Beyond the Brief
PROFILE: Sethi has over 21 years of industry experience in media planning and buying and has been dealing with numbers and analytics for distinct campaigns. Approach To Media Buying: She believes that effective media planning requires a combination of data-driven decision-making, flexibility, evolution on the basis of trends, opportunities and understanding of the client's objective. Her process is to leverage data analytics and research tools to make informed decisions, optimize the media mix to arrive at the most effective budget break-up and finally, monitor and analyze campaign performance based on KPIs. Memorable Campaign: A campaign by Spotify in partnership with IPL dispensed across TV, Social and OTT, is a memorable one for her. Spotify leveraged multiple media extensively to tap the mass reach of IPL. Promotion via spots, in-show, contextual, and segments were developed to build the omnipresence of the brand. The campaign was optimized on behaviour to target music enthusiasts, and its message was customised in regional and local languages to build greater relevance. Emerging medium/ channel that will revolutionize the industry: She states that podcasts and Generative AI will revolutionize the industry. According to her, podcasts are experiencing significant growth driven by evolving consumer preferences, technological advancements and creativity. Generative AI is expected to take centre stage as it has the power to automize, optimize, and customize all messaging and execution based on consumer needs and preferences. PROFILE: Ghosh leads media planning and buying with over 20 years of experience. She likes to read books, practice Yoga, play ukulele, dance, and explore healthier edible options during her leisurely time. Approach To Media Buying: Her approach to planning changes with changing trends and advancements in technology. She reckons the traditional mass media approach needs to be coupled with a ‘tribe-based’ approach as the audience has disintegrated into various ideological and interest-based communities. She signifies creative optimization at various stages of the consumer journey and addresses the tribe’s mindset. For her approach, focusing on performance marketing with balanced brand marketing is the key to creating stronger brand equity and share of mind, along with having a high ESOV to stay in the cluttered market for a longer time. Memorable Campaign: Her favourite campaigns are the use of AI for the festive campaign by Mondelez, and the latest Dark Fantasy campaign by ITC for their use of AI to beautifully enhance the brand message. Emerging medium/ channel that will revolutionize the industry: She reckons the use of AI will increase over time, and Connected TV audiences will also see substantial growth. PROFILE: Srinivas Rao comes with over two decades of experience across sectors, having been a part of companies such as Maxus and Mindshare. Approach To Media Buying: According to Rao, media planning and buying go hand in hand. He likes to make use of relevant tools to work out a media-agnostic audience-based planning approach and tries to deliver not only on media objectives but also on business objectives. He has three key considerations for both Media planning and buying – defining and understanding the audience precisely; devising the ideal mix for delivering on the objectives; and arriving at the right value for the investments. Memorable Campaign: The Mondelez – Shah Rukh My Ad campaign is one of his favourites. He is impressed by the way it made use of the logic of a big celebrity helping in selling a product for your next-door kirana store. He also commends the way machine learning was used to create advertisements for local merchants and believes that this made it one of the most memorable campaigns of recent times. Emerging medium/ channel that will revolutionize the industry: Rao is mighty impressed by CTV, which is currently in the evolution stage. He believes that CTV would be moving towards complementing TV. Additionally, he thinks the use of Influencers across platforms would increase, and the use of AI and machine learning to create personalised content for the audience would pave the way for the next wave of innovation. PROFILE: Jangra has over a decade of experience in media planning and buying. He likes travelling, cycling and swimming during his recreational time. Approach To Media Buying: He takes a data-driven approach to planning, focusing on the opportunities and mediums. His aim is to reach out to the target audience most effectively and efficiently, to achieve the desired campaign results and KPIs. Memorable Campaign: In 2018, he planned a campaign memorable for ITC’s Fiama that focussed on targeting audiences interested in beauty and personal care. This involved tracking the journey, from the first to the last click, in order to gain audience data that helped in understanding consumer requirements, and target them with relevant product variants. A phase of the campaign also identified audiences who abandoned their carts, allowing the brand to target them with incremental sales campaigns. This campaign exceeded the benchmarks for brand lift and consideration. Emerging medium/ channel that will revolutionize the industry: He reckons Connected TV is a revolutionary medium that gives audiences the opportunity to watch the content they love and allows marketers to gain insights into their content consumption patterns using data. In the near future, marketers will make use of automatic content recognition (ACR) to identify the content being played on smart TVs. ACR technology will power them with insights, target, and measurement, which will change the way marketers collect data and target audiences.
Vice President, Lodestar UM
Managing Partner - South, Motivator
Chief Investment Officer, Wavemaker India
Director - Media Planning & Buying, iProspect India
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