Navigating the media maze: Optimizing investments in an integrated landscape
The second edition of CMOs’ Charcha - Kolkata Chapter 2024, held on June 14, turned the spotlight on ‘The Media Maze: Optimizing Investments in an Integrated Landscape’. The panel discussion was moderated by Paromita Ghosh, Director of Candid Communications, and the panelists included:
- Soumya Mukherjee, COO, hoichoi
- Aji Issac Mathew, CEO and Co-Founder, INT. Techshu
- Gandharv Sachdeva, Country Head - India, Hybrid
- Dwaipayan Chakraborty, Senior Director, Mindshare
Paromita Ghosh started the discussion by noting the importance of integration of different media platforms in helping to reach a greater number of people. She observed, “In today’s world, the media landscape is like a vast intricate ocean with so many options available from TV, radio to social media, and streaming services, businesses need to be wise about how they spend their money, to get the best value. The media landscape includes all the different platforms and channels where content is shared. This can be traditional media like newspapers, television, and radio, as well as digital media such as websites, social media, streaming engines, and so on. Each platform has its audience and style, so understanding these differences is the key to good investment choices. Integration means bringing together different media, channels to create a unified strategy. For example, a company might run ads on TV, share content on social media, and have a blog on their website, all working together to share the same message about their new product. This integrated approach helps to reach more people and makes the message stronger.”
She added, “However, integrating different media channels can be tricky since each platform has its own rules and best practices, and what works for one might not be working for others. Companies need to carefully plan how they use each channel, to get the most out of these platforms. To get the most out of their media investments, businesses need to know their audience, bring them all together, and choose the right channels to invest in. Having specific objectives such as brand awareness, or driving scale is the key to success. This could involve using analytics tools to monitor website traffic and much more.”
Soumya Mukherjee spoke about Hoichoi’s acquisition strategy, stating, “The OTT industry has evolved over the last five years. Hoichoi started as one of the first few players in the market and we launched way back in the year 2017. Media for us is very complex and we are a media company first because we create content. To us that is the biggest form of media, at the same time, with context to the panel, the entire Hoichoi's acquisition strategy across the world not only in India is dependent on acquiring new users and retaining them. That is where media plays the most important role.”
He further shed a light on how using first party data responsibly is what they aim for and that it goes a long way in building any brand’s trust. He said, “Not only for any OTT company, but for any B2C company out there, today user retention metrics are by far the most important. And a lot of the user retention is done through first party data that the companies actually own. At present companies have the right to send atleast 10-20 push notifications to any customer, send multiple emails, that is where user or platform responsibility comes into play about how one uses first party data in communicating with the users, and eventually building strong trust. For a very public company like us which creates content and which is continuously in the customer’s eyes, trust is also created by the kind of content we are creating, the kind of laws we are following in creating that, and how we are essentially capturing somebody’s data and utilising it.”
Emphasising on how it is important to think from a first-principle perspective and to define clearly what a brand stands for in current context, Aji Issac Mathew pointed out, “I am from the digital marketing industry, and I have been in this industry for the last almost 16-17 years. In the digital space what I can say with respect to demand is that you have too many media options that are available, whereas the advertisers have also grown. One needs to keep looking at, whether we have more media available compared to the more advertisers, and how do you balance this supply gap for your advantage. But it can also be a lot of noise, but how do you look at that media from your perspective? This is, I think, the best time to start thinking from a first-principle perspective and saying that as a business what I’m doing, why I’m doing it. If I’m building a brand, what does the brand mean in today's context, does the definition of brand building even hold from yesterday to today, because the brand never had a single number.”
Gandharv Sachdev said, “When we talk of the ad-tech industry today, it is something that is growing and coming up new. Media has been there, there have been a lot of publishing houses and everything that has been there, but when it comes to the ad-tech sector we are consolidating everything in one place, looking at the demographics and any kind of targeting that we look at, wherein the media helps and is helping the clients to reach the right audience at the right time and not just any intrusive advertising.”
He added, “With the third party cookies going out, privacy will be there. We are running onto those platforms which are cookieless, we see that we are targeting the right audience and when we use the right ad units along with that, the clients are happy, users also look at that privacy platform.”
Speaking about the pitfalls of a cookiless environment, he shared, “In a cookieless world, the kind of transparency might not be there, the kind of retargeting parameters will not be there. That is somewhere the clients will feel the prunt and about what’s next should be done. If it is totally cookieless, then there has to be different kind of platforms, advertising which the users will have to get into.”
Highlighting the changing nature of contextuality and data signals, Dwaipayan Chakraborty shared, “Contextual and timing makes a lot of difference when it comes to digital media, because it’s a real-time kind of a thing, it depends on the run on day part. At the moment if I categorize you as a target audience, your nuance of selection of content and your palatability of selection of specific content changes. So, in a sense from a media perspective, your contextual element and your data signals are changing. Now, given this scenario where cookies are slowly getting obsolete, data clean rooms are the need of the hour because right now once cookies are completely phased out of the scenario, how will you target the cohorts, from an ad tech perspective, from a business perspective?”
He added, “I think as a business owner or a media conglomerate or an agency also, these three factors on which media is operating right now need to be taken into account about how they can take care of their PI data, how they can utilize this to figure out the 20%, creating probabilistic modeling to find out who those consumers are who are going to define the media perspective, and investment perspective. Dynamic creative optimization comes into play based on that.”
These are edited excerpts. For the complete discussion, please watch below:
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