Jeffrey Dachis, CEO, Chairman & Founder, Dachis Group

Social engagement is going to drive brands. What you do with social is build brand love, advocacy and mindshare in a powerful manner. If you can start to marry your top-of-the-funnel engagement with your bottom-of-the-funnel performance marketing activity, it will get very exciting. Moving from spray-and-pray mass communication to highly targeted, ROI-oriented communication, you will see a much more sophisticated and financially aligned marketer.

Jeff Dachis founded Dachis Group, a leading data-driven social marketing software and solutions firm, in 2008 and is currently the company’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman. He is also the Co-Founder, former CEO, and former Chairman of Razorfish, the world’s largest digital marketing solutions firm. While at Razorfish, Dachis profitably grew the company’s annual revenues to over $250 million, expanded its talent base from 2 to 2,200 employees with offices in nine countries, completed over 25 M&A transactions, led its IPO raising $55 million, and catapulted Razorfish’s public valuation to over $5 billion.

In conversation with exchange4media’s Priyanka Mehra, Dachis speaks at length about the digital revolution, leveraging big data & using social media to drive brand engagement.

Q. In the early ‘90s, you had helped create the first-ever banner ad, ushering in the age of digital brand marketing. Having been part of the digital revolution, what are your thoughts on the changes it has brought with it?

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Last year was the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. The last 20 years are what I like to call the most powerful revolution of communication that has drastically altered the face of commerce. Today, there is a democratisation of tools for self expression for each individual who can distribute ideas in High Definition. There has been a huge shift of people from ‘mass communication’ to ‘mass communicators’. User generated content consumption is higher than consumption of content generated by media companies.

Q. Where do you think India is today in the digital revolution?

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India is in a unique spot as a power house growth economy, with a burgeoning middle class that is empowered with the tools of self expression; Indian consumers are connecting and sharing in ways we’ve never seen before. That creates both opportunity and a threat for the ways brands are built. Brands were traditionally built with a focus on building pre-purchase intent in the consumer’s mind, emphasising on brand value and what it means to an individual. Now, there is a new dynamic with social media and a mobile centric economy; India has a huge opportunity to leapfrog, but the challenge is the infrastructure and technology at the moment.

Q. Do you think marketers are leveraging social media as a tool to effectively drive brand engagement and move beyond likes and followers?

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We look at social as a highly effective part of the brand building at the top of the funnel; people don’t go to their Facebook page to see ads. Social engagement is going to drive brands. Digital has evolved enormously in the last 18 years that I have been part of the industry, it is now a 70-million industry; from demand generation to influencing purchase intent to post purchase engagement, digital has been phenomenally grown. But digital has been bad at building brands, that is the main function of social media. What you do with social is build brand love, advocacy and mindshare in a powerful manner. You have the capability of understanding who is saying what, how they are saying it, and when they are saying. If you can start to marry your top-of-the-funnel engagement with your bottom-of-the-funnel performance marketing activity, it will get very exciting. Moving from spray-and-pray mass communication to highly targeted, ROI-oriented communication, you will see a much more sophisticated and financially aligned marketer. Companies need to normalise the currencies of engagement towards focused brand outcome.

Q. Do you think marketers are leveraging the power of big data to derive insights towards better brand communication and returns?

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Big data is becoming a term clichéd, underestimated and mis-defined. Data has traditionally existed in silos inside companies, structured as well as unstructured, sitting in data warehouses. There are enormous amounts of insights to be gleaned from this data. With the advent of the ability to connect and engage with the democratisation of communication tools, we have seen an explosion of information for and about brands, wherein consumers are sharing ideas, photos, and their brand passions. This leads to a vast volume of data in the market place, which is actually an unstructured reservoir of customer intent and of the way people are consuming and experiencing brands. For the first time brands have the opportunity to access and process this information and glean insights. The technology capable of doing this did not exist a couple of years ago.

This ability to process unstructured and structured data and derive insights from it is the power of big data. If marketers are able to tap into this consumer-brand life journey, then brands would be much more relevant. I don’t think a huge number of brands are really tapping into this optimally at the moment.

Our company collects and analyse data for 35,000 brands in real time and I can tell you the insights are fascinating. On an average one, one-hundredth per cent of a brand’s engaged audience generates 30 per cent of a brand’s earned media. It is quite amazing that few thousand people impact the brand in such a big way.

Q. How do marketers then powerfully combine the power of social and performance-driven marketing through digital to optimise returns?

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The link from these powerful brand advocates who are driving most of the earned media as well as impacting the pre-purchase decision of their friends, family, followers and many such audiences, is the primary mode that brands need to drive to get conversion from top-of-the-funnel consideration to bottom-of-the-funnel conversion. We are still coming out of the likes and followers era.

The Yahoos and Facebooks are driving the conversations today, but the media dollars are flowing into the ad units not engaged in marketing, which needs to change.