Speaking With Arun Nair On All Things Digital
Arun Nair was one of the speakers at last year’s Digital CMO summit. At that time he was leading the Digital Initiatives at Mahindra Holidays. Arun has received accolades for his work with Mahindra Holidays and has also been awarded with the ‘Best Practise Award‘ at Mahindra Group internally by a jury helmed by Anand Mahindra himself. He is also a keen blogger who independently analyses Digital Media, Advertising and social media on his blog, Indianeyes. In this post we ask him about his views on the Digital Marketing space in India.
What does Digital mean to you as a CMO?
Digital is the future that is galvanizing and changing traditional ways of marketing. Digital is where consumers are increasingly spending more of their time, and businesses will naturally adapt around consumer trends and behavior.
Do you think there is more hype than substance in the digital media space? If no, can you elaborate on your reasons?
Certainly not. There are expectations and demands that are premature, but the medium is certainly not a hype. Digital as a platform lets marketers try out radical means of interacting with customers and doing business; we are in the discovery phase and there are many ideas/possibilities. Some of the ideas may not work, because there is a mismatch between expectations and reality as the market is still shaping up. However, in the process of exploration, we discover eureka moments that become hugely successful and have tremendous market implications.
What is one Digital campaign that you are proud of?
This would have to be during my days at Mahindra Holidays (I now run my own digital consulting). Actually I have more than one that I’m proud of. For e.g. Verse-a-tile, a crowd-sourced travel contest that ran on twitter for about a month, exceeded all our expectations. Our twitter follower base grew substantially, we had thousands of mentions and tweets, and got featured in various media publications for that contest. The best part was that the contest was wrapped at a cost so low, you would have your jaw agape!
What is that one Digital campaign that inspires you?
Any campaign that captures the collective imagination of the audience and makes them part of the campaign is my winner. The “Share a Coke” campaign done by Ogilvy Australia take the cake – they picked 150 of the most popular names in Australia and printed a unique name on each Coke bottle, urging user to “Share a Coke” with a special someone. This strategy turned out brilliantly for them; In the first 3 months, young adult consumption increased by 7% and an astounding 5% of Australians began to drink Coke for the first time (in over a year). Also, its worthy of a mention that the campaign received over 120 million Facebook impressions.
According to you, what are the challenges that Digital Media faces in the country with respect to its growth and adoption?
Bandwidth is still a concern in our country; the average national Internet speed is barely at 1 Mbps, and is ranked 112th globally. Then there is is ubiquity or lack of a stable connection in smaller towns. That said, the situation is definitely better than it was a few years ago and I’m optimistic that mobile broadband will bridge the gap. Most impeding though, is the lack of confidence of marketers; I have yet to see many of the marketers dive head first and take the plunge – I’m still waiting for that break through campaign that was driven entirely by digital.
What are the top 3 Digital Agencies that you respect?
Tribal DDB – Some great work done over the years, a good servicing team.
India Social – They are a pure-play social media agency and are one of the very few good social media agencies in the country. The award winning work done for Mahindra Rise is noteworthy.
Interface Communications (Draft FCB) – I have a bias because I’ve worked closely with them.
What is the ideal percentage of spends on digital platforms and marketing that you would recommend to a fellow CMO?
Around 30% is the sweet spot. If your business depends entirely on digital, the % goes up drastically.
From a digital platform and solutions perspective, which of these excites you the most? mobile/social/interactive ad display/pay for performance.
Mobile and Social Media is where the innovations are. The right strategy and media mix can get you the maximum bang for the buck.
Can Digital be the best medium for brand building? Share your thoughts about this with our readers.
I would love to say a resounding Yes! But let’s not get myopic and view the medium in isolation. To quote from the book “the Dentsu way” (a must read), cross-communication strategy always works best at maximizing the impact and increasing brand recall.
That said, digital allows for personalization and building a closer relationship with your audience, that endears the brand and creates evangelists.
Talking Digital With Virginia Sharma Of IBM India
Virginia Sharma is the Vice President of Marketing and Communication for IBM India/South Asia. She was a speaker at our inaugural Digital CMO event that was held last year on 31st August. As part of our inaugural post on Digital CMO, we will be interviewing her to get her perspective n Digital Marketing.
What does Digital mean to you as a CMO?
