The pandemic has brought about notable shifts across industries, and the case has been no different for marketing. Today, digital marketing has become a crucial aspect in order to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. In our weekly BrandWagon Ad Talk series, industry experts highlight what has changed over the past two years and more importantly, are these changes here to stay. Nimish Agrawal, senior vice president, and head of Marketing at Niva Bupa Health Insurance talks to BrandWagon Online, about the dos and don’ts of digital marketing, best marketing campaigns and more. (Edited Excerpts)
What is the difference between launching a brand in today’s digital era versus earlier?
From a launch standpoint, the three critical stakeholders (Media landscape, consumer and the marketer) have all undergone some changes and that makes the launches very different from earlier.
Media Proliferation: With hundreds of websites, apps, OTT platforms, traditional consumption options, digital news, social media, consumers have been split across various touchpoints. Hence to build a seamless integrated media plan that optimizes frequency and maximize reach as a launch plan has become increasingly difficult.
Skip Happy Consumers: The attention span has plummeted over the years, and the tolerance for unwanted advertising is at an all-time low. The marketers are trained to tell / write and think stories but unfortunately the audience base is waiting for the skip button to appear. The advertising narrative is moving towards feature led communications which should not take more than 7 seconds. For a new launch or brand, which is still not familiar to consumers this becomes a big issue.
Marketer’s FOMO: The need to stand out as marketing whiz kid and promote your own ad/brand on social media has become a toxic trend these days. As a result the marketers are ditching the consumer insight sessions and leaning more towards what will create more buzz. Every third brand today boasts a social message, weather it is relevant or not doesn’t matter. They go with the intent that it should look good on my LinkedIn wall.
What is the recent best marketing or advertising campaigns you have seen and why?
Recently I saw the women ethnic wear brand Sabhyata campaign and really liked the same.
The elements that worked for me were:
Storytelling: Very relatable situation and a story told well with the right emotions, great casting, good production values
Brand Fit : Bringing in an element of brand philosophy around ethnicity and espousing what our culture truly stands for and subtle fitment of the brand made the brand recall very strong for me.
Persuasion: A good campaign should drive consideration for the brand. After watching the ad, I searched about the brand which I was not familiar with. This is a great measure of efficacy.
I also loved the Lenskart recent campaign with Karan Johar; the quirkiness of a lifestyle brand interwoven with strong product RTB was a joy to watch both as consumer and marketer.
Which brand in the last year has made the best use of digital and how?
I think Mondelez on CDM is doing some great work on DCO and precision based marketing, leveraging technology to personalize at scale using third party data is very difficult and they made DCO household name in the marketing fraternity.
Second would be Zomato. Their social media marketing stands out every now and then. The best part is the sheer amount of earned media that they are able to drive on the back of creative copy is just brilliant. Like the Amul advertising in the early days, the social media handle of Zomato has elevated itself to become part of millennial pop culture.
In a post-Covid world, what are the dos and don’ts of digital marketing?
Post COVID while the digital adoption, time spent, engagement and lot of other metrics have soared but, in my mind, – the do’s and don’ts have not changed too much. Listing few:
Do’s
- Test, test and do more test, I can’t stress this enough. This is the beauty of the digital medium use it to the hilt. Better your understanding on what works and what doesn’t. Treat your performance ads the same way you treat other ATL advertising stimuli. This description lines will get you business, read it once yourself and don’t just outsource this to the agency partner.
- Personalize message at scale using FPD, CDP or data clean rooms. Breaking down consumer cohorts makes the message sharper and shorter and that works well for digital natives.
Don’t
- Don’t assume a quirky fun personality for your brand because digital is largely driven by entertainment. Like Ogilvy said – great advertisement is not entertaining but persuasive. Given you line of business, define the tonality and brand personality appropriately.
- Don’t treat performance marketing and brand marketing as silos, give the same thought while designing a text ad, banners as you would do to your mainline creative. The consumer is the same and he/she should consume the brand message in a coherent consistent manner.
- Don’t just get swayed by platform metrics on the publisher side. Most of the metrics are built on last click attribution and that does not necessarily represent the consumer journey before he drops a lead/ becomes a customer. The limitation on data attribution should not suspend common sense advertising and rigorous consumer insighting even on the performance side.
One recent bad case of advertising you have seen, and why?
I personally have been very disappointed with the recent cause-advertising bandwagon, where lot of brands share a point of view on the bad state of affairs in the country. Neither they offer a solution, nor they have any locus standi on the issue and they also are not serious about the issue. It’s just a creative device, once juiced for awards and social media post the same brands will pick another premise. The likes of Vim Black, Dove campaign on fair skin, Colgate, Bournvita forced packs have received tremendous backlash and rightly so. As marketers we are in the business of persuasion and only that.