Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is ''all in'' on India and the country is a “lighthouse” for Meta and at the “forefront” of innovation in areas such as Reels, business messaging and the WhatsApp JioMart partnership, said Nicola Mendelsohn, Vice President, Global Business Group at Meta in an interview to a business publication in September 2022. 

Cut to 2023, the tech giant hands over pink slips to a bunch of India staff including top executives like India’s director of marketing Avinash Pant, director and head of media partnerships Saket Jha Sourabh and director of legal Amrita Mukherjee. This was reportedly the third round of layoffs at the company. Besides the latest round of layoffs, Meta India, over the past few months, has also witnessed some high-profile exits. Last year in November, Meta’s India head Ajit Mohan quit the company and joined rival Snap Inc as APAC President. Six months prior to that, Sandeep Bhushan, who was the Head of Global Marketing Solutions at Meta, called it quits. 

So, what is plaguing Meta India?

The latest layoffs are part of the company’s larger restructuring plan announced in March to eliminate 10,000 roles globally amid economic headwinds. While the number of total India staff and number of sacked employees in India is not immediately clear, it is believed that nearly three dozen people have lost their jobs suddenly. Some of them shared their layoff experience on LinkedIn as well which raises a serious question mark over the company’s Human Resource policy. 

The India development is part of Meta’s fresh round of layoffs that was set to impact about 6,000 employees globally. These job cuts were part of the company’s so-called “Year of Efficiency” in which Meta is being restructured to cut costs. 

The series of exits and layoffs at the tech giant’s India arm have shocked the entire media industry, especially since India is a very fast growing market and likely to be that for a few years. 

Meta India accumulated huge profits and ad revenues in FY22 in the country. Facebook India online services, the flagship registered entity for Meta in India, clocked gross ad revenues of Rs 16,189 crore in fiscal year 2021-22, a 74% year-on-year growth as per the latest regulatory filings by the company. The company's net profit grew by 132% year on year to Rs 297 crore during the same period. In contrast, Meta’s global revenue growth has almost stagnated over the past few quarters, ranging from 2-6 percent, necessitating the global layoffs. 

“Firing its senior-most staff from one of the most profitable markets raises a serious question over the long-term strategy of Meta which professes India to be a key market,” a senior industry analyst pointed out. 

India most important market: Meta officials said three weeks ago 

Interestingly, Arun Srinivas, Director & Head of the Ads Business of the US-based tech giant, told e4m on May 10 this year, “India is our largest user base across all three Meta plaftorms-Instagram, FaceBook and Whatsapp- and Reels feature has grown significantly since it was launched three years ago and now it is the fastest growing segment for Meta India.”

Facebook's user base in the country touched 440 million in FY22.

Meta Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been calling India his “most important market” since his maiden town hall at IIT Delhi in 2015. Just a month before this, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his trip to the United States in 2015, visited Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California.

Zuckerberg had set his sights firmly on India, a market that had illustrated a tremendous appetite for his offerings. Even in December 2020, during a fireside chat with Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, Zuckerberg stated that India was a “very special and important country” with a remarkable entrepreneurship culture, as he sought to push deeper the just-launched payments services that allow users to make payments over WhatsApp.

“Facebook opened its first office in Hyderabad in 2010. From 2010 till Ajit Mohan’s departure in 2022, India used to be largely a sales office for Meta. With top level layoffs, it seems the company has gone back to being mere a sales office again,” analysts wonder. 

Impact on multiple ecosystems? 

Trimming of the workforce impacts innovation and growth. It also serves as a reminder of the human impact of layoffs and the long term strategy of the company for that particular region.

A tech expert said, “Such a crisis dashes the chances of Meta’s future investments in India, especially the content and curator ecosystems.”

Global phenomenon 

Dwindling ad dollars and declining growth in the post-pandemic world globally has forced many tech companies to trim their workforce. In 2023 alone, layoffs have cost tens of thousands of tech workers their jobs. The workforce reductions have been driven by the giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Meta and Zoom. Startups, too, have announced cuts across all sectors, from crypto to enterprise SaaS. 

Most of these companies cite similar reasoning to justify the layoffs; such as “macroeconomic environment and a need to find discipline on a tumultuous path to profitability.”

Experts speculate that it is quite possible that despite earning huge profits and ad revenue in FY22, Meta India’s ad revenues are not as good in FY23 which turned out to be particularly bad for most platforms. The company has not filed its financial report for FY23 at the Registrar of Companies yet. 

