Truly immersive advertising still has a long way to go: Gopa Menon

Caught as he is between the Mindshare’s Maruti mandate, which was confirmed a couple of months ago, and the festive season, exchange4media spoke to Gopa Menon, Head of Digital for South Asia at Mindshare, about the future, starting off specifically with AR/VR tech.

“Well, from an advertising opportunity standpoint, as of now, those are limited. If you want to actually gaze into the future, these things will obviously get interesting there. And obviously those platforms will start trying to see how they can monetise it.”

“Both advertisers and marketers would like to actually get on to that banner and start engaging with that. For example, right now, let's say you're into gaming or there are certain clients who are interested in tapping into a gaming audience, then you are able to do some kind of integrations and work on that,” he says, noting that truly immersive advertising still has a long way to go.

And that naturally also brings up another hot topic, namely AI, where Menon sees a lot more happening in the now.

“Probably the most important thing I would say is its use is optimization and you can actually optimize your ads. Look at how your ads are actually doing, check your rates and see drastic improvements in various metrics and deliverables,” he says.

Then there’s the creative angle, where Menon sees especially Generative AI tools helping to massively generate large creatives, as well as help scale up and interpret human creative talent, in a market demanding increasingly personalized media and engagement.

“And definitely reporting is the third. It’s difficult for agencies and marketers to get all of the information in one dashboard or a suite. This definitely will help in actually getting all the numbers and data in very less time with very minimal human interface, in that (number-crunching) sense. So, it saves on cost, saves on human manpower and creates comprehensive data sets.”

Speaking of data sets and tools, Menon says that while there is a surfeit of technological solutions to various issues in digital advertising, there is a certain threshold cost.

“I think more and more advertisers are seeking those answers, but whether they are willing to invest that much for a technology is a question, as of now. It all depends on their priorities and what their current goals are,” he says, pointing out there’s still no universal way to address all issues.

If an advertiser is primarily digital, they are willing to invest in those technologies, but if digital makes up, say, only 10% of their marketing mix, they don’t see the need to invest in such advanced tools yet. As with any other technology, as more and more people use it, and prices drop as it becomes more mainstream, it’ll be more widely distributed.

Noting that a lot of new technology companies are coming in, Menon says “All of these newer players are actually bringing in lots of choices for advertisers and advertisers who are interested in exploring them. But again, it’s a question of cost, and what’s viable for an advertiser. A lot of these 3rd party tools have a lot of proprietary technologies and associated costs. General AI tools are mostly free to use so you’ll see people playing around with that a lot right now.”