OTT, e-comm at the forefront of delivering consumer delight using AI: Puneet Avasthi

Kantar, a renowned global leader in marketing data and analytics, explores the dynamic AI market, providing valuable insights for brands. The AI wave is transforming consumer experiences, with AI becoming widespread in fitness and social media apps, virtual assistants, and smart home automation.

However, merely adopting AI isn’t enough; it is about humanizing it. Kantar’s innovative suite of AI-driven research solutions empowers brands to gain unprecedented understanding of consumer behavior, leading to sustainable growth and competitive advantage in an AI-centric world.

In an exclusive chat with Adgully, Kantar’s Senior Executive Director - South Asia, Puneet Avasthi, speaks about the recent Kantar AI Summit, highlighting how AI is reshaping marketing dynamics in India. He touches upon key study highlights, including AI’s impact on consumer behaviour and its role in driving competitive advantage. Avasthi emphasizes the need for marketers to effectively leverage AI for personalized brand experiences and optimized ROI.
What are the key highlights of Kantar’s latest study?

We discussed how the internet has enabled various aspects for Indians, from financial inclusion to entertainment quality, allowing communication globally. About 9 in 10 active internet users in India, roughly 724 million people, are exposed to AI through apps on their devices, although not all app genres embrace AI equally.
Social media apps heavily use AI compared to short video apps or health-related apps. Looking ahead, internet users will increasingly rely on virtual assistants for specific queries, reshaping digital marketing dynamics. AI adoption spans age groups, enhancing productivity and accessibility.

While AI isn’t complex mathematically, its consumer impact is user-friendly, enhancing daily life. However, marketers need to leverage AI more effectively for brand experiences and targeting consumers, a task that requires further development.

From a consumer standpoint, in which areas do we see heavy adoption and what sort of learnings can marketers take away from these findings?

Consumers are widely exposed to AI’s recommendation features, productivity tools, and efficiency enhancements. Image enhancement is another crucial aspect. These elements collectively define AI for a large consumer base. From a marketer’s perspective, it is crucial to leverage each of these aspects to ensure their product is recommended in the right context during consumer searches.

Your product shouldn’t just be recommended; it should also present the market’s right images to consumers, leveraging these various AI capabilities that excite consumers. For instance, image enhancement not only aids content creators in producing engaging videos but also helps convey brand messages effectively through AI-powered features.

What industries and brands are significantly deploying AI in their marketing?

Naturally, businesses with large first-party data sets have a first-mover advantage in developing robust machine learning models, thanks to the variety of consumer data and touchpoints they possess. OTT entertainment and e-commerce businesses are at the forefront of delivering moments of consumer delight using AI. Direct-to-consumer (D2C) companies in the FMCG space have effectively leveraged AI to understand their consumers and offer the right products accordingly.

This trend is indicative of how AI will continue to evolve across all sectors in the future.

How can marketers activate AI to produce future products and optimize ROI?

The temptation to use AI as a tool for creating fantastic but gimmicky features for consumers is strong, because it is low-cost, easy, and quick. However, it is crucial to understand and test it in context and within a reasonable timeframe to effectively communicate the message to consumers promptly. Marketers are increasingly relying on insights communities for this purpose.

Cater is an organization with a strong suite of products and tools for consumer understanding. They leverage AI to ensure sellers grasp consumer trends, preferences, and behaviours, aiding in effective marketing strategies and product innovations.

Our product, Link AI for TV, leverages over 30,000 active tests conducted over the years, integrated into our machine learning models. It enables AI-powered performance testing of creative ideas within 15 minutes, helping marketers decide on the best approach swiftly.

How are brands using AI strategies to build competitive advantage for sustainable growth?

As mentioned earlier, it is crucial for the competitive advantages to endure for long-term development. They are ingrained in the brand’s core values. Therefore, AI should be utilized to create exceptional brand experiences for consumers in a modern format, ensuring alignment with the brand's architecture and creating lasting brand impressions.

You have already discussed various brands. However, in the message, if you could elaborate on an AI-based offering and how it can aid marketers in evolving better. An AI-based offering encompasses all aspects of consumer understanding, including identifying trends that consumers value.

Could you tell us more about Kantar’s AI-based offerings and how these tools can help marketers to achieve better results?

An AI-based offering considers all aspects of understanding consumers. It enables understanding trends that consumers value.

It provides a wide variety of datasets, whether it is brand tracking data, real sales data from retail audits, or media aspects. It helps understand what it takes to ensure a specific preference for a particular brand with consumers. So, that is from the standpoint of understanding consumer trends and effectively leveraging them to create strong emotional associations with consumers.

Then there is the aspect of understanding effectiveness, whether it is about patents being put forth. I mentioned Link AI earlier, which is a very strong guidance and an area where Cater has played a strong role for several decades.
And it helps understand how this specific communication will be delivered in such a context across different media and helps decide what the optimal spending is on various media platforms. This is done through our ROI guidance.