TV & digital need to be viewed through the same lens: Vikram Sakhuja

Vikram Sakhuja, Partner & Group CEO, Madison Media and OOH, decoded “the sense and nonsense in the media world” at the unveiling of the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2023.

Sakhuja reviewed some of the media practices, which have become ingrained over the years, and added his perspective, while noting that over Rs 1 lakh crore is slated to be spent on AdEx in 2023.

Advertisements today were no longer perpetuating the brand that they are supposed to build, he noted. “Isn’t the point of advertising to reinforce the values a brand stands for,” he asked. Citing the example of McDonald’s advertising over the years, he said that advertising works via reinforcement of key equities that the brand has built by which the consumer can remember you. “With more than 90% of a brand’s budget going into media costs and less than 10% into the creation of advertising, I think it’s a huge waste if you are not building these basic equities into your brand,” he said, addressing advertisers and creative agencies.

Sakhuja also addressed the subject of advertisers not adapting their advertisement to the medium or platform on which they were using it. Each medium has its own syntax and has to be recognised for its powers: TV / cinema for its emotion, drama and big picture, radio as a “companion medium”, while OOH ads need to ‘impactful and visual with few words, where ‘Less is More’.

He also weighed in on the problems of a “pavlovian response of advertising on sales”. “It’s important to understand how advertising works, and the communication for a particular ad campaign. For newer brands, the task is simply to create awareness for the new proposition by building reach and frequency, he said. For mature brands, expectations need to be tempered as category advertising while not growing the category much. “It is essential to re-bring and reinforce the strategic or psychological equities of a mature or established brand.”

Noting that media is now much more than a delivery pipe for advertising to deliver messages, Sakhuja said it allows one to do associative marketing, clutter-breaking impact, build higher order brand values and so on.

Delving on whether advertising is only about “brand salience” or actually about communication, Sakhuja said that while he was a believer of brevity and non-extravagant ACDs (Average Commercial Durations) he was not a fan of the “10-second edits” on premium properties like IPL. ACDs need to be managed wisely, he stated.

He also questioned the logic behind planning TV and Digital in silos, when both are video and viewing is seamless. It would be much simpler to plan TV & Digital as one similar video plan, he pointed out. They need to be viewed exactly through the same lens. Digital video planning needs to be integrated using the same metrics as the ones, which have worked successfully through the years for TV, he stressed.

Questioning the media TG practices followed by marketers and advertisers on digital, he advised brands to relax their TG definitions to make it closer to their business target group. He also deliberated on rethinking TV planning around the HSM and other regional markets.

Sakhuja summed up his talk by saying that in today’s TV media landscape brands need to choose markets with more granularity, and TG with less granularity in the case of digital media.