In the series of interviews with market leaders, change-makers and innovators, we bring our next interview with an innovator and industry expert Ms. Moneka Khurana, Country Head, MMA India.
MMA is India’s only industry body that focuses on the Mobile Marketing space, conducting several surveys, publishing several industry reports and educating marketers on the emerging trends, technologies, disruptions, etc.
MMA recently published a report which talks about digital marketing, ads, OTT, AI in marketing and we spoke to Ms. Moneka about the same.
- What is the focus MMA for 2020 and the upcoming time?
The focus of MMA for 2020 is to continue to build guidelines and best practices for creative short format advertising on mobile, cross-media reach. We are also focusing on building the best practices for brand marketers and performance marketers. Beyond this, we are focusing on the high potential area of modern marketing where we are evangelizing best practices and guidelines for modern marketing which enables the usage of tools and technology like Artificial Learning and Machine Learning to drive better business efficiency, enable digital transformation and deliver optimal results. We are also focusing on voice, for example, 25% of queries are coming from voice searches and tools. We feel voice is a very potent tool for the upcoming time.
- What is brand value in today’s Digital Era?
When it comes to brand value in the digital area, it comes in 3 folds. First is giving authentic information to their customers because today there many fake pages and circulation of fake news. So, brands are looking to take ownership of authentic information through their handles.
The second thing is ensuring automation, so that the brands can deliver a more personalized experience to and solve a lot of queries of their consumers.
The third thing is more empowerment because the brands have understood that brand value is co-created with the customers. Today, not only the brands are talking about themselves but the customer is also talking about the brand, whose perspective is of utmost importance.
- Tell us about the usage of AI in the marketing scenario.
Today more than 80 percent of the corporates have adopted some type of industry learning tool or AI technology to drive business whether it is for the personalized experience or better turnouts. It is highly used in CRM, e-commerce, and personalized content discovery. People are also creating chatbots to answer queries. That’s how AI is being used and very soon AI will be as common as how social media is today.
- How crucial is content in today’s digital era?
Content today is very crucial, and it has a very short life span. Today’s content is ephemeral by design, such as stories of Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok videos. Due to the short span, these types of content have a very strong purpose and a lot of creativity. Video is one of the key carriers of content for any brand. Today a marketer can’t get away with a 30-second video due to the ephemeral nature of the content. The video should be able to tell the story in 10 seconds. It’s really important to design a strong video as the customers decide in the first 10 seconds where they want or don’t want to engage with the brand.
- A lot of brands are going vernacular, what is the reason behind that?
Today the focus of marketers is the next billion users who come from tier 2 and tier 3 cities, which are non-English speaking consumers. That is why today we have to get more local outreach and localized content. 90 percent of internet users in the next 5 years are going to prefer vernacular languages. AI-based voice technology has been focusing on it and they are present in most of the regional languages today.
- With the rise of OTT platforms in India, what are your views on this?
OTT is slowly becoming a replacement for appointment viewing. Appointment viewing is something which is the way people were consuming content when you can see a certain thing according to the schedule. But with OTT it has become a video on demand, you can view it with a single click. While we have one television per family, we have 4 OTT users in the same family. This is the level of reach OTT has achieved in all these years. There is already a war going on among the OTT players. There are also music streaming apps that are having another war of their own. It’s a huge game and it’s the same as one time when cable operators were acquiring customers with different strategies. The investment in creating on OTT is huge, there is around 2.5 Billion INR investment in original content.
- How do brands manage their customer loyalty in these days of crazy discounts?
Like the retail war that was among the retail giants during old times, the same thing is happening in terms of e-commerce these days. The biggest challenge for every big player is online discounts. As there was the case of Zomato gold where there was a huge backlash because the restaurants were losing customers and making losses. It went through a lot of corrections and it is now sustainable for both sides. The apps are going all out to acquire users today by giving crazy discounts, huge flash sales. The consumer is understanding where they want to shop from and not by just looking at deals. Here, Microretailing shines out and will see a huge growth through mobile
- How big will mobile marketing get in the coming times?
Today mobile is huge and everything digital is going through mobile. Mobile has a lot of advantages like utility services such as location-based services, cab services, food, and a lot of other things. There was a time when mobile has a 7 percent share in digital ads and today when we talk ‘mobile’, it has a 30 percent share of digital ads. It is only a matter of 3-5 years when mobile will dominate the digital ad market also.
Team Next Big Brand extends heartiest wishes to Moneka and Mobile Marketing Association. It was great knowing a lot of industry insights from you and we hope you keep building the best practices for the mobile community.
You can check our other interviews here.
