Advertising needs to become conversational: Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan, Gupshup

At the virtual unveiling of dentsu-e4m Digital Advertising Report 2022, Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan, VP Marketing, Gupshup spoke on the topic ‘Conversational Advertisements - A new way of Audience Engagement’.

“Advertising is an industry that is growing steadily,” he noted, while adding the dentsu report that has been released also attest to the same thing that ad spending and ad media spending is growing and not declining. “The growth is coming in from digital platforms because a lot of us are spending more time online. The pandemic has only physically distanced us but brought us closer virtually through different messaging and video conferencing apps like Zoom calls, etc.”

He also pointed out that the attention span of consumers has been gradually reducing. “Because there's a lot of context switching that takes place from app to website, website to WhatsApp, WhatsApp to YouTube, YouTube, to Facebook and so on and so forth. And if you look at most of the advertising stimuli today, (of course offline is one-way), a lot of the digital advertising formats that we use are inherently one-way. This is coupled with the fact that people are spending a lot of time online and it's resulting in a lot of advertising fatigue,” he said.

Highlighting how one-way advertising stimuli is causing advertising fatigue and why people around the world are using ad blockers, Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan shared, “About almost 750 million people in the world have employed ad blockers and India is number two on the list in terms of the number of people who have actually used ad blockers. Now if you're an advertiser looking at this, you're wondering how in this new scheme of things, can my advertising campaign actually touch the target audience in a very personal way.”

“So the other thing to consider as an advertiser is that, and this was based on a Facebook survey, today customers expect to have two-way conversations with brands, they're tired of being sprayed with a lot of stimuli advertising. Therefore, they want to be able to converse with brands the way that they would in a normal scenario, like if they were to visit a store or if they were to visit some kind of an experience centre. And the medium in which they would want to do this with brands is actually the messaging app.”

Speaking about the importance of two-way conversations, he shared why advertising should become conversational. “Today, one thing that's coming out of all of this is that advertising needs to become conversational or enable two-way conversations between brands and consumers. And there is no better place to do it than the messaging app, because the messaging app is something that almost all of us have, whether you're looking at the urban segment or you're looking at the Bharat segment. Messaging apps are ubiquitous.”

“And pretty soon, we will be having a lot of first-time smartphone users and buyers across the Bharat segment. So this is a segment or this is a platform where your audiences are already active. So you as a brand needs to figure out a way on how you can live on that app along with your consumers or friend or family or relatives or high-school friend group or college group or work group and figure out a way in which you can create a conversational experience. Instead of just thinking about advertising like doing banners, picking up physical inventory, you need to think how can you create conversational advertising or conversational experiences on messaging apps and that is where your brand really comes alive.”