e4m Real Time Conference: Industry leaders back omni-channel marketing

In an ever-changing digital world, programmatic advertising is also evolving with time. The shift from omni-channel to a complete digital marketing world is still unclear and still unfolding. Digital marketing is an evolution and programmatic is the main gameplay, and programmatic helps in reaching a consumer in an omni-channel world. These and other trends were discussed in a panel discussion during the inaugural edition of the e4m Real time Conference on Friday.

The panel discussion, ‘Programmatic Advertising: A Game changer for digital marketeers’, was chaired by Dimpy Yadav, GM, Xaxis. The panel included Mehernosh Pithawalla, Senior Vice President and Head of Brand and Strategic Insights, Godrej & Boyce Mfg; Prabhakar Tiwari, Chief Growth Officer, Angel One Ltd; and Nishant Gupta, Head of Revenue Operations at Torc AI.

Sharing his thoughts first, Pithawalla said: “I have heard a lot about programmatic, but I firmly believe that fundamentals of marketing do not change... A lot of people in digital marketing and programmatic kind, to a large extent, give a lot of importance to digital wallets, almost as if everyone is living in a digital world. We are not living in a digital world…we want to meet physically. So omni-channel is something that is obvious. I think omni-channel experience for the consumer is obvious.”

“Understand your consumer well. That is only going to come when you are actually the fly on the wall. That means the consumer still moves between the physical world and the digital world… Just that completely relying on bots or AI for programmatic is not liked. You need to understand the consumer well… So finally, I, to a large extent, believe that an omni-channel experience type, relying on old age marketing, understanding of consumer belt, and altering your digital strategy and programmatic is important,” he adds.

Sharing a similar perspective, Gupta said, “I feel we need to tap into the consumer journey. Once you do that, a very important factor is your CRM... It’s very important to understand what you show, when you show and how you show in the right proposition and then target adtech and martech. It’s not that people are working in isolation. I think the best way possible is all the marketeers would be taking out and spending their money to ensure that they are sort of not spending only on one part of it, but obviously the second is also very important. Both will continue to grow.”

Coming on fintech companies, Tiwari said, “People are curious about financial topics, sometimes they are afraid of the stock market, so they have queries… what do they do? They go to YouTube and search, they go to Google and search. They even search on MX Takatak and TikTok. So fundamentally what programmatic is telling me is there are so many customer journeys possible.”

“Fundamentally, programmatic is very important. You need to experiment with a platform sometimes and have faith in the team behind it. I’m very happy with the way we have grown up from a Rs 50,000 account opening per month to half a million that we are doing now. So, I believe we have got something right. Choosing the right channel, choosing the right proportion, new performance marketing, vis a vis programmatic,” he added.