Karan Taurani of analyst firm Elara Capital says, “The Meta financials seem to be strong for FY 22 because that time the market was not impacted by the macro uncertainty. The macro uncertainty started off in FY23, around the month of June-July, because of higher interest rates, and because of higher inflation in the US market. So, I think the impact will come in FY 23 India financials.”

“Going ahead in terms of FY24 also, there are concerns around innovation, there are concerns around the similar growth profile, and most of these companies have invested very aggressively in a market like India. So, maybe just some near term measure to just recheck the strategy”, Taurani explains. 

No comments, says Meta India

In response to e4m detailed questionnaire to understand the number of sacked employees and their roles and seeking reasons behind the layoff despite huge profits in India, Meta India official said, “We have no comments to offer.”

e4m was directed to check the Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s old blog dated March 24 which was addressed to Meta employees. Excerpts of the blog are: 

“Meta is building the future of human connection, and today I want to share some updates on our Year of Efficiency that will help us do that. The goals of this work are: (1) to make us a better technology company and (2) to improve our financial performance in a difficult environment so we can execute our long term vision.”

“Here’s the timeline you should expect: over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates. With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted. We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May. In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes. Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”

(With inputs from Nilanjana Basu)

On World No Tobacco Day, the Union Health Ministry notified that OTT platforms will carry anti-tobacco warnings as do theatres and TV shows. The amended rules come under the Cigarette and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2004.

Online publishers will now have to show anti-tobacco ads that are at least 30 seconds long, according to the new diktat. The spot should also have a strong message about the health effects of tobacco consumption.

The audio-visual message should comprise a disclaimer lasting at least 20 seconds at the programme’s start and midpoint.

The message should be legible in black font against a white background. The spot should also carry warnings like “tobacco causes cancer” and “smoking kills” in the same language as the content.

The government will certify "permissible online games" till the gaming industry forms the self-regulatory organisation, media reports have quoted MeitY minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar as saying.

Tech giants Google and Apple will be sent a notification about the same, the report said.

The companies will be told to approach the ministry in case of any confusion.

Chandrasekhar has also said that nearly 70 apps have been taken down, mostly those that involve wagering.

KC Global Media and Prime Video today announced the launch of Japanese entertainment pack, Animax + GEM on Prime Video Channels in India. Animax + GEM offers customers a selection of popular Japanese anime, drama, and variety programmes with English subtitles from KC Global Media’s linear channels Animax and GEM. This ultimate 2-in-1 entertainment pack is now available to Prime members at an add-on subscription of ₹299 per year. With Prime Video Channels, Amazon’s video entertainment marketplace, Prime members get friction-free and convenient access to a wide range of premium content from multiple video streaming services all available with add-on subscriptions at a single destination—Prime Video website and app. 

George Chien, Co-Founder, President, and CEO of KC Global Media said, “Fueled by passionate fans and the strong following of Japanese pop culture in India, we are excited to bring the ultimate Japanese entertainment experience in collaboration with one of India’s leading streaming platforms. This partnership with Amazon Prime Video marks another significant milestone for us, as we continue our efforts to provide fans in India with greater accessibility across multiple genres of premium Japanese hit series and anime content, anytime, anywhere.” 

Home to some of the biggest anime titles, Animax offers popular genres for action, romance, horror, supernatural, sci-fi, comedy and slide of life. Anime fans in India can now tune in to enjoy award-winning anime action fiction series like the hit drama romance, Fruits Baskets (Seasons 1 to 3) – winner of the Anime of the Year, 8^th Anime Trending Awards 2022; the complete box set of popular sports comedy series, Haikyu! (Season 1 to 4); as well as fantasy action, Yashahime: Half Demon Princess - Nominee for Best Character Design, Anime Awards 2021; and the highly acclaimed action-adventure anime, The Seven Deadly Sins – winner of Behind the Voice Actors Awards 2016, for Best Male Lead Vocal Performance in an Anime Television Series and adapted from one of the best-selling manga series of the same title; as well as the popular comedy action series, How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom and many more!  

Asia’s leading Japanese entertainment brand, GEM, makes its debut in India with an unparalleled line-up of hit Japanese dramas and variety shows featuring Japan’s leading celebrities and hosts. India fans can catch popular hit drama series, such as 10 count to the Future starring award-winning actor, Takuya Kimura, including other titles, such as AVALANCHE, Captured Hospital, Outsider Cops, and NICE FLIGHT!. Popular Japanese variety shows include VS ARASHI, featuring Japan’s hottest J-pop male idol group, ARASHI, going through a series of funny and entertaining challenges with other entertainers and celebrity guests. India fans can also explore the unique flavors of Japan as celebrity chef, Mocomichi Hayami takes audiences on a culinary adventure across Japan in Moco’s Travel Kitchen. Other fan-favorite titles include, The Quest, Who is the Real Celebrity, and more. 

