The Pitch CMO Summit Mumbai held on March 24, brought top industry leaders for a panel discussion on adopting agile marketing. The panellists were Esha Nagar, Managing Director – APAC, Nepa; Hareesh Tibrewala, Joint Chief Executive Officer, Mirum India; Jaya Jamrani, VP – Marketing, Castrol India; Manasi Narasimhan, VP and Head, Marketing & Communications, South Asia, Mastercard; Nikhil Gulati, GM – Marketing, Clovia; Sapangeet Rajwant, Head – Marketing and Digital, Hindi Mass Entertainment, Viacom18; Vanda Ferrao, CMO, WOW Skin Science and Vivek Bhargava, Co-founder, Profit Wheel. The session was moderated by Jaiti Hariani, Sales Director, DoubleVerify.

Kickstarting the session, Hariani asked the panellists about their definition of agile marketing and how it varies from traditional marketing. To this, Bhargava said, “The biggest challenge is not only the mindset. Most brands know what the customers do with them in terms of transactions. But there are no platforms that give you real-time insights into what the consumer is thinking today. If somebody could create which is real-time, that would help as a base for all kinds of decisions you take on media buying or creative strategy or content creation. So, I think the biggest challenge is data on a real-time basis to take such decisions. If we can solve this problem, then agile marketing can be better.”

“Agile marketing is all about responsive marketing. But more importantly, I think it requires a mindset shift. I also think that agile marketing is more like an organisational structural change where you have to completely pivot yourself from the traditional to the modern cues. It’s so much about consumer interactions and what they think about your documents and plans because you are re-gearing and re-shifting. It is also about acting on the change than sticking to a plan and details. Therefore for me, agile marketing is so pivotal that requires so much buying across the organisation otherwise it is a failure,” Nagar added.

Talking about having an agile marketing strategy to overcome challenges from a BFSI perspective, Narasimhan elucidated, “We are living in an incredibly cluttered world. We are a very behind-the-scenes payment brand because let’s face it, all of us pay every single day with whatever mode of payment. We want it to be seamless, safe and efficient. The success in this is not to think about payments because if you have to call up your bank or somebody, then it actually means we haven’t done our job. However, the trick here also is to find out what are consumers interested in. it is about getting a real insight and once you get it, then tell it in an evocative way.”

Rajwant stated that television marketing has seen a paradigm shift from when she started back 20 years to now. “We are a typical mass brand and we cater to across categories of audiences. We are TG pans from the grassroots level who lives in the heartland to a niche person who is sitting, let’s say, in Hyderabad, Bangalore or Mumbai. Similarly, when our audience set is so vast, our marketing has to pan across to all those people. While we are a mass general entertainment brand, but we look at our consumers in a very pyramid format. As brands, we need loyalists. It is when we engage with the consumers on a regular basis,” she pointed out.

Gulati talked about the shift in the consumers’ buying pattern post-pandemic when he said, “During the pandemic, all categories shifted online. We saw consumers buying rampantly online because firstly, it was the need of the hour and secondly, more and more categories were available online. For Clovia, we saw exponential growth in loungewear and activewear. As people were at home, they were trying to get healthier and fitness was a way of life. As a result, people adopted activewear and its sales zoomed up. On the contrary, bra sales fell flat. So accordingly, we had to adjust our working capital and deploy our production, and marketing budgets from one category to the other as per the requirement of the business. Post-pandemic in 2021, we saw a surge of shoppers coming online but in 2022, that surge has now plateaued. People are back to offline stores and I think maybe it is pent-up demand. I was going through data a few days back that 93 per cent of India is still shopping offline. So, while we have always been a digital-first brand, we are ramping up our offline presence now.”

“At WOW Skin Science, we are always an idea of the first company and I think what we did prior to the pandemic actually kept a good stead to extract the maximum. So, our agility comes from identifying trends. We always keep an eye on search volumes. Innovation is fuelled by interesting formulations in great-looking packaging and smelling wonderful. We had the entire funnel set up. We go to nearly 4000 influencers on a monthly basis. They tell consumers how to use it, textures, results etc. and we can directly check on how our traffic comes to our channels. The pandemic has helped us to increase our households by around five times growth,” Ferrao stated.

