Media Dialogues: CXOs on marketing's measures of excellence and AI impacts

The SMARTIES Awards, organised by MMA, the global marketing trade association, honours marketing campaigns that have pushed the boundaries of innovation and made a significant impact. These campaigns have set new benchmarks for brands, agencies, media companies, and solution providers across India, showcasing groundbreaking work that stands out in the industry.

In a conversation with Storyboard18's editor Delshad Irani, the awards jury—Shailendra Katyal, MD of Lenovo; Deepika Bhan, President of Packaged Foods at Tata Consumer Products; Rohit Bhasin, Head of Propositions, Consumer Bank, and CMO at Kotak Mahindra Bank; and Rohit Dadwal, CEO & Board Member at MMA Global APAC and Global Head of SMARTIES—discussed the essence of marketing excellence and what truly defines it. They also shared insights on the campaigns that made a measurable impact, earning their place on the business impact index.

Below are the excerpts of the discussion.

Q: Give me a little bit of an insight into what it was like looking at all the Smarties Award entries, especially when it came to making that correlation between creativity and business impact, tell me a little bit about how important that was and what stood out for you during the judging process?

Katyal: The overall experience was quite good for me. What stood out for me was the level of experimentation. Despite the use of generative AI being relatively new, I saw a lot of experimentation. Has the experimentation scaled to a level where it can have a genuine business impact? Maybe not this year, but even as a jury we said that we should encourage the behaviour of experimentation and hence recognise people who made that brave attempt to use new technology.

Q: Tell me about this play between the balance of tradition with innovation; how did you see some of that also being reflected in the campaigns that you have looked at during this process?

Bhan: I found a lot of brands doing a great job of being very true to their core, while they were still playing with an idea for a younger consumer cohort, across different channels. You can see that sort of idea of a lose brand essence.

We all grew up in a world of very sharply tailored brand and the brand experience being similar across touchpoints. But you began to see brands operate from a little bit of an essence which you could feel through different kinds of advertising. So there is an evolution happening there, in my view.

Q: If you were to say, some commonalities between some of the campaigns that stood out for you in terms of again, having that tech infusion, or really sort of cutting-edge work that is pushing the boundaries, while of course keeping an eye on all the measures that you need for marketing excellence. If you were to sort of connect the dots between the work that won for you, what would those dots be?

Bhasin: I was out of the country for about five years and I came back last year. What I was truly impressed with is the amount of shift that we made from just being traditional advertising to being more about really using digital as a channel, not just to build above the line but also to do below-the-line conversion. The kind of work that is coming out of India is truly impressive. The second thing for me is that creativity for the sake of creativity is not good enough. For me, good creativity is when it is effective; when you can measure the impact of the campaign on business results, that's when you see whether that campaign is effective or not. You could see a big shift in being able to measure campaign effectiveness on business results. We rewarded those campaigns that could measurably show positive business results.