All content from Animax and GEM will be streamed in their original Japanese audio and accompanied with English subtitles.

The other day, I went to a salon for a head massage and hated every bit of the experience. I left a one-star, negative review on their GMB (Google My Business) page, explaining in detail the terrible experience I had. The review was seen by many, and many found it helpful.

Ten or 15 years ago, this was not an option available to a paying customer. And this is precisely how digital marketing and the various digital platforms have changed consumer behaviour.

The customer has always been the king, but today’s consumer also has a voice. She is empowered and can use technology to make the right purchase decision.

Here are a few ways in which digital marketing is transforming consumer behaviour.

Influencing purchase decisions

The “zero moment of truth’, a term coined by Google’s Vice President of Sales back in 2011, became a part of every marketer’s lexicon thereafter. It is a phenomenon that is entirely internet fuelled. Before purchasing any product, a consumer has the option to educate herself on the product features, access reviews and see whether it’s worth the price. Whether it is a high-ticket price purchase such as a washing machine, laptop, phone or home theatre, or just something as simple as a new brand of shampoo – a large number of the over 700 million internet users in India use the internet to make a purchase decision.

Co-creating brands and their communities

It’s not just purchase decisions and customer feedback loop that digital marketing and the digital era has transformed. Today, consumers co-create brands and their communities, and become and active part of a company’s brand building effort. User Generated Content (UGC), is one of the biggest ways in which customers tell the brand story. The Apple #shotoniphone campaign, is one of the best examples of a really smartly done, successful and long-lasting UGC campaign.

Interchangeable paradigm

In the digital era, the consumer can be the brand, and the brand can often be the consumer. Let me explain. Any consumer with a sizeable number of followers, can become a micro or macro influencer.  Consumers today are investing time and energy in creating personal brands, growing their followers, building a compelling online presence. Personal branding is one of the biggest game-changing phenomena of the 21st century.

Brands, on the other hand, can often mirror their own consumers. Today, a consumer brand is expected to have a personality, tell a story, stand for certain social causes (sustainability, inclusivity, diversity etc) and have several values. In other words, we are seeing a humanising of brands. Brands are no longer corporations that sell commodities. They talk to their customers, listen to what their customers are saying, engage in a conversation, are often witty, funny, friendly, and basically mirror the personality of their ideal customer. Think of Zomato’s brand personality. It’s a bit like a cheeky, funny, 25-year-old, who loves a good burger as much as he loves a great meme. And social media has made this personality building possible.

Expecting personalisation and enhanced user experience

How is the consumer journey being impacted by digital marketing? Thanks to predictive AI, consumers today expect brands to know their choices and needs more than they know it themselves. If you are an Amazon shopper, you expect the marketplace to show you product recommendations and send you mailers with these recommendations based on your purchase history, so that you don’t have to look for similar products in a huge marketplace. It’s the same for Netflix. As a user, you expect the platform to use machine learning to share recommendations on what to watch next.

The consumer today is also expecting to see customised messaging, and ads that are relevant to his or her lifestyle. And AI and ML are making this possible at scale.

The ‘C’ factor

Convenience is the biggest gift technology has given us. Some may argue that it has made us lazier, less social and more isolated. But, today, it’s possible to bring home everything – right from a gym session that can take place through an app, to a haircut and of course, food, fashion and other commodities.  And that has helped us optimise our time better, enabling us to do more with less time, as we get technology to work harder for us. From the marketing context, technology (virtual reality in particular), has even enabled consumers sitting in faraway lands to make purchase decisions for ultra-high ticket price products such as real estate. We have seen many instances of real estate brands leveraging AR to help consumers get a virtual site visit done, and book an apartment, even without visiting a model apartment on site. This gained momentum particularly during the pandemic when many NRIs indulged in remote purchase of real estate. Several fine jewellery brands used VR as well to accelerate remote buying. So product categories in which customers would make a purchase decision only after a “touch and feel” experience, have also been disrupted through digital marketing.

In all, it has been a complete disruption of consumer patterns, behaviours and journey, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.