Tibrewala explained how being in a leadership position one can cultivate an agile mindset for the team and encourage them to adopt a marketing approach. “Agile marketing is the way we need to behave. A couple of years back we had set up an agile pod for the organisation. An agile pod comprises of resources like a copywriter, designer, HTML programmer, creative technologist, and brand strategist and it is run by a scrum master. I believe the concept of agile marketing comes from agile software development. We should use waterfall development where you would build everything and then keep on getting customers buying in shorter cycles,” he added.

Concluding the session, Jamrani noted, “Castrol in India is about 130 year old brand. It also means that they have people who have worked in a certain style and fashion which is the traditional FMCG automotive style of working where you do seasonal campaigns and cyclic marketing. Being able to put money behind agility is not really a buzzword but you need to be able to go back to your top management or whoever your stakeholders are to say that by going agile and by adopting this new change, I have been able to show x million dollars savings and benefits to the company which is then you will get a lot of buy-ins and a lot of training that you need to make that agile engine move in the organisation.”

A one-of-a-kind sports-focused survey, by sports brand PUMA India and research & analytics firm Nielsen Sports, has unearthed startling insights that indicate a huge lag in inspiration in the country to pursue physical fitness, even as India is witnessing a growth in the adoption of sports culture. The exclusive study was conducted to deep dive into the nation’s perception and extent of participation in sports and fitness activities among adults and kids in the country.   

Based on the report findings, PUMA launched the ‘Let There Be Sport’ campaign featuring Virat Kohli, MC Mary Kom and Sunil Chetri today to question the conventional mindset that sports is a digression from academics. The brand affirmed to champion the cause of sport and advocate it as a life skill. The movement comes with the aim to disband the word ‘extra’ used typically for the subject of sport and integrate it into the main curriculum of educational institutions across the country. 

PUMA also released a Digital Film today featuring its brand ambassadors Virat Kohli, MC Mary Kom, Sunil Chhetri, Avani Lekhara, to Bhagwani Devi and everyday athletes. Created by Ogilvy & Mather India, the 90-second film launched on PUMA India’s social handles on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, captured the archetypal need to call sport an extra-curricular activity, and in turn advocated the increased adoption of sports culture to foster the overall development of the nation. 

The PUMA – Nielsen report stated: 

• In the last 12 months, 68% of adults in Urban India claimed to have participated in fitness-related activities. 

• Only 20% of adults in urban India meet the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended index of a minimum of 150-300 minutes of physical exercise per week. 

• Kids spend a mere 86 minutes of the WHO-recommended 420 minutes or more on an average per week. Shockingly, this is lesser than that of Adults who invest 101 minutes of fitness activity per week. 

• Kids in the East region spend the most time playing sport & fitness (125 minutes per week), vs the West at lowest average (68 mins) 

• Direct correlation was found between Kids with high sports participation and improved academic performance. 

• Among Adults that exercised in the last 12 months, more Females (42%) participated in sports & fitness related activities on a daily basis than Males (36%). 

• Adults with high sports participation are likely to exhibit more positive emotions than adults in general by 21%. 

• Yoga (37%), Jogging (29%), Running (28%) and Cricket (28%) are the most actively participated sports & fitness related activities by adults, in the last 12 months. 

• 54% adults prefer self-guided workouts post pandemic. 

Both kids and adults listed Lack of Time as the primary barrier to participating in sports and physical activities, followed by other challenges such as lack of facilities and high cost. 

The shocking report, which is part of PUMA’s sports-focused study on the ‘Let There Be Sport’ initiative, has emerged as the catalyst for the country’s leading sports brand to become the driver of change and champion the cause of prioritising sport and fitness in the country.  

