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Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Softbank and Meta-backed e-commerce platform Meesho's recent campaign “Arre Waah” has been tailored to capture India’s regional nuances and thereby build resonance among various audiences. The campaign was shot in three zonal languages - Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil -and it was further amplified in other regional languages.

Month In Focus Int Logo vootSimilarly, logistics and grocery delivery platform Dunzo is known for creating hyperlocal advertising such as “Kannada Starter Pack” or Netflix that often partners with audio streaming sites to create local language content to promote regional titles being released on its platform.

As more Indians log on to the internet, the demand for local language content is steadily growing followed by the need for advertisers to consider creating regional advertising which has gone beyond dubbed ads. This is reflective in user behaviour which is why the click-through rate of regional creatives is much higher and why 70 percent of Indians find vernacular digital content more reliable than English, according to a joint study conducted by Google and KPMG.

Of the around 700 million active internet users in India, only 216 million transact online. According to the IAMAI-Kantar ICUBE 2020 report, this is expected to swell to 900 million by 2025. New consumer segments are continuously being formed and purchasing power is increasing steadfastly.

Experts and platforms Storyboard18 spoke to asserted that vernacular content is helping brands break adoption barriers and making the experience of not only consuming content but also transacting online more relatable. Unlike print or TV, Digital does not need a separate regional edition or channel, as it can be personalised real time via an instance.

Stay focused, stay local

Shradha Agarwal, CEO and co-founder, Grapes, believes that regional content cannot be homogenized, hence, gone are the days when dubbing used to be done in the region-specific dialect.

“Creative teams must curate messages keeping in mind the region and integrate the lifestyle, interests, colloquialisms, and cultural nuances of the specific audience base. Collaborating with nano and micro-influencers can prove to be very helpful in bringing out the desired result. It has endless scope for personalisation for the generation of hyper-focused messaging winning the loyalty of the regional audience,” she adds.

Brands are taking note too.

For instance, Megha Agarwal, CXO, Growth at Meesho shares that with audiences increasingly veering towards video content in vernacular languages, 90 per cent of the company’s campaigns are localized. The company has been amplifying its campaigns in a plethora of languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi and Assamese, among others.

“We are also working closely with Google and Meta to tailor our narrative to our audiences. We are also exploring strategic tie-ups with AVOD (advertising video on demand) and SVOD (subscription video on demand) OTT platforms, especially with respect to regional content,” she adds.

Meesho said that it primarily engages with micro and nano influencers from Tier II+ regions as well to connect with consumers across smaller towns of the country.

“Through sustained influencer engagement, we have acquired over 700,000 unique transactors (directly attributable) since March 2021. Brands need to invest in better understanding this diverse India, if the next wave of growth has to be unlocked. 10X more visual, completely vernacular, short form content will have a large role to play in the foreseeable future,” Agarwal notes.

Rise of regional influencers, content

Platforms which take on the burden of curation such as Google search require heavy investments at a technology and infrastructure level to support each new language. For example, machine learning for identifying, serving and moderating content. On the other hand, social platforms which rely primarily on user-generated content can easily host a Marathi, Bengali, Bhojpuri video on the same platform, with basic translation of user prompts and buttons.

"This makes video platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Josh and Moj (owned by Sharechat) a powerful medium to connect with people in local languages. Further, the emergence of regional creators on these platforms means that it takes the load off the platform and brand to create high quality content, as these regional creators are great at touching a cord with the right use of language and nuance – whereas a lot of regional ads can often be prosaic translations or at best transliteration of a master created in Mumbai or Delhi," notes Amaresh Godbole, CEO, Digital Technology Business, Publicis Groupe India.

Indian social media platform ShareChat, for instance, said that it witnessed exponential growth during the first phase of lockdown. Post lockdown era, ShareChat has grown from 60 million MAU (monthly active users) to 180 million MAU, and the average user time spent increased from 24 minutes to 31 minutes daily.

The company, which opened its platform to advertising in early 2020, has signed up over 150 brands within six months including brands such as Nykaa, MTR, Bharti Airtel, Future Group, Snapdeal and Flipkart. The platform is available in 15 Indic languages, out of which Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi and Bengali are the most popular among brands for advertising.

“Localised content is mainstream on ShareChat, giving brands the advantage to advertise by micro-targeting. Regional creators are aware of the regional sensitivities and cultural nuances. They are rapidly growing on the platform especially due to the expansion of our monetisation models like influencer marketing, virtual gifting, and live and video commerce,” says Akshat Sahu, director of marketing, ShareChat.

Key challenges

Advertisers across a number of sectors such as fintech, edtech and e-commerce have realised that vernacular advertising is essential for reaching a wider audience in order to drive recommendations and conversions and the number is continuously growing.

Vipul Kedia, chief data and platforms officer and head of MAAS India (Affle), shares that given the demographics of the audience, the video and audio formats are more effective since they are more engaging and rich.

