In 2021, dentsu international underwent massive restructuring, and in the process handed the reins of WATConsult to Sahil Shah. He speaks to Venkata Susmita Biswas about the new organisational structure, trends in digital advertising, and more.
What is your vision for WATConsult which is now in its 15th year? What are your core focus areas?
WATConsult began when social media was barely taking off in India. Starting from there, we have added expertise in paid search, video content creation, and programmatic advertising. At a time when digital is an obvious medium for advertising, our vision is to deliver outstanding creative solutions on digital media for brands. We do not claim to be a mainline-plus-digital agency or an integrated media agency; at the core, we simply want to focus on creative use of the digital ecosystem.
WATConsult is now part of the Isobar Group in India. How do clients benefit from the restructuring?
The Isobar Group within the dentsu creative service business unit has a central alignment; we are able to integrate services across the three agencies. While Isobar has strengths in brand experience and brand identity building, Perfect Relations addresses communications, and WATConsult offers services in the creative, content, and social media space. Between the three, we can provide a comprehensive bundle of solutions all the way from creating a logo to driving awareness and lead generation.
With digital forming 30% of the ad pie as per the Dentsu Digital report, what are the most popular digital destinations for brands?
The growth in digital advertising has been steady, at 25-30% year-on-year, barring in 2020. Online video is a dominant part of digital advertising, spanning long-form videos on OTT platforms to short-format videos on social media. In fact, short-format video is highly popular in the non-metro markets. Video has traditionally been used for brand building; we are now seeing the rise of video-led commerce that is driving everything from awareness to purchase. One can now include shoppable features on videos, thus reducing friction points in the consumer’s purchase journey. Social commerce is another space that’s exploding in India.
By 2023, ad spend on digital is expected to match that of TV. What are some of the issues that need to be ironed out?
The digital ad buying ecosystem needs more transparency. The transaction between the marketer and the publisher is full of middlemen. If we can enable greater transparency in the path that an ad takes to reach a consumer, we can bring in a lot more efficiency into digital advertising. One way to do this is through the application of the decentralised blockchain technology. While it is true that the industry still does not have a uniform measurement metric, a brand tends to be open to investing in digital advertising because it benefits not just in terms of brand awareness, but also sales.
Amazon has reported ad revenues of $31 billion for the year, while YouTube clocked about $28.8 billion. What trends are emerging in this space in India?
Ad spends on e-commerce platforms are zooming ahead. In fact, brands that are endemic to an e-commerce platform are rerouting their ad spends from other platforms to e-commerce websites. Brands are able to draw a lot of insights from marketplaces like Amazon to target consumers. Since people head to YouTube mainly for entertainment, it is unlikely that the platform has data on the purchase behaviour of a user. The area that Amazon needs to work on is video advertising inventory. That’s the space where YouTube and OTT platforms are ahead of platforms like Amazon.
Web3 has become a buzzword in the industry with brands hopping onto the NFT bandwagon. How big is the scope for monetisation here?
There is definite scope for monetisation. What needs to be seen is the direction that Web3 takes from here on. We are in the early days — this phase is like the early 2000s when social media platforms like Orkut and Myspace mushroomed and then died a natural death when Facebook emerged. However, it is obvious that the decentralised Web3 technology is here to stay. The participation of brands in the metaverse must be such that users can participate and engage with the brand. Brands should be careful not to use the metaverse as a simple analog for the online medium.
Read Also: Credenc announces Mayanka Uppal as its new CMO