“Digital” – the term per se is a form of technology. It is the enabling effect of this technology, which is of far more importance to me as a CMO. Marketing today is more about outside-in, than inside –out. For a marketer, therefore, the importance lies in understanding and leveraging both the communicative and analytic effect of digital technologies through which customers interact. On the one hand, we need to leverage the digital realm to engage with the various constituencies while on the other hand, we need to analyze data from these hundreds of digital interactions, to understand customers better.
At IBM, we have seen the function of marketing increasingly changing owing to two key factors – driven by ‘digital’ :
1. In the era of data-driven marketing and digitally empowered customers, the CMO cannot function in a silo. He has to necessarily partner the CIO.
Armed with Big Data, CMOs can shape everything from how brands interact with customers, to the products and services they offer, to the structure of the company itself. The CMO is influencing R&D, supply chain and just about every strategic area of an organization.
Now that Big Data is placing new demands on CMOs, many understand that technology is the factor that fuels their success, or cements their failure. CMOs – not just CIOs — are now being held accountable for business results tied to technology investments, and for driving long-term growth beyond marketing campaigns.
2. CMOs and CIOs must forge a shared agenda as the new C-suite power team to drive marketing innovation, blending the art of marketing with the science of technology
Due to their lack of technology training, CMOs are finally starting to look in-house to CIOs to get a better handle on their situation and to streamline their technology needs. Conversely, more CIOs are looking for ways to guide and assist CMOs as marketing continues to evolve.
Despite their different backgrounds and cultures, CMOs and CIOs are in the same boat. They need each other more than ever. Together they can approach marketing as an essential enterprise system that delivers innovation, business results and better customers experiences.
CMOs can re-imagine their role with next-generation skills, expanded peer networks and technologies to transform their profession. Meanwhile, CIOs can lend their expertise in data management, enterprise IT integration and policy issues such as security and privacy.
Do you think there is more hype than substance in the digital media space? If no, can you elaborate on your reasons?
I won’t say there is hype. There is urgency. The changes that are happening in the realm of digital technology are happening at a rapid pace. Back in 2000, with the dotcom bust, everyone thought that the internet was dead. How wrong was that assumption? The advent of the social web, the mobile revolution, voice led machine intelligence, semantic search – these have all turned the world of communication on its axis. The result has been a constant grapple to stay on top of things. As marketers, traditionally, we have always wanted to be in control: Control of our plans, our messaging, and of our execution semantics. The digital disruption has taken away some of that control. It has forced us to rethink the way we go to market. So we are trying to adapt. Trying to find the right way. The right mix. The right approach.
What is one Digital campaign that you are proud of?
Being an IBMer, one of the campaigns that I am most proud of in the realm of digital marketing is about creating awareness and driving conversations around Smarter Planet.
The concept itself had a larger than life appeal and it was imperative that the core message permeate through a campaign which had reach, accessibility and relevance across generations. Digital was one of the key medium used because of its scalability and reach. Most importantly, the concept of Smarter Planet rested on creating a shared agenda with our constituencies. Those who would believe in it created conversations around the same, thereby amplifying the message across the entire ecosystem.
However, the fact that makes me most proud was that this was not a social media campaign led by an external agency. True to our brand value, we inspired IBMers to lead these conversations and share their point of views. Thousands of IBM leaders and SMEs blogged, wrote and shared their experiences of working on technology solutions that was making the planet a smarter place to live in. The Smarter Planet blog became an aggregator for views by IBMers on how to make a difference to the way the world works. Over time, as the campaign established itself, we actively engaged our influencers to act as advocates in our journey towards progress for the people, the community and the planet!
To make this simpler, more vibrant and also ‘viral’, we leveraged multiple video assets and later, infographics to engage the audience. What also needs to be highlighted was the understanding and usage of various social platforms to leverage their core capability to help differentiate our campaign. So if LinkedIn was used to seed the blog messages with targeted business constituencies, Facebook was used to build on the community network effect, twitter was used to create organic search relevancy and string communities, word press was used for blogging because of its organic search relevancy while tumblr was used to create shareability of content modules which spoke about the concept of a Smarter Planet.
In short, I would like to point out that this was not a campaign or a quarter or a year – true to the tenets of building a real engaged constituency who believed in our message, it was a long term campaign that has not only touched the lives of every IBMer but has successfully engaged over 245,000+ followers on Smarter Planet.
