‘Integrating brand purpose with emerging tech is the way forward’

How is AI penetrating its way into content marketing & advertising? How is synthetic, AI-generated media going to liberate creativity? How do brands work on creating a clutter-free, seamless experience for their consumers? To answer these questions and more, industry leaders came together for a panel discussion on the topic ‘The Future of Content: Emerging Technologies’ at e4m Content Jam 2022.

The session was chaired by Niraj Ruparel, Head of Mobile & Emerging Tech – GroupM. The others on the panel were Chandan Kumar, Senior Vice President Marketing - Brand Design, Strategy & Communication, UltraTech Cement; Gagan Agarwal, Brand Head, Ageis Federal Life Insurance; Gaurav Dagaonkar, Co-founder and CEO, Hoopr.ai; Geetanjali Kothari, Head - Marketing and Corporate Communication, Bharti AXA Life Insurance and Pooja Sahgal, Chief Marketing Officer, Raymond Consumer Care.

Introducing the audience to the topic, Ruparel said audiences around the world can now interact with AI services like Chat GPT & Lensa AI. "ChatGPT is the latest step in the world of customizable content - it can provide infinite content, generated by AI, and will impact how we all create, consume and commercialize media moving forward. Prisma’s Lensa AI app has gone viral, turning selfies into fantastical ‘avatars’ that look like works of art.

By combining these AI services with existing brands, people can interact with the digital avatars of the brands and people that they wish to - making this one of the most important leaps in the user experience journey."

Agarwal shared his insights on generative AI and spoke about a campaign done by Aeges Federal with Sachin Tendulkar. “Insurance as a category has been something sold on the basis of fear. Therefore, we decided to start a positive conversation around it. We empowered our consumers to live the lifestyle of their choice and we wanted to integrate that into our content. The challenge was that we wanted to do a film about young Sachin but we hardly had some 4-5 images, that’s where Generative AI helped us come up with this campaign.”

Talking about how the content strategy at Bharti AXA has evolved over the years with emerging technologies, Kothari said, “There have been various challenges - email opening rates dropping from 25% to 7% to Google categorising inboxes into primary, social and promotional and therefore we have had to keep our eyes and ears open for opportunities. The biggest growth engines are either coming in from youngsters or from Bharat. To penetrate into Tier 2 and 3 - they have to be told the brand communication via human intervention while the youngsters don't like that as they like to figure things out on their own. These are the two areas where we are thinking of doing business in a manner that is cost-effective and sensible for us and we are able to talk to all our consumers."

Sharing insights on the regional aspect of music content, Dagaonkar said that when it came to mobile marketing, video formed the crux and 60-70% of videos required music. “Brands want to know about going local and hyperlocal. Now, this can be done via language but at the fundamental level, even musical instruments can set the mood. Today, brands have barely 6 seconds to engage with consumers. The reason why we are looking at music as the last bastion when it comes to be conquered by generative AI is that there is a sense of aesthetic beauty that needs to be translated and a lot of that progress is going on.”

Talking about the content strategy of a low-involvement category like cement, Kumar opines “At first, the belief needs to be dismantled that cement is a low-involvement category. It’s an extremely high involvement category for someone building a home. We are driven by proximity buyers. 1.2 billion people in India live in a part where homes are built with a lifetime worth of savings and 99% of them build only 1 home in their lifetime. Since there is no past experience, aspirations are sky-high, knowledge is zero and the trust deficit is pretty high which was bothering the consumers; this is where we found the sweet spot to solve the problem that the consumers are really worried about.”

In the area of NFTs and metaverse, Sehgal had some insightful takeaways to share. “Kamasutra is a brand that has not been in the news for a long time and conversations have also evolved. It’s catering to an older TG as an old brand among the new competition. Hence, we used voice AI to understand the keywords around love and sex and created conversation stickers that got integrated seamlessly into the content. We took it to a second stage where we converted the popular stickers and minted that into NFTs. We also started doing a chatbot by taking up all popular search queries. In order to make it more immersive, we have also ventured into the metaverse where people can interact with avatars. Integrating brand purpose with technology is the way to go forward for us.”