“We obviously need multiple creative sets for each language with regional context, but more importantly, it needs deeper data distillation and sharper targeting to be able to identify and target consumers based on their language preferences,” he adds.

Listing some challenges related to local language advertising, Kedia notes that having to communicate in several Indian dialects simultaneously can be resource-heavy for brands.

“During the campaign, there is also additional data analysis and reporting complexity given the numerous sub-campaigns and creatives. The optimisation complexity also increases accordingly. Another challenge is that regional marketing cannot be standardised. Brands must pay attention to regional insights to customise their content,” he adds.

Rise of vernacular advertising on digital in India

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Google is gearing up to eliminate third-party cookies in its Chrome browser Month In Focus Int Logo vootby 2023, and Apple is making changes to its Identifiers for Advertisers (IDFAs). Third-party cookies have acted as a catalyst for advertisers, who invest heavily on digital, to understand who their consumers are, what their preferences are, and where they are located, to target them with precision.

Third-party cookies on Google Chrome, which holds the largest market share in terms of browsing, help advertisers to personalise, target and retarget their consumers. Marketers across the world are racking their brains to crack new codes of targeting and advertising on the internet.

According to an e-Marketer report, worldwide, 36 percent of marketing professionals expect that customer purchase history will be their most valuable source of data once third-party cookies are gone. Meanwhile, 32 percent see social media profiles as key, and 31 percent plan to rely on website registrations. When the who, what, and whereabouts of the consumers are out of the window, marketers have to develop new strategies to get to consumers.

Shashank Srivastava, senior executive director, marketing and sales, Maruti Suzuki, says that in such a challenging scenario, marketers would depend more on first-party data. The auto major is extensively dependent on it. Maruti Suzuki has a Customer Data Platform (CDP) in place. Data regarding all the interactions with consumers are collected. CDP not only consists of transactional data like invoicing or day-to-day delivery service but also has interactional data that is gathered while conversing with the consumers.
According to Srivastava, brands will have to engage in probabilistic audience modeling - a mechanism where data is generated through anonymous data points from a user’s browsing behaviour; and comparing them to deterministic data points - also known as first-party data truth. This can be done with the help of tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning, he suggests.

Quick delivery platform Dunzo’s head - category and growth Mrunmayi Oke has similar thoughts. She states that to maintain the return on investment (ROI) of online marketing spending, advertisers will now have to start utilising first-party data smartly.

Oke says, “Hyper-personalisation through user tracking would become difficult and impact return on ad spend (ROAS). App-based advertising is also set to change with more focus on privacy concerns and data sharing. ATT (app tracking transparency) for iOS is already implemented and android privacy sandbox is expected to follow soon.”

To personalise or not?

Maruti Suzuki’s Srivastava believes in a cookieless world, a solid level of personalisation may not be possible. It would require a lot of investment and upgradation of technology to collect first-party data. But, Mondelez India's vice president - marketing Anil Viswanathan, feels that this is a good time for brands to engage with their consumers through their owned properties or platforms.

On one hand, Srivastava and Oke think of contextual targeting as one of the mechanisms to survive and gain more traction in a cookieless world, on the other Viswanathan says that it all boils down to “How well do the brands know their customers?”

Fifty percent of Mondelez India's advertisements have adopted the personalized route. Viswanathan states, “We have set up a consumer digital organisation where the team is concentrating on our owned media platforms. Through this, we are collecting our own first-party data. It is also about engaging with consumers on an ongoing basis, gathering data and making it smarter along the way." The next step - the brand plans to take is to transfer the data to the regular marketing team. That will then be used by them to design the campaigns with sharp insights.

Experts that Storyboard18 spoke to think advertisers should focus on taking consent from the users. This could be done by displaying the right message about the benefits of collecting secured data in order to deliver a personalised experience. Dunzo’s Oke adds, “In addition to this, relying even more on one-to-one marketing channels like notifications, emails and short messaging service (SMS) would help maintain the ROI in a cookieless world.”

Crunching the right set of data

At Mercedes-Benz India, the focus is on building communities using the observe, orient, decide and act (OODA) model. Santosh Iyer, vice president - sales and marketing of the luxury auto brand in India, says, his team is working on putting together a technology agnostic framework. This will be a safe set of third and second-party data signals that will be used to create activations, mine insights, and personalise communication. “This framework can help leverage key globally defined audiences at a local level. Those audiences can be used in a self-serve manner directly from the activation platform. These audiences are ready to use now and can bring scale and performance to any type of campaign,” he adds.

While Mercedes-Benz India will primarily build up and increase the use of its first-party data, the company is looking at leveraging third-party data partnerships to improve campaign performance. “Contextual and behavioral personalisation will become hygiene going forward,” says Iyer.

