By A Correspondent

 

We all know that data is the future of the marketing services business. The immediate future at least. And those who want to maximise on things now, even the present.

 

Marketing services conglomerate WPP organised its first ever ‘Date with Data’ Summit on Tuesday with a galaxy of marketing gods and its own star-studded network.

 

The idea was to exchange ideas and insights on data-driven marketing and the use of technology across marketing solutions. Keynote speakers and masterclass presenters emphasised the evolving role of data and its profound influence on the industry across all sectors. And thereby of course underscore its expertise with all things data.

Speaking on the relevance of Audience Planning: A Journey or a Destination, Gauravjeet Singh, Head of Media South Asia, Hindustan Unilever, said, “It is a great experience to attend industry forums like this which really discuss the cutting-edge work that is happening around data. It is important to validate what one believes which helps during discussions with panellists and eventually leads to the right direction.”

 

Addressing the growing need for marketeers and thought leaders in the industry to efficiently utilise the power of data, CVL Srinivas, Country Manager WPP India, said: “WPP strongly believes in driving collaboration amongst various stakeholders of the industry and this event is our attempt to create a platform for sharing different perspectives on how data is helping reshape marketing and businesses. As responsible users of data, we strive to enable thought-provoking discussions around important themes. We witnessed great participation from our clients, partners and colleagues.”

 

The Summit opened with masterclasses on Data Visualisation-To Drive Data Adoption and Data Driven Thinking; Building A Data Driven Organisation; Unlocking the True Potential of Mobile Data; Data Privacy and Responsibility and Connecting Data (Data Integration) and Generating Targeted Insights (Data Analysis). These sessions were conducted by experts from Google Cloud, InMobi, Kantar and Data Alliance.

 

The afternoon saw panel discussions on topics such as Decoding The Consumer: Fundamentals to Future, that addressed advancements in insights, research and analytics; Connected Commerce: Decoding The Last Mile, which highlighted how data and analytics are being leveraged to bridge the gaps in commerce. Audience Planning: A Journey Or A Destination touched upon innovative approaches of using data whilst Data As A Source of Creative Inspiration explored how data can be used to inspire creative content and communication planning.

 

Speakers and participants from companies such as Vodafone, ITC, Pepperfry, Hindustan Unilever, Ford India, Google, InMobi and Nykaa were amongst those that delivered key presentations and business insights.

 

And here are pointers from what the various panellists said:

 

Panel 1: Decoding the Consumer: Fundamentals to Future

 

Siddharth Banerjee – Executive Vice President of Brand and Marketing, Vodafone

Data signals help to pick up on consumer behaviour. Data collection can be harnessed in days and weeks rather than months and years. Facebook analytics is used to understand consumer behaviour, it is important for marketeers to harness the information. Future models will have evolve. I would rather use two or three word acronyms over artificial intelligence. Some fundamentals don’t change.

 

Tushar Vyas- Chief Strategy Officer, GroupM South Asia

Miniscule part that buys ITC product will be open to understand consumer behaviour

Machine and data is augmenting the human mind to make the decision.

 

Shuvadip Banerjee – Vice President of Marketing Services, ITC limited

Data is being collected, curated mined on a daily basis. Bringing this data together is a challenge. End-to-end perspective gives a richer view. Quantum has increased.

Data will help us predict consumer behaviour. Data is supplementing something critical. Never loose contact with your consumers.

 

Panel 2: Connected Commerce: Decoding the last mile.

 

Vikas Agnihotri – Country Director, India Sales, Google India.

Certain weather conditions leads to how the food ordering habits change

Helped a client on-board payments identified catchments areas where merchants will come on board. Omnichannels is going to stay it is a big part. Eg: Maruti has more than 700 dealers in the country. 9-10 customers watch a video before buying a car. It is a yearly study done by Google. There is a very strong correlation that shows customers are able to see and buy products from the store. The customers are now more informed about the car before they purchase it.

 

Kashyap Vadapalli – Chief Marketing’s Officer Pepperfry

Control marketplace, partly how we sell it to our merchants. Data what we use is consumer behaviour. What kind of patterns lead to a completion.

Buying behaviour is important. Life time value. Then we know category of consumers we have to tap on. Browsing behaviour, gives us an idea of what to do

 

Sanjay Suri, Chief Technology Officer, Nykaa

We save all data (click, search) earlier we used to do base level analysis. Ability to look at the cohorts who have come on week by week.

Use different Market strategy. Breaking the cohort into a granulated level, figuring each segment and personalising it.

 

Panel 3: Audience Planning: A Journey or a Destination.

 

Gaurav Jeet Singh – Head of Media South Asia Unilever

It is all sophisticated marketing. Purchase decision is important.

Performance marketing is confused with Audience marketing

Looking at large data structure which don’t talk to each other.

How does our data marry 2nd party data and how does 2nd party marry 3rd and complement the other.

You need to go after data that is most recent or refreshed every month. A lot of data set ups are not recent.

 

Vasuta Agarwal- VP and GM, South Asia InMobi

Becomes critical with partners and shares. No one solution to fit different markets.

Define relevant signal and sources

In the non-economic world you don’t have a single view of their customers which is a problem. Sometimes we take data we take at face value. We don’t know how many times it is refreshed and how recent it is. Another challenge is authentic data. And needing teams to check the data.

 

Rahul Gautam- VP of Marketing Ford India

Small share in the Indian context of 5%. People are going against others opinions to buy Ford cars. Taking those signals to target my audience that’s success. It will help all advertisers to be sharp on the money.

 

Kartik Sharma – CEO South Asia, Wavemaker

Cohorts of people are being able to identified through audience planning. Initially audience planning was more like demographic planning, now it has become sharper. Look at the consumer take signals and build something of it.

Recency of data is important. How do you make meaning out of signals is difficult. If you don’t have the resources and people it is task to do.

Audience planning is a Process

 

Panel 4: Data As A Source of Creative Inspiration

Aditya Swamy – Head of Agency Partnership Google

Looked at data from audience POV. A strong idea laid across the tool, you are sure to win the market. Mass brands can bunch users by their spending techniques and their behaviour. 2015, YouTube had two YouTubers who had million subscribers now in 2018 there 400 solo native Youtubers who have a million subscribers. These people have looked at data analyst and constantly reading comments.

Looking for tickets while traveling is something MakeMyTrip would tap onto but Samsonite is tapping on those queries.

 

Kainaz Karmakar – Group Creative Director, Ogilvy

Campaign creativity for awareness – Savlon Swast campaign.

Target audience children. By simple data point of washing hands, we have reached 2.3million children. We carried out a project where children in villages were given chalk to write with and once done it was used as handwash under water. This data point has made a difference.

 

Deepshikha Dharmaraj – Chief Business Growth Officer, Genesis Burson-Marsteller

It is the biggest challenge to combine data and creativity. Data is pure info unless you can create a story with it. A great campaign is built when it starts with your assumption, thought and then with the data and add a layer of how it work with the audience. Data+ creativity= Magic. It is about storytelling. Influencers are what driving the storytelling technique. Some people don’t want to engage with influencers because of payment. But engaging with them creates a better story telling method. And it also reaches the audience faster.