Commenting on the report and its findings, Abhishek Ganguly, Managing Director, PUMA India and Southeast Asia said, “As a nation, we have witnessed a fundamental change in adoption of sports culture with far more running communities, gyms and people taking up different sports. However, we have just scratched the surface and have miles to go. The PUMA - Nielsen Sport study proves that there are still significant areas for development. The study indicates the growing need to create awareness and inspiration among adults and kids to play more sport as well as illustrates the myriad ways in which sport adds value to life. There is a direct correlation between sports participation in kids and improved academic performance and positive emotional wellbeing. A strong sports culture brings out the best in people and is critical for the development of a country.”  

The PUMA-Nielsen sports survey was conducted across 16 cities, with 4280 respondents aged from 18-65 years of age (including parents of kids aged between 6-18). 

“PUMA’s new platform, Let There Be Sport, will be our priority this year. It will promote and encourage sport and fitness as a life skill. We will heavily invest in creating awareness towards sports adoption at a mass level, build more moments of inspiration, continue to support grassroot athletes and work closely with key stakeholders across sectors to integrate sports and fitness into the main curriculum. In five years, we are confident that a sports-focussed survey will yield better insights in India,” added Ganguly. 

Nielson Sports has a history of presenting a clear and comprehensive picture of the sporting landscape and its association with PUMA to bring out this revolutionary report, is a game-changer for the upliftment of sports in the country. 

Denise Menasan, Managing Director for APAC & MENA at Nielsen Sports & Entertainment, said, “A study was commissioned by PUMA India to help understand the views of sports in India and how sports & physical activity impacts other aspects of our life, such as emotional wellbeing, academics and employability. While there have been multiple initiatives to boost fitness-related activities, our study indicates that more needs to be done in this space. The study highlights that an increase in sports and fitness activities can help enhance overall emotional wellbeing amongst adults, help learn valuable life skills and increase academic grades of kids. We hope this campaign from PUMA India inspires people to become more physically active in their day-to-day activities and equips government agencies with data to frame new policies.”

PUMA has been actively contributing to the rise of sports culture in the country and this report will go a long way in helping the brand fulfil its goal of creating a sports-friendly and fit India.

At the Pitch CMO Summit Mumbai held on March 24, top industry leaders came together for a panel discussion on how to build an agile brand. The panelists were Anuj Arora, Chief Marketing Officer, Symphony; Dippak Khurana, Co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer, VServ; Kavitha Ganeshan; General Manager- of Marketing TVS Eurogrip; Vijay Kumar Pampana, Director & Head of Marketing, P & G Health India; Virat Khullar, AVP & Group Head- Marketing, Hyundai Motor India Limited; Yannick Colaco, Co-founder, FanCode. The session was chaired by Nikhil Kumar, Vice President, India, and SEA & ME, media smart.

The leaders discussed the topic, The Playbook for Building Agile Brands.

With the increasing demand for consumer attention, brands need to enhance their consumer journeys as consumers have a plethora of options to choose from. Creating and deploying fresh content regularly is the key to keeping your audience engaged.

Taking the discussion forward and describing brand agility as an essence of marketing, Arora said, “Customer expectations have drastically changed in the last few years and the brands must focus on how to be more relevant and credible to the customer to do purposeful marketing.”

Citing how conscious marketing has become essentially important for sustainable brands, Arora mentioned that Symphony is a 35-year-old brand that launched the whole branded coolers category. ‘Thinking of tomorrow’ is the brand’s tagline, which represents a sustainable future.

Khurana shared, “Brand agility is what we immensely follow as we are in the business where we democratise intelligence to cater to stakeholders, publishers, CMOs and digital marketing managers.” 

Elaborating on brand sustainability, Ganeshan said, “It is no longer about 360-degree campaigns, it is more about 365 days of marketing. Also, how the brand builds its communication and designs its playbook to build effective and efficient mechanism will make it stand out in the clutter.”

Pampana added, “The most definite elements of the playbook are brand purpose, brand equity, and character of the brand. We prefer to evolve based on the market trends and latest learning.”

Ganeshan mentioned that delivering empathy to the customer as a part of brand communication makes the brand more agile. Yannick said, “Brand agility is not an option, it is survival as we have to segregate the audience demands to cater to their needs.” 

