mediasmart – Democratising multi-screen brand storytelling programmatically

Can you elaborate on mediasmart's journey in India? How have your strategies helped the programmatic advertising platform and its clients brave the pandemic?

mediasmart was already a leading mobile programmatic platform in Spain, having started its operations in 2012. In March 2020, Affle and mediasmart joined forces to help advertisers in India and Southeast Asia. This brought great strategic merit wherein advertisers in this part of the world could now benefit from mediasmart's solutions for proximity marketing and incrementality.

One of the most distinguished solutions that we have brought to Indian advertisers has been around Connected TV (CTV) advertising. While CTV was already a growing phenomenon in the western part of the world, in the Indian ecosystem it was still fairly new. Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, audience content consumption changed. This led to increased CTV usage and new consumer behavior. CTV advertising in India quickly adapted to these changes, which is impressive.

When mediasmart launched its cross-screen and Household Sync solution during this time, it further strengthened how advertisers would launch CTV ad campaigns and gave an impetus to the adoption of this format. Brands could now supercharge their CTV ads and sync with ads on other connected devices in the same household, thereby making ads more engaging, effective, and highly relevant by personalizing them for specific audiences in the same household.

Some of our other key solutions have been centered around bridging the gap between the offline and online worlds, which to me, is highly relevant in the current post-pandemic ecosystem. As brands look for ways to drive-in store traffic, mediasmart’s Proximity Marketing and Location-based advertising solutions not only help in increasing brand awareness but also in the incremental lift.

Today, mediasmart operates as one of the leading advertising solutions providers across verticals and geographies with over 800+ clients and has won 24+ awards in Asia alone with multiple platform recognitions, making us a bespoke voice within the programmatic advertising landscape.

What are your views on the growth of CTV in India? How will it benefit brands and advertisers in the long run?

The CTV market in India has been growing at an impressive speed on the back of three key pillars - evolved and highly engaged audiences, household co-viewing across demographics, and discovery to purchase and beyond. The current reach of CTV is around 14-15 million households andwith cheaper internet data rates as well as competitive pricing and availability of Smart TVs, it is poised to reach 25 + million by 2025.

mediasmart’s India CTV 2.0 report released in 2022 unveiled interesting insights into CTV consumption in India, which has emerged as a family viewing phenomenon. Our first-party survey research found that 84% of households have more than 1 person watching CTV and 64% of the respondents claimed to prefer watching CTV together with families. The time spent on CTV viewing increased to 4 hours in 2022, up from 3.5 hours in 2021.

In fact, co-viewing is going to be a key driver for brands to connect with CTV users and make the most of the interactive CTV ads, along with the measurability it brings to a traditional medium like television. The ability to connect the journey from TV to mobile also empowers brands to improve brand recall and create meaningful experiences for the end user. In today’s hyper-connected omnichannel world, it’s important to create experiences that leverage how a single user can be reached across multiple channels and CTV gives advertisers that opportunity to build an efficient channel for omnichannel targeting.

What are the recent initiatives taken up by mediasmart to keep up with evolving consumer behaviours?

mediasmart’s solutions are always committed to offering more value to our advertisers by staying on top of changing consumer behaviors in the digital advertising landscape and responding to the needs of the end customers. As the average user gets more and more connected across devices, our solutions strive to integrate those consumer journeys across screens. Recently, we announced the launch of Digital Out of Home (DOOH) with Audience Sync solution, which is a powerful offering to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds.

On CTV, one of the ways in which we do this is with the household sync technology to reach users across multiple devices within the same household, including mobile, desktop, and CTV. We enable tracking across the user funnel, i.e, from exposure to all the way to user action. This solution enables advertisers to reach a granular audience and deliver consistent messaging, regardless of the device they are using. Another technological innovation we’re bringing to make advertising more appealing and meaningful is by focusing on increasing user awareness of advertisements. Our teams researched user engagement versus ad exposure, and developed methods to improve ad awareness through a feature that helps boost user engagement, and strengthen customer experience, to ultimately improve the ad viewing experience.