What is that one Digital campaign that inspires you?
As I said earlier, it is what digital enables and allows me to do, that defines to me the value of a campaign. In that context, in recent times I was quite impressed with the way Obama’s election campaign was managed using digital technology. From the use of analytics to gain key insight into the minds of the voters, to using social networks to build advocacy, reach and loyal communities, it was a master class in using digital means and mediums to understand each target audience as an individual, create multiple and customized touch points around creating value and ultimately building and reinforcing the idea of a brand with a very clear recall value.
According to you, what are the challenges that Digital Media faces in the country with respect to its growth and adoption?
India is a country that moved to mobility before it embraced wired internet completely. So it is a country where the boom has been led by necessity. Bundled data packets of multimedia content, disseminated across multiple screens are the future. To adopt that change requires a lot of infrastructural development. There needs to be a lot of education. But the changes are happening, albeit slowly. A few weeks back I was at a Digital Media event and I saw Government officials of the likes of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Shashi Tharoor all congregating to understand how the internet and mobile industry needs to grow. So while on one hand we are seeing a pro-active push by government to roll initiatives to broaden the reach of digital networks and content, on the other hand we are seeing organizations understanding the need to change their technological infrastructure to really adapt to this change. To manage all the data, to create insights out of the data and to create solutions that solve problems for end users.
From an organization’s perspective, as mentioned earlier, the partnership between the CMO and CIO will be crucial in the adoption of digital media as a marketing medium. CMOs need to re-imagine their role with next-generation skills, expanded peer networks and technologies to transform their profession. CIOs can lend their expertise in data management, enterprise IT integration and policy issues such as security and privacy.
What are the top 3 Digital Agencies that you respect?
It is such a new field, it would be wrong to name three clear winners, but a lot of agencies are doing some really good work in the realm of digital. However, most of them are one off’s. There is not one agency who is constantly churning out impressive digital campaigns back to back. Ultimately for agency folks, they are in the business of selling ideas. The whole concept of that idea though has been decentralized. That idea is no longer the pre-requisite of a planner, or a creative suite. It can come from a mobile developer or a retail floor manager as well. So for agencies to respond to this disruption, they need to change their approach towards selling digital ideas as well. Ideas that will work on digital are hinged on technology and agencies are not really investing that much in understanding the technology angle to this.
What is the ideal percentage of spends on digital platforms and marketing that you would recommend to a fellow CMO?
This is the whole thing about this change. You cannot be rigid about this or treat this as a silo. It has to be an integrated layer of marketing. You have to seize the initiative by moving in when no one else has moved. By using ideas that no one else has used. Otherwise it becomes one too many of a mee-too approach. However, for doing that, one has to have insight. One has to understand the relevance of data. I can say this much that in times to come CMOs will invest a lot more in adopting technology that gives them this insight. So the approach that I will fix 5 % or 50 % of my budget for digital platforms and marketing is not the right way to look into this. One has to watch the trends and plan accordingly.
From a digital platform and solutions perspective, which of these excites you the most? mobile/social/interactive ad display/pay for performance.
Again I am back to emphasizing that we cannot look at this in silos. Search, social, mobile, local, geo, semantics, they are all interconnected. Each one is relevant and each one affects the other. Facebook has a billion people on it, but if you ask me, the mobile phone is the most crucial social network. Search however, does not work that well inside mobile applications, but is necessary to create discovery. The entire landscape is exciting and inspiring. It opens a plethora of possibilities of things we can do to make marketing relevant and impactful. The approach though has to be holistic. What is important is to create an integrated and layered approach, which builds on the unique value proposition of each new media platform, leveraging it only for that purpose, but ties it to the larger overarching requirement.
Can Digital be the best medium for brand building? Share your thoughts about this with our readers.
It can definitely be a key medium. Can it be the best if it is not integrated to the overall organizational culture, requirement and marketing objectives? No. For building a brand one has to create a lot of functional integration. CMO’s thereby need to get to the table with their CIO’s and HR teams and CFO’s to really create the brand vision. The vision itself will give the answers of what is required infrastructure wise and culturally to create a specific recall value – the recall value that defines any brand in the market today. It is not about building a killer app or having a great social media campaign with a million fans on Facebook. It is far more integral to the tenet.