Mondelez India's Viswanathan thinks that till the time brands are dependent on somebody else for the data of their own consumers, it would be seen as a flawed strategy. He highlights when the cookie crumbles the advertisers depending on the big social platforms would be a risk over a period.

Startup brands in India that are ahead of the tech curve believe privacy, personalisation, and measurement can all be achieved together if the right tools and strategies are deployed. For instance, tracking pixels—a 1x1 pixel graphic that looks at users’ behaviour, site conversions, web traffics and other similar cookie metrics that are hidden in platforms ranging from banner ads to emails—captures information instead of cookies. For now, Indian advertisers, with investment power are ready to fight the cookiepocalypse.

Are Indian marketers prepared for a cookie-less world?

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

The role of marketing has always been to form a connect between a brand and its consumers. Over the years data and technology have played a pivotal role in bridging this gap. Many would argue that technology has evolved to become the backbone for driving effective and efficient marketing solutions so much so that digital is set to overtake a more established media like television.

As per an estimate put out by GroupM in February, the total ad spend across media in India is estimated to cross the Rs 1 lakh crore mark in 2022, even as digital is set to overtake TV as the largest advertising medium in 2022, accounting for 45% share of the total ad pie.

Storyboard18 spoke to digital experts to understand and identify key adtech trends that will define the India market in 2022 and beyond.

Preparing for Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is the next stage of the web evolution that would make the internet more intelligent or process information with near-human-like intelligence. In Web 3.0, users won’t distinguish between physical and digital experiences. They will expect work, friends, goods, and experiences to be connected virtually.

“This interconnected, live, persistent virtual world with the physical world or reality is also popularly known as the Metaverse. Brands would start leveraging this virtual world as well as components powering the virtual worlds to build Brand experience &amp; assets, drive consumer connect, Associate with the cause, build loyalty, own a moment, or drive real or virtual sales,” says Vishal Jacob, chief digital officer, Wavemaker India.

However, some experts also believe that Metaverse led marketing is still at a nascent stage in India.

“The role of Metaverse in a brand’s larger digital/marketing strategy still needs to be thought through and charted out well before making that big leap. Meta is one of the pillars of the brand experience - when consumers need to experience a brand in the virtual world, not the entirety of the consumer experience,” says Monaz Todywalla, CEO, PHD India.

Return of impersonalisation

One of the trends that agencies have begun to see is the return of impersonalisation – which is a direct result of the personalisation approach not being able to achieve the desired results, says PHD India’s Todywalla.

“By targeting groups or cohorts of consumers with customer segmentation rather than individuals, the advertising tech industry is now finding a mid-way of impersonalising content by taking a step back from hyper-personalisation – turning to strategies and creatives that speak to the common category of potential consumer pools. This largely eliminates the risk of not being able to connect with audiences on the desired level and creates a safe but sustainable model,” she explains.

Identity resolution of consumers

Third-party cookie deprecation is an industry-wide alarm to regain trust and imbibe transparency with the audience. The following are the areas of impact – targeting audiences based on behavioural data, frequency, verification, custom audience, measurement and lastly return on investment (RoI).

“Focus will shift towards identity resolution by leveraging various data sources like panel, contextual, social listening and logged in environmental data. Solutions like unique ID, contextual targeting, hashed email, 1P data, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) &amp; Artificial Intelligence (AI) are proposed around these areas. The need is not just Customer Data Platforms (CDP) or Data Management Platforms (DMP) but a complete data platform tool that provides effective yet meaningful data,” notes Rohan Chincholi, head - digital services, Havas Media Group India.

“Marketers will have to do a series of test and learn to identify the right solution depending on the use-case as party cookies have e ramifications across targeting, optimisation and measurement,” says Wavemaker’s Jacob.

Data Enrichment

Using first-party data combined with data collected from third-party external sources (like socio-demographic and geographic details) can help boost the visibility of consumer needs, helping brands cater to them effectively across channels.

“Furthermore, it also helps segregate target audiences into specific categories which can then be used for creating more accurate, macro-level strategies. Consumers are more likely to respond well to advertising when it’s done right and data enrichment undoubtedly plays a huge role in augmenting these experiences, adding to the brand’s loyalty value in the long run,” notes Toadywalla.

According to her, the most vital aspect of it all is the ability to foresee the consumer’s purchase intent and more actively identify markers of customer buying behaviour.

“Smart segmentation based on available data sets can make it doubly easier for businesses to reach out to different demographics but with focused precision, thanks to the high-value data obtained from the process,” she adds.

Single marketing lens

Today, data and insights are stored in different dashboards, consumer data is stored in multiple locations. This data is not available across all systems &amp; lacks a central location for critical consumer information.

“There is a pressing need to have a single lens view of brand data that encapsulates all sources to give a holistic picture on cross functional insights (For instance, increase in organic traffic due to branding, impact of branding on branded query searches). That is when connection, context and content parameters seamlessly integrate to deliver meaningful media experiences,” concludes Chincholi.

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