Social Wavelength’s Jt CEO On Changing Role Of Marketing

Traditional marketing is completely overtaken by modern marketing. However, there are a myriad number of challenges that come on its way, which throw light on new opportunities. Have a look on below webinar led by Sanjay Mehta, Jt CEO, Social Wavelength in order to develop a complete understanding on the same.

Webinar Leader’s Profile:

Sanjay has been an early Internet entrepreneur, and with 15+ years of experience, at a hands-on level, he would also be one of the most experienced in this space in India.

He co-founded his first startup, Homeindia.com, back in 1998 and ran it for 9 years, before divesting and exiting in 2007. Then, he took up a professional career, as COO of Compare Infobase Ltd., an 800-person Internet business at that time. After around 1-1/2 years at this company, he moved on to start his new venture.

He has now launched Social Wavelength, a social media management brand of Social PR Outsourcing Pvt. Ltd.

Sanjay is B.E. Electrical Engg. (1985) from VJTI, Univ of Mumbai, and M.S. Electrical and Computer Engg. (1986) from the Univ of Southern California, USA. He spent the first 10 years of my career in an Electrical and Industrial Electronics manufacturing and marketing business, as a Director, before venturing into the Internet space in 1998.

Social Wavelength is a pure-play, full-service Social Media agency, perhaps the largest of its kind, in India. With a team of 100+ persons, and upwards of 60 leading Indian brands as clients, Social Wavelength has rich experience in both of the key verticals of service it provides, viz. Social Media Marketing and Management, and Social Media Monitoring. Besides managing Social Media platforms and communities for its clients, Social Wavelength also handles media buy, application development and creating videos, and on the Monitoring side, services offered include Online Reputation Management, Social CRM, etc.

Twitter Handle: @sm63

As transcribed by Digital Vidya:

Q- Isn’t target advertising already fulfilling the digital marketer’s fantasy?

Sanjay: To some extent, yes! There was an interesting article in Mint, couple of days back which actually compared Facebook advertisers to television. That was unbelievable! The fact that it can even be compared was an amazing fact that even with the Google and search marketing, television is very popular; it used to be because television gave you reach in one shot and it also gave you ability to tell a story that has a large video format in an interesting way. So, if you are doing brand sale you want that kind of canvas and you want large reach whereas Google with its great search capability was able to give you a fine targeting but only while people were searching to achieve a large number of certitudes to get somewhere.

Facebook now is kind of addressing both aspects. One is it has reach, the fact that in India also it has got more than 100 million and in Europe it is beyond a billion. It has got reach on one side and divides profiles by lifestyle issues or by custom audience which means the customers you can target, i.e. the customers who are alike which you can target, and people who have visited your website from now coming to your Facebook page. So, targeting is becoming better and better plus it also offers you rich media methods to convey your brand story. So, best of both worlds in a sense that it has got the richness of the media i.e. the reach and the targeting which television doesn’t offer. So in that sense, yes it is getting to a point where targeting with all these means is getting to the point which is closer to the digital marketer’s fantasy. But I think digital marketers have media and they will want even more than this.

Q- How much percentage of overall marketing spent does digital marketing get?

Sanjay: At this time the numbers that I have which is from some industry report is that it is about 10% overall as an industry number. This was the number I read somewhere that last year out of overall spent of 35,000 crores, digital part got about 3 and a half thousand roughly, which is good from going from small single digit to heading towards a 2 digit level. But it is becoming significant that it is already bigger than other areas like radio, outdoor and cinema advertising and all. So, it’s definitely in a way replacing a system where traditional advertising used to happen and the other fact is that, it is still I suspect these numbers are only looking at the fundamental marketing trends which is closer to how advertising money is spent.

Digital is also getting budgets from other departments of a company like customer’s service teams, PR teams and sometimes investor relation’s teams. It is even getting its budget from HR teams because wherever there are people communicating with each other, for lot of stakeholders in the company, there is both opportunity and vulnerability and it is not just the marketer who spends money here but the HR person wants to be sure that employer branding is happening correctly and he wants to be sure that he tracks the conversation that the existing employees are having at the platforms or the previous employees are having. So, the money is also spent here, in other words. But pure advertising and marketing spent (digital) would be roughly 10% of the total.

