The Marcom Avenue has announced that it has secured the performance marketing mandate for biscuit brand PriyaGold. The collaboration aims to amplify PriyaGold's digital presence and engagement with its diverse customer base.

“As part of this partnership, The Marcom Avenue will leverage its expertise in data-driven insights, creative content, and cutting-edge digital strategies to enhance PriyaGold's brand visibility and market reach. The agency will focus on driving measurable results, optimising customer acquisition, and increasing overall brand performance,” stated a press release.

"The Marcom Avenue is thrilled to have been entrusted with the performance marketing mandate for Priya Gold. We are excited to work with a brand that is synonymous with quality and innovation in the food industry," said Ms Divanshi Gupta, Director at The Marcom Avenue. "Our team is committed to delivering exceptional results, and we look forward to helping PriyaGold achieve new heights in the digital landscape."

Manas Agarwal, Director, Priya Gold, expressed satisfaction with the collaboration, stating, "Partnering with The Marcom Avenue would prove to be instrumental in leveraging our strengths, amplifying Priya Gold's narrative, and expanding our market reach to a remarkable audience. Their team has consistently demonstrated their expertise in the marketing field and has gone above and beyond to understand our unique requirements. Their efforts have played a significant role in positioning Priya Gold as a preferred choice for snacks and confectionery products. We are excited to continue this partnership and achieve new milestones together."

The online viewing revolution means the word ‘TV’ no longer just describes purely linear TV. Increasing numbers are watching streamed content via Smart TVs and according to IDC over 4.5 million Smart televisions were shipped to India in 1H23, an increase of 8% year-over-year (YoY).

Samsung has been the leading TV manufacturer worldwide for the last 17 years, and this means the data we collate at glass level is representatively robust. In the first half of 2023, this data showed that Indian viewers on Samsung TVs spent almost 88% of their total TV time in streaming environments.

This sea change in viewing behaviour is important for advertisers as the data-driven insights we gather from connected TV (CTV) provide opportunities to deliver more relevant advertising, refine reach to find new audiences and reduce wastage.

Jargon is clouding our understanding of CTV

We are all guilty of over-complicating the TV landscape and reinforcing the fragmentation within the medium with an over-use of jargon. This is detrimental to agencies’ full understanding of how CTV can be utilised as part of an integrated media plan.

Streaming brings the data collation and targeting ability of digital to the world of TV but the disjointed way we talk about the ecosystem can be confusing. We have created an alphabet soup of categorisation. One that viewers do not care about and which muddies the waters in our own commercial conversations.

The original labels that initially accompanied the streaming revolution– Advertising Video on Demand (AVOD) and Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) – can be useful in identifying these two different streaming environments.

Viewers certainly understand if they are watching TV for free or paying for the experience - and we know most streamers in India are happy to watch advertisements in return for access to free content. Research we carried out with Verve shows 80% of people in India are happy with this trade off. On the other hand, subscription numbers are churning as people face increased economic pressures.

But we have since added to a growing list of acronyms FAST (Free Advertiser Supported Streaming TV), a descriptor to explain the proposition of a scheduled streaming channel, and we’re grappling with an acronym for Subscription with Advertising Tiers as the SVOD platforms look to new monetisation models.

Will HVOD (Hybrid Video on Demand) win out or SAVOD (Subscription Advertising Video on Demand) win out? This is exactly the kind of meaningless debate around terminology all involved in the TV industry need to put aside.

Step out of siloed thinking

Planners can find these acronyms useful but the lines between these different viewing environments are blurring so much that as an industry we risk creating a convoluted landscape for ourselves that will hold back overall CTV growth. Acronyms become out of date and can inhibit fresh thinking – the most creative solutions and TV buys come from stepping out of siloed thinking.

Agency buyers and planners who may be anxious about their streaming knowledge should be confident in the digital abilities they have honed across a range of media. If you understand how digital media is traded and the capabilities of programmatic then the fundamentals of how to plan and buy CTV will not be difficult to grasp.

Audience first approach

Instead, the focus should be on gaining a deeper knowledge of the viewer and how to reach them. Understanding what they watch, their preferences and how to deliver a positive, privacy compliant experience in which advertisements are welcomed as an integral part of the whole should be the goal. The data-driven insights surfaced by CTV are what is truly important, not the label categories.

This will come by breaking down the silos including the ones that might exist in agencies between audio-visual and digital teams – alignment across teams to focus on CTV’s strengths will deliver the best results for advertisers. These strengths include knowledge at the glass level of watch time,  awareness of favourite genres and the ability to identify audiences that have not been reached by a brand’s linear TV campaign.

These insights mean brands can devise complementary campaigns for advertisers that can reach fractured audiences, whether they are linear TV viewers or streaming enthusiasts. Planning against deterministic data rather than siloed viewing formats badged by acronyms  will lead to the media mix best optimised to meet marketing objectives.

The lawsuit filed against Humans of Bombay (HoB) against the People of India (PoI) has opened a new can of worms for the former with even big international publications covering the news. In his recent salvo against the Mumbai-based photoblog, Humans of New York founder Brandon Stanton has released his statement regarding the monetisation of his platform.
The comment was in response to a query by the Washington Post regarding the HoB lawsuit.