NVIDIA and WPP today announced they are developing a content engine that harnesses NVIDIA Omniverse™ and AI to enable creative teams to produce high-quality commercial content faster, more efficiently and at scale while staying fully aligned with a client’s brand. 

The new engine connects an ecosystem of 3D design, manufacturing and creative supply chain tools, including those from Adobe and Getty Images, letting WPP’s artists and designers integrate 3D content creation with generative AI. This enables WPP’s clients to reach consumers in highly personalized and engaging ways, while preserving the quality, accuracy and fidelity of their company’s brand identity, products and logos. 

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the engine in a demo during his COMPUTEX keynote address, illustrating how clients can work with teams at WPP, the world’s largest marketing services organization, to make large volumes of brand advertising content such as images or videos and experiences like 3D product configurators more tailored and immersive. 

“The world’s industries, including the $700 billion digital advertising industry, are racing to realize the benefits of AI,” Huang said. “With Omniverse Cloud and generative AI tools, WPP is giving brands the ability to build and deploy product experiences and compelling content at a level of realism and scale never possible before.” 

“Generative AI is changing the world of marketing at incredible speed,” said Mark Read, CEO of WPP. “Our partnership with NVIDIA gives WPP a unique competitive advantage through an AI solution that is available to clients nowhere else in the market today. This new technology will transform the way that brands create content for commercial use, and cements WPP’s position as the industry leader in the creative application of AI for the world’s top brands.”

“I think what is happening with generative AI and AI is for everyone to see,” says Rajiv Dingra, Founder and CEO of RD&X, said in a conversation with exchange4media.

With the evolution of technology in the last few months, the focus of the marketing world is also evolving. RD&X, founded by Dingra during the peak pandemic year of 2020, stands for ‘Real Time, Disruptive and Exponential’ and it brings a blend of MarTech, Ad Tech and deep learning to help its clients to become more real time with their marketing solutions.”

Speaking about the blend of the three technologies being used at RD&X, Dingra says, “We call it mad-tech for short. ReBid is our platform that we have in the market that clients are using today and it's a mad-tech intelligence platform. We connect martech to adtech.”

He gave an example of an omni-channel retailer who has stores, also sells on e-commerce platforms and has ad data on social media, first party data, emails, SMS and so on. “What ReBid does is it connects all these ecosystems in one platform, bringing in all your data and giving you a unified funnel unit of ad to transact and giving you a 360-degree customer profile and customer journey.”

RD&X has also come up with a chat-based AI tool that RD&X has launched which helps marketers ask simple questions for their data and get answers to make informed campaigns, Dingra said.

While handling such powerful data, Dingra believes it is important for agencies to focus on finding better talent who can handle this complex data. “The problem with agencies using technology is that they need to find better talent. The challenge is, agencies need to find specialists who can work with technology and start delivering the value to clients. Technology for technology's sake, as a gimmick or as a new shiny tool that they are showing to clients is not going to get them results. I think agencies need to integrate technology at the heart of their business.”

Dingra also spoke about the trends that marketers should keep an eye out for. “I believe this AI trend is going to explode because the money behind it is way beyond any other vertical of technology today out there. So, AI definitely everyone is going to invest money into it and that is going to create a huge trend. If you see the industry that's already getting most disrupted is the advertising and marketing industry. You don't need to write content; you don’t need to think through ideas. You can even get your basic recommendations on how to run Facebook and Google ads and whatnot.

The other trend in advertising and marketing I see is that marketers will start to take back control of their marketing and advertising data for multiple reasons. One is because it is now clear awareness to marketers that data is what drives the difference in their marketing campaigns. Second, is the cookieless future, which means that they have to collect, manage, and enrich first-party data. So that the data-driven focus in marketers is going to explode even more.”

Speaking about ad spends, Dingra said: “Ad spends, in general, because of the market environment for the first quarter have been subdued. But marketers are focusing a lot on driving bang for the buck, which is why we've seen a lot of new clients come on board with us. People are very focused on optimizing to the last mile. Given the general global environment, spends and overall focus on ad spends is likely being shifted from January, February, March to April, May, June and beyond. I do see that the market on the spending front will be much stronger in September. The festive season will definitely bring it back up to a great level.”

On the expansion front for the company, Dingra says, “Our focus is geographical expansion. We've hired a head of sales in the US. We already hired a salesperson in the UK. Our goal is geographical expansion for this year and next. On the technology front or our product roadmap, I think we can invest heavily over the next two to three quarters in leveraging GPT and natural language AI to make cool features for our clients that would solve a lot of the headaches that clients have.”