Another mediasmart solution helps app marketers tap into CTV’s potential for online advertising and market their apps to the audiences. This helps companies take advantage of CTV’s immense audience reach, building a channel that could bring a lot to the table for app promotion. With this solution, the audience does not need to manually search for the app, rather, app download QR Codes on CTV ads can take viewers from their TV screen to the app store with a quick smartphone scan. They are open to multiple targeting options, such as intent-based targeting, demographic targeting, and geo-fencing. These ads can capture data from each TV scan so you can stay on top of metrics such as unique and overall engagement, scanning location, and scanning device OS. This only means more substantial reach and awareness opportunities for app marketers.

By leveraging these initiatives, we help advertisers achieve their marketing objectives and drive higher volumes with lower CPMs. Our commitment to delivering value-added services makes us a leading demand-side platform, enabling brands to succeed in the evolving digital advertising landscape.

With the growing digital penetration, can you shed some light on the changing digital advertising landscape in brand advertising in India?

The industry has been gradually shifting to more measurable advertising spends and the COVID-19 pandemic played a catalyst, wherein more businesses adopted a digital-first approach/awareness to reach a more targeted & measurable audience impact.

For brand marketers in particular, the focus has surely gone beyond awareness. At present,there seems an equal discourse about the complete funnel impact and its measurement. Marketers are using a full-funnel approach to involve customers at every stage of the customer journey, from awareness to consideration to conversion. Additionally, we might observe a shift away from walled gardens towards more unified, transparent, programmatic-led attribution and implementation channels that are crucial for purchasing, serving, and tracking advertisements.

mediasmart has won several accolades like the MMA Smarties Wins and other recognitions for its exemplary services, can you shed some light on what makes mediasmart the best from the rest?

Innovation has always been at the vanguard of product development at mediasmart. With our cutting-edge technologies, we assist marketers in bridging the gap between their core objectives and the impacts they are looking for.

We are also moving towards a multi-screen audience approach, focusing on reaching the right audience, thereby making it platform/channel agnostic and minimizing ad fatigue/maximizing impact or ROAS.

We specialize in solving complex challenges, such as converting TV exposure to mobile action/intent; mobile exposure to driving store footfalls; layering data and targeting to give the optimal mix; and more. Our solutions are designed to minimize ad spillover and maximize engagement, delivering measurable results for our clients.

We utilized our location intelligence tech and weather-based innovation for Lotus Herbals which delivered phenomenal results. With the KFC campaign, our location precision targeting technology helped identify and engage a high-intent audience which resulted in a significant increase in footfall to the KFC store. Spotify enjoyed significant growth in app downloads and an incremental uplift in all key brand metrics with the help of our proprietary Household Sync technology.

Our tech capabilities like these have enabled us to build success stories across verticals & geographies. We believe in driving impact and thus in the last two years, we are grateful to have won multiple awards & recognitions in key categories like - Programmatic led advertising, Internet of things/connected devices, Mobile advertising excellence for cross-screen, Innovation-led digital campaign etc, to name a few.

What are the biggest challenges you foresee in the advertising and marketing industry in the near future?

Consumers are accessing content across a wide variety of channels and devices. Reaching their target audience is growing harder for marketers as the media landscape becomes more dispersed. A fresh and creative approach to media planning and measurement is required to address this challenge.

As the world transitions to web 3.0, more technologies are developed, and consumers are more conscious of how their data is used. With these technological advancements, transparency and ethics are set to become the benchmark between brands and customers.

The emergence of artificial intelligence and automation will be the other challenge. Brands need to incorporate these technologies into their marketing plans. Along with the creation of new tools and platforms, this will call for a change in knowledge and experience.

The global conditions around the risk of recession are factors that would impact advertising decisions. Marketers must carefully invest in technologies that maximize ROIs, reduce ad wastage, and offer omnichannel solutions for incremental impact. However, on a more promising note, India and Southeast Asia, the CTV trend is surely picking up momentum.

India is poised to reach over 25 mn+ CTV users while markets within South East Asia are also promising double-digit growths on the back of growing OTT consumption. On the other hand, new-age cross-screen advertising technologies are also gaining pace. DOOH Advertising Market is expected to Reach $55.23 Billion by 2030 in the APAC region. Connecting user journeys across screens will therefore be crucial to advertising choices, and companies that fail to do so run the risk of appealing to only one side of the equation. Therefore, at mediasmart, we believe in creating impact by integrating consumer journeys across screens - CTVs to mobile to DOOH & other connected devices.

(This is advertorial content curated by partner team)