Q- a) What are your thoughts on Flipkart and OLX marketing partnership?
b) Lot of ecommerce companies use content driven marketing and still they use traditional media. What are the reasons behind it?

Sanjay:

a) I haven’t got into the Flipkart and OLX tie-up in detail. So I have to pass that question. I am not very sure but I would say that both of them are doing extremely good. I am sorry I do not have enough data.

b) I think what happens is that when a company has raised a lot of money, there are certain expectations that they and their investors have regarding the rate of growth. It is because you want to grow at a certain rate and hence, do not want to miss out on any possible opportunities, which means that you will spend left, right and centre or covering all ways in other words. So it is just fine if you have ample resources and ‘why’ and ‘why not’ of doing everything is one way of looking at it but on the other hand, if you look at the different days of television and traditional media, definitely it still has reach and you still see an ad on television on the big screen with sharp colours, great audio and a great story. So, there is a certain brand imagery that is built through that ad which is a hit part because you want to create certain inspirational value about the brand when you show that ad and parallel to that when you are doing content/digital marketing, it is probably closer to bringing the person to your website faster.

There is immediacy when I see something on the website, reading something, see a nice video or photograph, it tells me to click then and there and generate what you call as a virtual footfall into your store. So, both are required. I wouldn’t do it if the brand is not even recognised. If I see some XYZ and even if it is a firm piece of line, I will think twice about it that I do not know who they are and let me not waste time as I have other things to do. But if it is the same brand which had created certain visual imagery about it by showing me a television ad and now shows pop-ups on my browser, there are fair chances that I may click there and go ahead. So you need both kinds of them in order for the product to deliver.

Q- Where do you think Twitter globally would head from here compared to Facebook based on what they are currently from the marketers’ point of view? How do you see the future, which will grow and where should we focusing on?

Sanjay: You actually need a crystal ball to know where it will go. It is not because we cannot visualise everything but the fact is that there are lot of different paths that these companies have taken in terms of the kind of acquisitions they have made and the kinds of tie-ups they do. So, while Twitter is on its own, it has certain personality to it and a certain purpose it serves. Let’s say if it ties up with Wine and it gets a new capability and over time acquires Wine and gets a different personality and opportunity, similarly it has got in action on television and it can potentially connect with a buy button which it has already got and is experimenting and this becomes a way to sell instantaneously or impulsively. The fact is that what it does on technology front in terms of features, acquisitions. It is a very dynamic space which we can’t visualise today because it is something which the thought processes are going on in this direction and it will evolve as we look at it.

At a fundamental level, where they are today and what role they have in the consumers’ life, Facebook of course is something where people go and spend larger time, they need longer stories, they see photographs of their friends and others, so they are spending more time there, which is where a consistent and continuous message a brand give, whether it is through the promoted posts or video advertising etc. continuously to enrich the brand building efforts for the brand as well as give a link which people can click and bring people to our store. It has a little long term appeal from a brand building perspective and advertiser’s perspective. Whereas Twitter of course as its nature is far more about the year and now. So, as an advertiser you would want to run the things like in the next hour, this offer is running like when you enter this code, you get this discount and the things like that can get pretty viral if you have an interesting offer that you pushed out.

Somebody seeing it and starts retweeting and it can carry very fast or you put out a nice image of the product which is a Twitter special sale that is amendable for the next four hours or something like that can have a tendency to go pretty viral. So from a brand point of view, you would need 2 mediums in a very different way based on the status of the medium which is right now. But as I said, these guys keep evolving and through acquisitions or other means manifesting themselves in different ways. Can you use Wine for an interesting video and then you know an Instagram or other things? These are all a part of one or the other larger gate. I think Facebook is probably a little more ongoing brand building and activation platform that brands will use. Twitter is probably still close to being on more impulse kind of driving mechanism and hence, you use it for some tempting offers, deals or discounts where you can quickly go, share and have them go viral on the medium.