Furthermore, panellists described how their brands meet their customers’ expectations.

Pampana was requested to share how P&G Health India's brand campaigns made them successful in the market. Answering the question, he shared, “Simplification and articulation of personalised experiences to understand the customer and market, made our brand campaigns successful.”

Ganeshan shared how market research helps in understanding consumer demands. She mentioned that TVS Eurogrip is relatively new in the category and the brand tries to engage more with the right influencers which include auto journalists, reviewers, and the mechanic community to build a better system for advertising and marketing.

In addition, Khullar mentioned that the average price at which the Hyundai sells its car has doubled in the last four years and it is possible because the brand kept on innovating and evolving with time. In the concluding remarks, Yannick shared how Fancode uses cloud services to comprehend the audience's demand.

Brands and marketers can target audiences on the VI platform, not only within their owned and operated media but also onto the third-party, said Nishant S Gupta, Head of Revenue, TorcAI, at the Pitch CMO Summit in Mumbai on Friday.

He was delivering the spotlight session on ‘Many Industry Firsts with VI Ads’. According to Gupta, brands can also transfer their first-party data in the most secure manner on VI Ads’ platform.

Talking about VI audiences on third-party media, Gupta said, “Till date, within the telco ecosystem, advertisers could target the audiences within their owned and operated media. But with VI Ads, the landscape has completely changed. Now brands and marketers can target audiences on VI platform not within their own and operated media but also onto the third party.”

Vodafone Idea Limited (Vi) provides access to more than 243 million subscribers in India and has signed a multi-year partnership with Infomo's subsidiary TorcAI to launch a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) enabled AdTech and data distribution platform known as VI Ads.

Vi Ads has been conceptualised, developed and handled by TorcAI. It was launched in 2022.

“It allows the brand and marketers to not only target the digital part but they can also target via traditional media like SMS and OBD,” Gupta said.

Accompanying him was Madhu Sudan, Executive Director, New Business, TorcAI, who said it is the first time that media and data are being stapled together bringing telco data into digital advertising.

Sudan added, “When we say the platform is inventory agnostic what we really mean is that we have telco data, which tells you who the user is and on top of that when we staple it with media we also know where he is.”

He said that brands usually spend a significantly large amount of time, effort and money experimenting with various media to try and find out which media works best for them and this usually involves very little efficacy and large budgets.

Explaining through a case study, Sudan said, “We ran a campaign recently. It was a large music service that we all know of. They were relaunching in a huge way and they wanted to spend significantly large amounts across media categories. So, we arrived at music affinity audiences and we ran it in excess of 20 different platforms.”

“The service would have had to run individual campaigns across each of these media categories to understand which works for them and which don't; whereas with VI ads, capability and ML (machine learning) capabilities, we were able to identify music affinity audiences and target them across various number of third-party media and yielded fantastic results,” Sudan said.

Explaining the concept of media and data stapled together, Sudan said, this is the first time it's being done and TorcAI has brought in the telco data into digital advertising, which is the most deterministic form of data available in the market.

“Once we know who the user is, we staple media to that ID and we also know where the user is. We are concatenating multiple campaigns into one capability by stapling media and data together,” he said.

Adding to this, Gupta highlighted that the platform not only allows the brands to target predefined cohorts like gender and socio-economic class but it also allows the brand to create its own custom cohorts and segments.

“It offers the marketers the benefit of unique audience segmentation and interest groups and targeting parameters,” he said.

The Pitch CMO Summit held at Mumbai on March 24 saw an enviable gathering of marketing and brand heads, advertising thought leaders and other media luminaries who exchanged thoughts, ideas and notes on all things marketing.

As the advertising and marketing media continues to be driven by reams of data from multiple sources, Gaurav Anand, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, L’Oréal India, appositely spoke on ‘The Future of Marketing with Consumer Data.’

While eschewing the usual practice of illustrating his talk with the use of slides, Anand admitted that as a marketer, it wouldn’t feel right to him to have no visual aid, and proceeded to show a quick video encapsulating L’Oréal’s data and digital-driven process in its marketing endeavors.

