuria to speak at length about the changing digital ecosystem, social media and everything in between…

     

    How have the demands of marketers from the digital platform changed in recent years?

     

    The Indian digital ecosystem is changing positively over the last decade. Marketers are trying their level best to catch up with consumers’ needs in the digital world. Today, digital is a must-have media vehicle. Gone are the days when we were asked, “What can be done on digital?” The need of the hour is how to take communication to the next level on digital. Tangible and controlled experiments are what brands expect from digital agencies today.

     

    With changing consumer demographics, it is necessary for digital agencies to have a clear idea of the business objectives of various brands. At Digital Quotient, we look at campaigning for a brand from a very strategic point of view. I think that should be the approach taken by agencies today.

     

    How is social media gaining importance in a marketer’s communication plans? Are the brands getting it right in terms of social media?

     

    It can be noted that every brand wants to have a social media presence. While some brands are getting it right in terms of social media, many others need to revise their approach. The first thing that brands should stop doing is racing towards fetching more likes. The question that brands which are looking for business should ask themselves more often is: “Does it add any value to the communication strategy?”

     

    Brands should understand that on social media, timeliness is of the utmost importance. A social media user has a different mindset. Brands should ensure a strategy whereby consumers are not left with stale or outdated content. Engagement mechanism is a must for social media branding. On the other hand, there are many brands which are using social media purely for post consumer service. This is an interesting move. Social media is now definitely a medium that cannot be ignored but it is up to brands how they shape up strategies that are worthy of attention.

     

    What are the key things that brands should keep in mind to build a healthy social media conversation? 

     

    It is just like any other marketing medium that needs to be accepted first. Though social media is largely technology-driven, it is emotional connect and remembrance that matters for consumers. It can be observed that content is taking different shifts over the years. From text-heavy content, brands are today looking at making a splash on social media through videos and pictures. Humanising content is what makes any social media conversation healthy.

     

    Mobile has still not been leveraged to the best of its capabilities by Indian brands. What is your observation on this?

     

    Earlier, conversations were very telephone-led but today, marketers are jumping into the mobile fray. It is for reach that marketers are looking at mobile as a communication platform. Brands need to take a cue from how global marketers are looking at social and mobile integration. There is much learning that comes from there, which is noteworthy. One thing is clear with the current numbers: India will soon lead the charts when it comes to mobile reach.

     

    Brands are betting big on video in digital campaigning. How can brands further optimise the use of video?

     

    There are many brands that roll out TVCs on social media. TVC is the easiest replication that a brand can do but clearly, it is not an ideal one. That is what brands are getting wrong when it comes to video. It is very important that brands create videos that are shareable. Brands need to start using different formats such as Vine or Instagram. Content curation is something that brands are leveraging on while creating videos.

     

    Do brands understand the power of big data?

     

    Understanding big data needs different skill sets. It is relatively new to decode for many professionals. Numbers driven from big data are fascinating and are like an asset that marketers can put to use. Time will help marketers discover the power of big data. 

  • Brands piggyback the selfie

    Brands piggyback the selfie

    MUMBAI: When Oscars 2014 host Ellen DeGeneres posted a selfie co-starring some of Hollywood’s finest stars, it went on to crash the record hitherto held by President Barrack Obama. At the end of the awards’ ceremony, DeGeneres’ “Best photo ever” stood at 2,070,132 retweets and counting; a milestone in social media history. More importantly, the fact that Degeneres had clicked the iconic selfie using a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (given to her by the brand itself) wasn’t lost on the teeming tweeple. In fact, various international reports stated that 37 million people worldwide tuned in to the broadcast to view DeGeneres’ tweet while 43 million tuned in just to view the Samsung snap.

    Taking a cue from Samsung and other such international brands, home-grown brands too are increasingly tapping into the marketing potential of the selfie, allegations of narcissism notwithstanding. For instance, Dove and Ponds from the house of HUL are running a large-scale social media contest incorporating the selfie element even as we speak. When contacted, company officials refrained from sharing any details. However, it is learnt that along with cross promotions, these products are creating a lot of noise across social media platforms.

    Click here to watch the video

    At least a dozen Indian brands are putting the selfie to good use. ”Selfies are the latest fad and something that would instantly connect with our customers. From celebrities to teenagers to even middle-aged people, everyone today is suddenly using their phone cameras to not only click their surroundings but themselves,” said Lenskart CEO & founder, Peyush Bansal. Recently, Lenskart rolled out a social media campaign, asking for selfies from its fan base. “The idea was to see how involved our customers are in our products. We wanted to engage the online customers in a fun Lenskart selfie contest by asking them to take a selfie, share it on our and their social media pages by linking and tagging Lenskart through all platforms and using the hashtag – #mylenskartselfie. They had to ask all their friends to ‘like’, ‘favourite’ their selfies and the ones with the maximum number of likes won the contest,” said Bansal.

    Force-fitting selfie-ness

    Using selfies to market products is fine but the general perception is that all brands, from beauty to surrogate, are looking to engage social media by calling for selfies. We spoke to a few social media experts for their views.

    “Not every brand can pull off a selfie stunt and hope to make it an instant social media hit. It needs to connect with the audiences; it should come across as something natural or on the spur of the moment and not staged. Unless one makes no bones about it but does it in style,” said Grey Digital executive creative director Navin Kansal.

    On the other hand, Digital Quotient COO Vinish Kathuria, expressed the view that curated content really works for brands these days. “It is interesting to see that various brands are thinking in terms of crowd sourcing techniques while rolling out contests on social media,” he said.  

    Whether the continued use of selfies will work for brands or it will reach a point of saturation, only time will tell.