Stanton claimed that in the last 13 years, HoNY was operational, he never received a penny for a single story he has put out. He also emphasised that his income mainly came from proceeds from his book sales, speeches he has given and Patreon.

Here's the full text of his comment.

Was just asked for comment by The Washington Post regarding a certain court case involving my work, but which thankfully doesn't involve me. I thought it would be worthwhile to share the statement here. For an example of a true artist who has done beautiful things with the… pic.twitter.com/y6Xvz8EGSx

— Brandon Stanton (@humansofny) September 26, 2023

Stanton's statement comes at a time when HoB is being criticised for monetising the content on the photoblog.

You do not change a fraud by not identifying yourself with them, you change the fraud by taking action.
File your infringement lawsuit, the @HumansOfBombay have been using this rate card and your ideas to earn money from Indians who actually had the courage to share their… pic.twitter.com/MsEOdT7eQ6

— Subhav Samarth (@subhavsamarth) September 26, 2023

HoB was in the news for filing a lawsuit against People of India (PoI) for copyright infringement. According to the plaintiff, PoI copied HoB's storytelling format, which showcases human interest stories centred on photographs of ordinary people. The plea also mentioned that PoI lifted films from HoB's Instagram account without seeking permission first.

CDPs, CRMs, CPMs, CTRs. No one can accuse martech stacks with lacking acronyms for various tools and metrics, and that was just some of the Cs. Today, we are delving into yet another acronymous technology which, though doesn’t begin with C, but is being viewed as indispensable in helping marketers track and attract the all-important Customer.    

“Marketing Data Platforms (MDPs) are emerging as powerful tools that complement Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, and other data tools in the marketing ecosystem. MDPs help organizations centralize and leverage their data for more targeted, effective, and data-driven marketing strategies,” reveals Gopa Menon, Head of Digital – Mindshare South Asia.

Abhimanyu Vyas, Business Head of Havas’s MarTech arm, PivotConsult, says that Marketing Data Platforms serve as a central hub for brands to seamlessly consolidate data from various sources, including advertising, analytics, and transactional sources.

“They bring together data from owned, earned, and paid channels, allowing brands to forge a unified, comprehensive view of their marketing landscape. This consolidated data serves as a valuable resource for generating marketing insights, refining campaign strategies and product offerings, making informed pricing decisions, enhancing user experiences, and constructing finely tuned audience segments,” he says.

Marketing Data Platforms complement existing tools like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs), facilitating agile measurement and analysis of activations conducted through these systems. Clients are also using advanced cases like Marketing Mix Modelling, Anomaly detection and Uplift Modelling.

Menon agrees that there are multiple use cases for MDPs, ranging from 360-degree customer view; segmentation and targeting; personalization; marketing automation; attribution and analytics; content management; cross-channel integration; compliance and data governance; predictive analytics; and customer retention and loyalty.

Indeed, as Bharatesh Salian, Sr. Vice President – Marketing Science and CX, FCB/SIX India, points out, “In today’s evolving and commoditised world, customer experience becomes a deal maker or breaker for more than 80% of the purchase decisions. Hence it becomes very important to map the behavioural data of prospect consumers to identify the right moment of truth when brands can engage and drive the right stimuli to take the action as part of an orchestrated consumer journey.”

“While CDPs or CRM provide the single golden record of the consumer along with their purchase patterns and preferences, the MDPs provide the insights into the behaviour of the users to click on the purchase now button. The ability of the marketing platforms to create data sets and classifications based on propensity to purchase by building on the lookalike audiences also helps tremendously in optimising spends,” adds Salian.

That being said, Paras Mehta, Business Head, Matterkind India, which operates under the IPG Brand says that while Marketing Data Platforms are emerging as valuable complements to existing tools such as CDPs and CRMs, “Their full potential is yet to be fully harnessed. The key challenge lies in the need for a substantial volume of consented data, which is currently a work in progress, mainly due to the presence of multiple walled gardens and limited access to personally identifiable information (PII) datasets.”

“In my perspective, an ideal use case for these platforms would involve three critical steps: firstly, at the advertiser level, establishing a Universal ID that encompasses all actual and potential consumers; secondly, leveraging this Universal ID to orchestrate and control communication and frequency across all marketing channels; and thirdly, utilizing the insights derived from these platforms to further optimize media and communications strategies,” says Mehta.

Menon concludes, “In today’s data-driven world, Marketing Data Platforms enhance the capabilities of CDPs, CRMs, and other data tools by providing a centralized hub for data management, analytics, and marketing automation. They empower marketers to create more personalized, data-driven, and effective marketing strategies, ultimately leading to improved customer experiences and business outcomes.”

In the latest development on what has become a long and consequential standoff, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) today announced that it will start hearing Google's appeal against an order by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) that had imposed a Rs 936 crore penalty from November 28. The CCI has imposed the fine on the internet ubiquity for taking unfair advantage of its dominant position in the app store ecosystem.

In October of last year, CCI had charged Google with restricting app developers from using any type of third-party billing or payment processing services to purchase apps for in-app billing on Google Play Store, the globally available app platform developed and maintained by the company. 

In January of 2023, NCLAT denied immediate relief to Google against CCI’s order. Google also filed an appeal at the Supreme Court against the NCLAT order, though it ultimately withdrew the case.

NCLAT has now said that the litigating apsp should file responses to Google’s appeal in four weeks.

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