"At L’Oréal we are busy crafting out what the future of marketing would be. We work across a lot of different markets and take inspiration from China and Brazil, “he said, adding that in its simplest form, he broke up marketing into three buckets. “The first would be who's the audience I show my content to, the second what content I show, and third, how I measure its impact.”

“When it comes to describing consumers, marketers have never been short of flair. How often have you seen a brief that says ‘looking for affluent consumers in the X-Y age group, who are into high end fashion, styling, etc.’  And if you don’t have these well-defined psychographics, there’s been a lot of research done like TAO segmentation or Sociovision which can help you define those psychographics,” continued Anand.

While appreciating these means in helping create content, Anand said one basic practical question remained to be answered, “Where do you find these consumers?”

“When the media is struggling to go beyond basic demos and age groups, how do we start getting into these nuances? Where do we find these consumers? That’s the challenge marketers are facing, especially in big markets like India,” he said, circling back to the hypothetical brief of finding a particular set of consumers, and elaborating on the conflicting metrics that can muddy particular demographics and definitions, akin to finding needles in the haystack.

Giving an example of when L’Oréal was launching Lancome in India, Anand said the brand initially looked at targeting women over 25, with high disposable incomes, but was then pleasantly surprised to see a large influx of consumers from younger cohorts, and so had to correct their assumptions.

Noting that while there were a lot of buzz words and flashy terms being used when speaking of targeting audiences (his personal least favourite being ‘affinity’), Anand said that a lot of it was just jargon and distracted marketers from figuring out the correct content for the correct consumers in the correct context.

"The first thing we need to do is to stop moving away from claim based signals to deterministic signals. For instance, what a consumer watched can tell you a little bit about what this consumer is going to buy,” he said, continuing, “The second thing I've started seeing, and Google is doing a fantastic job at it, is using their household panel data on their entire YouTube audiences, which gives a sense of affluence targeting to brands at scale.”

Anand continued to break down how smaller datasets could lead brands into creating and visualizing the larger picture and therefore help determine future targeting and content programming. He elucidated on various methods that different categories of brands could employ, both consumer-facing as well as backend models, to gather data on the likes, dislikes, purchase decisions, aspirations and expectations of consumers and how to sell to them.

“Hence, in my view, the best way to find your future consumers is the data of your present consumers,” said Anand.

End of Broadcasting will be the beginning of conversations, said Tamanna Dhamija, Founder & CEO of Convosight, while speaking at PITCH CMO Summit.

Dhamija shared that she realized the power of online communities when she saw that 40% of conversations there are linked to brands. “I couldn't believe how simple and scalable this phenomenon was if brands had the opportunity to tap into communities such as these online and talk to consumers about the efficacy of brands. It took me three years to get to this realization.” 

Dhamika shared that the objective behind Conovosight was to help brands discover such communities, tap into them online, get insights and market to consumers that are talking to each other. 

In her presentation at the event, she talked about one such community- Jhatpat Recipe which has around five lakh members. She said there are 1000s of such communities just talking about food and other topics and there are 63 million members in these rooms spread across the internet.

According to Dhamija, communities have always existed but now they have arrived online, where people are talking to each other. "For instance,  Facebook groups are the largest with 1.8 billion people in these rooms. They've all joined organically and again, people are talking to each other. It's not just broadcasting. Other platforms are Reddit, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord. These are all the channels on existing social media where communities are present," she noted. 

“We've already witnessed this evolution of broadcasting to conversations. It's a tectonic shift in the way we as consumers have started behaving online. We have seen that balconies are where we step online, where a brand or an influencer or a consumer creates the balcony and constantly consumes a lot of content from other balconies," she said. (Balconies are here refer to Facebook pages, Twitter, Moj whereas Halls are Facebook Group, Reddit and Whatsapp ) 

Dhamija shared that since consumers moved to balconies, brands have also followed: “So all of the listening, inciting and paid marketing happen on these balconies. And as we all have evolved, as we all have started trusting each other digitally, we've seen an explosion of halls. And what are halls again? Channels in which people are talking to each other and not just broadcasting.” 

