Voice will shape the future of programmatic: Dimpy Yadav, Xaxis
Speaking at the e4m-Xaxis Programmatic Summit, Yadav, General Manager, Xaxis, shed light on discovery commerce as a concept and why advertisers need to focus on it
The world of programmatic advertising has advanced manifold in the past year. Brands are looking at it for growth and it is becoming a huge part of conversations amongst marketers. In the e4m-Xaxis Programmatic Summit held on November 16 in Mumbai, Dimpy Yadav, General Manager, Xaxis India, gave a keynote address on the topic 'Evolution of Programmatic in 2022’ and unveiled the e4m-Xaxis Report 2023.
She spoke about the key trends in Programmatic advertising in the country right now: discovery commerce, artificial intelligence, and voice assistants.
She details her idea of discovery commerce and why advertisers need to figure out strategies around it. “Within commerce, we have search commerce, social commerce, and then we have an entire bouquet of audiences which is sitting for discovery commerce, which is media commerce. Now, why do we call it discovery? The very clear reason is that when the audience is trying to make up his or her mind to buy something, they are in more of a discovery. So, you could be very clear on the fact that what product you want to buy could be a refrigerator, but when you're searching for it, when you have not made up your mind or the brand you want to go for, you're still discovering it.
"So as advertisers we've seen there's a huge gap in terms of our strategies because we are planning for the bottom funnel which is where we have a heavy investment on search commerce. People have already made up their minds in terms of the brand they are going to go for. We need to invest in our strategy and understand how can we tap into them in that decision-making journey which is why we are calling it discovery commerce.”
She then goes on to speak about artificial intelligence. “When humans are meeting artificial intelligence that's when it becomes magic which is amplified intelligence. Gone are the days when you just talk about you know, lowering down CPMs using AI. Nowadays AI is actually helping you in taking decisions, starting from planning your campaign, followed by activation, and then even insights after the campaign are done.
"So instead of investing heavily in manual strategies, is the time when we are building a lot of dashboards with the help of these millions and trillions of datasets.”
Yadav also tells the audience about the next big thing in programmatic, voice assistants. “There's a big trend coming up for us. In the next few years, we’ll see voice taking over that world. So, voice is actually going to shape the future of programmatic for us within this key scope of creativity. In India, this trend is going to come where most of our instructions in terms of buying or going somewhere navigation in our daily life will be driven by voice assistants, which is where our advertising landscape is taking us.”
She ends the speech by saying, “So one word we all hear is contextual. Let's move towards contextual ways of targeting not just keyword targeting. More to do with the context of the audiences, more to do with the relevance of audience groups working out together, and even on the back of data sets which are going to float back in your campaign. As we know that first-party data is driving the growth and factor there, every advertiser is working towards that. That remains one of their top priorities for them. But again, at the same time, we can't take data back, it's been a long time. What's going to really help us is those tech and tools, so that's going to be the heavy area of investment that we need to focus on.”
