#AgencyTalk with Tushar Vyas, President, GroupM South Asia.
We met with Tushar Vyas to discuss the latest trends in the market.
GroupM is working with almost every large and small brand in India. What according to you are the most potent trends in the digital marketing industry today?
Digital audience profile and the trends around it are getting broader, cutting across pop strata and socio-economy class. While invisible tech is blending into consumer’s everyday life; day to day chore is getting outsourced to tech and bar is getting raised on an everyday basis eg: Maps, recommendations, discovery, bills reminders and payments, natural language processing, AI, etc. are omnipresent! Access to data at scale is allowing marketers to create new opportunities and innovations i.e. the emergence of the micro market across various categories and consumption baskets. This digital infusion in everyday life is driving a fundamental change in consumer behavior. While on the digital advertising front, next level of technologies is bringing a human touch to the personalization of message and making experiential.
With the explosion of content-centric social networks (Snapchat, Tiktok, Instagram) and OTT Platforms, how can brands be on top of their marketing game every month?
India is witnessing the triopoly effect playing out in Media & Content industry – it’s maybe the only market with such level of activities. Best of West has apps like Snapchat, Disney-Star, NetFlix, Amazon Prime, YT, FB, etc. Best of East has top Mobile apps like TikTok, UC Browser, Shareit, etc. and Homegrown player like Jio acting as strong force building more integrated play at scale. This will continue to shape the industry and give brands the opportunity to reach their audience across platforms.
Brands should be able to identify trends, insights, and actionable recommendations from vast amounts of data- so, ask more questions, experiment new things and discover your answers! Deploy the ‘Six honest men’ as Kipling says on a mission to decode the atomized world
I keep six honest serving-men,
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
– Rudyard Kipling
Experiential marketing has become a buzzword today. Can you share some examples of such campaigns done by GroupM?
GroupM teams work across the spectrum of experiential marketing like– Rural & Melas, IoT & sensor based experience, AR/ VR, Voice based activation, etc. Using handset functionalities to drive experience is a widely used format and effectively connects physically to digital. One of the successful campaigns was during IPL we took the world’s largest selfie @ IPL Stadium with 360o camera! One can zoom into the selfie using seat number of their ticket.
Data agility, personalization, analytics, and measurement technologies have become a key part of every marketers’ ammunition. What advice would you give to Brands who are struggling to build their tech stacks?
Maybe the answer starts with what question – what problem are we trying to solve ? or what we want to achieve with tech stack? Make your marketing problem/use case a starting point and not a piece of technology.
In your new role as President for Growth and Transformation, what are the key areas that you are looking to for growth, and how do you see the agency transform to meet new client needs?
As digital and data start taking center stage, there is a need to drive transformation and build future capabilities. In my current role, I drive transformation for the organization and focus on building GroupM’s capability across Digital, Data, Analytics, and Content.