When we look at balconies and halls, there are just a few differences. First, all balconies are created through paid marketing. “So there's the concept of having a lot of followers and we do paid marketing to garner followers, in balconies or in halls, which are built organically. It's all organic because it's based on interest or passion. When we look at engagement between balconies and halls, there is a stark difference. Where you see the engagement in balconies is on an average 10% but when we look at halls one person on average engages six times in a hall which is 600% engagement. Content is created through individuals like you and me and that's how influence is created in a hall.” 

She further shared that not just organic communities, but even brand own communities or Facebook groups have really high metrics. She cited an example of Sunsilk Facebook group, which has just 20,000 members, but the organic reach of the group is 2.2 million.

“We knew communities need to be an integral part of the marketing and insights mix because it's an integral part of the consumer buying journey.”

She also stated that brands have not adopted communities at all and the main reason behind this is that there are no listing or discovery tools that exist that help brands identify the relevant rooms online that they can tap into. 

And there Convosight came into the picture. “That's how Convosight came into existence. It is just an enabler. It's really the change in behaviour that has happened online that has given the rise of communities.” 

She further added, “We were there at the right time and saw this opportunity and now we aggregate communities on existing social channels, really creating opportunities for brands and consumers in communities to co-exist. It's a win-win.” 

She also said, “It drives massive value to the consumer because they are there talking about the brands and categories. It creates consideration through word of mouth. We now have access to 100,000 communities with 900 million members across the globe. And we work with about 150 consumer brands, very large enterprise customers, again, enabling discovery, enabling inciting and marketing into those communities.”

In a world where everything about everyone can be known digitally, Profitwheel is a platform that helps companies know their customers. At the Pitch CMO Summit organized by exchange4media, Vivek Bhargava, co-founder of Profitwheel, spoke to the audience about how the company uses customer intelligence to help brands find their profitable customers.

In the session titled, ‘Decoding Your Profitable Customers With Consumer Intelligence,’ Bhargava talked about Profitwheel’s methods of using data and finding out more about a particular brand’s customer base in a way that the brand knows the interests of that particular customer and can use it to target them through different methods of advertising and marketing.

Bhargava said, “When you look at a brand, they don't know what their best and most profitable customers look like so they don't have a common currency. All the different departments that they have, they all work in silos. But imagine if you knew what the psychographic of your best customers look like, then all the brands can actually get all the departments aligned to this one north star of acquiring and retaining most profitable customers.

Imagine you could also give the same platform to entire ecosystem of partners that you have. So, give it to your creative agency, give it to your content creation agency, give it to your media buying agency, give to your influence agency, video market research agency, give it to consulting companies who work with you, audit that work with you. Basically, what you do is you create this one platform that every single person in your company, as well as your ecosystem partners can use when they want to take any decision.”

He also spoke about the usage of artificial intelligence and the famous generative AI application ChatGPT in the workings of Proftwheel. He says ChatGPT can take the data and help make a creative brief, a campaign idea and video scripts for the brand using the consumer intelligence data from Profitwheel.

Bhargava then talked about the importance of knowing what to do with the enormous customer data that brands have and how Profitwheel’s goal is to help marketers know and understand their consumers better. “The biggest challenge I think most of us face today is that we have so much customer data, but we don't know anything about our customers. We just know that okay, this person bought this three times in a month, this person has bought this much value in terms of pricing. But if I were to ask you, how are you going to build them as a community? How are you going to create content for them? How are you going to choose influencers with them? How are we going to decide which countries you should expand in? All these questions are completely unanswered, and it takes a lot of research, a lot of insights, a lot of experience before you can answer any of these questions. So, our goal is that every single person in the company should have access to a bouncing board that gives you real time insights about your customers. As soon as you enter it, you should get some insights, and then use those insights for actions. And not only you, every single ecosystem partner of yours should get the same platform and it should not be linked to the amount of money you spend on advertising.”