EssenceMediacom's Aarti Bharadwaj, SVP of Product Integration, APAC, and Chinmay Kelkar, Head of Transformation and Regional Client Business Director, APAC, master the complex balance between efficiency and innovation in the realm of advertising and media strategy. I'll talk about it.
Data-driven decision making is probably the most popular phrase in marketing these days. With the proliferation of digital channels and the vast amount of data available to advertisers, the effort to back up every assumption with data seems justified.
But there is an equally valid counterargument: a data-driven, efficiency-centric mindset has become the enemy of innovation. The only way to break through advertising clutter is through innovative communication and media use.
The pursuit of proven efficiency drives decisions to proven methods and stifles creativity. Therefore, every breakthrough media product for brands has a role to play in leveraging data to balance the need for efficiency with the drive for innovation.
So what is a game-changing media product for brands? It helps media players harness the power of data and technology to automate the generation of insights from the past and align creative and media strategies with their categories. It should be a set of tools and frameworks that help you break away from the average. Breakthrough products therefore help brands reconcile the reality of efficiency and the need for innovation in service to their businesses.
Efficiency perspective: maximizing profits investment
Shrinking profit margins, an ever-changing competitive environment, and rapidly changing consumer behavior have made efficiency essential to good business. However, given the increasing fragmentation of digital investments, the ability to make changes in real time is limited without automation.
The key to the breakthrough product here is automating the monitoring and reporting of campaign data. This allows media stakeholders to set guidelines for ongoing optimization, which can also be implemented through automation.
Therefore, the task of maximizing the return from every dollar spent is performed by the data-driven engine.
Direction of innovation: Breaking away from the average
The essence of advertising is to create a memorable impact on the viewer. To do this, the ad must capture the viewer's attention in its message and placement.
Therefore, there is an inherent need to break from what brands and their competitors have done in the past. This presents unique challenges to data-driven thinking. After all, all models are built on historical training data that defines the possible range of outcomes that the model can simulate.
Therefore, to drive innovation, our breakthrough products are built to use historical data to quickly take an average and maximize the time you spend creating a recommended media plan that differs from that average. I am.
One oft-cited example of this stream of innovation is the exploitation of new audiences. From an efficiency standpoint, it's important to find placements that are more effective with your existing audience. However, due to lack of data, this algorithmic approach cannot test new and unexplored audiences.
The innovation flow relies on a test-and-learn approach to fail forward to create data that can then be pulled back to the efficiency layer.
Balancing efficiency and innovation: Weaving two seemingly separate threads together
Breakthrough products balance the opposing forces of efficiency and innovation in achieving brand and business goals.
Growth for any brand needs to be planned around category dynamics, audience behavior, and strategic marketing strategies. Each of these pillars has a role to play in understanding what happened in the past and how it can be streamlined.
Efficiency therefore frees up innovation funds, i.e. resources and time to drive innovation. This innovation means creative that sets you apart from your competitors, a media strategy that moves away from your competitors' focus, expansion into new audiences and geographies, and new formats to drive incremental growth. It's a combination of platform, partnership use.
Overall, breakthrough media products are built as a service to brands and businesses, promoting innovation rather than using efficiency to stifle innovation. By design, innovative products are not one-size-fits-all and must be customized. A strong relationship between agency and client, based on the principles of shared ambition and a spirit of partnership, will be essential to realizing the vision of this breakthrough product. Therefore, breakthrough products in media require breakthrough client leadership in the agency ecosystem and a shared purpose among all stakeholders.
