'CTV a great platform for marketing in terms of innovation, precise targeting, placements'

At the inaugural edition of iDAC Summit 2023 held in Mumbai, industry leaders discussed the past, present and future of independent agencies in changing times, with  Saurabh Gupta, Founder and MD, Garage Group as the session chair.

Dev Batra, Co-Founder and CEO, Lyxel&Flamingo, Manas Gulati, Co-Founder and CEO, #ARM Worldwide, Ranjeet Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO, Team Pumpkin and Shradha Agarwal, Co-Founder and CEO, Grapes delighted the audience with their deep insights in a panel discussion.

There is already enough hue and cry for first-party data, according to Batra. A quite reasonable concern that a lot of people have is around identifying or creating cohorts of behaviours, without sharing any personal information.

Gulati then addressed the main pain points of this for agencies. He believes, at times agencies over-analyse data, especially when it's measurable and when they over-analyse things, the pie gets smaller. In the entire consumer journey, the brands should care about touchpoints all across, rather than just conversions. 

“A brand like Bajaj or HDFC, who have a great brand salience, don't need that amount of awareness indexing. Rather startups do. They need to reach the right set of customers, get high on the consideration set,” he added.

Coming to connected TV, the Grapes executive highlighted the role of this technology in the media landscape and how digital agencies can embrace that. 

Agarwal stated we are only 25 million connected TVs as per the last survey, which is not huge considering we are a 700 million internet audience. But it's not difficult to sell the concept of marketing on CTV because it's also a great platform to see what it brings in terms of innovation, precise targeting and better placements. Hence, it is a great platform to advertise on.

Gupta then zeroed on that CTV is still TV but just measurable. But more than a connected TV, the connected experience matters. He further asked Kumar whether in future the whole consumer journey will be able to complete on connected TV, from seeing an ad to making a transaction within the TV frame. 

Kumar said, “TV in its own form used to be a social experience at home, slowly giving way to personal TV on mobile phones. My daughter today watches a show on TV and then searches for clothes or things she likes on her mobile phone. There are certain applications in the US trying to solve that gap between the two devices. Amazon has tried this with Alexa and Alexa TV also.”

Today, creators are also part of larger celebrity management groups and their cost has skyrocketed. If an agency is targeting Gen-Z, then maybe an influencer works but for an FMCG product, a TV seller will make more impact. And if a creator cost one lakh earlier, they now cost five times that. This makes the client question the agency, whether a creator is even a safe bet.

Mehta then highlighted the concept of ‘single person unicorn’ that is helping brands these days. A large set of agencies are trying to figure out how to capture that set of markets, where creators can have an intersection of ROI. 

Right now the entire age wants to go hyper-local and creators have a much more targeted reach. There are six R’s Mehta’s agency follows before finalising an influencer for a client, namely, reach, resonance reputation, region, relevance and ROI.