World Cup will be a big needle mover for brands who want to make it big: Vaishali Verma, Initiative India

As the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 has begun with a bang, hosted by India this year, the media rights on both digital and TV are held by Disney+ Hotstar and Star Sports, respectively. 

The last cricket season, the Indian Premier League, saw JioCinema faring far ahead of Disney despite the latter's group retaining its TV rights. This year, Disney is offering free mobile streaming for the World Cup in a bid to further compete with JioCinema, democratizing the game for more than 540 million smartphone users across the country.

India's win over Australia on October 8 in the ICC Men's Cricket World Cup 2023 peaked at 26 million live concurrent viewers on digital.

The World Cup may generate at least 20% more in TV adex, while digital adex is likely to grow at least 70% more than the prior editions, as per Elara Capital’s report. 

With the festive season bringing in further opportunities for brands to tap into the shifting consumer trends, the rest of the year is a goldmine for brands to reach their consumers effectively. 

A Disney+ Hotstar Festive Shopping Sentiment Survey has found that shoppers this festive season are likely to increase their spending by 14% over last year, driven by a 12% increase in the size of their shopping baskets.

Vaishali Verma, CEO, Initiative India shares insights on the trends shaping consumer behavior, devising an effective media solution and how the festive and cricket season is set to shape the media industry.

Edited Excerpts:

As we approach the festive season, a critical period for advertising, how do you anticipate it will affect the media planning and buying behavior of brands in India?

A lot of brands hold back on advertising and the festive season is when they go all out because it becomes a make-or-break situation. This festive season is no different.  

The only big differentiator is the Cricket World Cup, which is happening during this festive season. Cricket is an emotion in our country. It's not only just a sport. There are a lot of brands that are extremely geared up to be on the World Cup. We have most of our brands coming on World Cup, which is either on television or on Hotstar.  

What a platform like the World Cup gives is the scale for brands who want accelerated growth in a country like ours. Even if clients have a smaller budget, if they're able to get a 10-day or 15-day presence on the World Cup,  they are able to accelerate their journey and campaign effectiveness. If you're smart with good creative messaging, then you can get a better result.  

World Cup will be a big needle mover in my opinion for a lot of brands who want to make it big.  

Are there specific mediums or platforms that you believe will receive more significant ad spends during the upcoming festive season, and what factors contribute to this shift in allocation?

Of course, Star Sports and Hotstar are the two platforms which will get the maximum share of spends. They will be garnering the maximum share of visibility as well. Other media might see a bit of a slowdown because money is limited. 

Festive period in India is always over-indexed. For a lot of our clients, 60%  of the spends of the year happens during the festive season, especially a lot of retail-led clients. 

They might be spending 70% of the budget on the World Cup and 30% of the budget on creating the other surrounding campaigns on other mediums. It could range anywhere between 50 to 70% in my knowledge of the brands we manage.

For FMCG, the spends could be in the range of 20% since they need to buy a lot of commodities.  

With your extensive experience in the media, advertising and marketing industry, what are the key lessons or insights that have significantly shaped your approach to media planning and buying?

As anybody, we have also evolved and changed with time. We've adapted ourselves most to the current environment and the dynamism with which we live today. The way we approach media planning and buying is that we try to understand the business problem the client is facing. Because eventually, no matter what money they spend on marketing and advertising, it needs to have some accountability and some metric needs to move for them on the brand. 

It's extremely important that we understand what the business objective is. Then we try and devise a media solution that helps best address and help achieve their business objective. Then, we get going into the diagnostics of knowing your consumer. 

I don't think anybody on this earth has still cracked what the consumer thinks,  but we try our level best with the limitations of,  whatever data is available to know our consumer or know who's buying your product. Because end of the day, if you spend a certain amount of money on advertising, it should result in sales and it should help the brand grow.   

There are two things which are extremely critical - understanding the business problem and knowing a consumer well.  When you know that,  you will be able to devise a far more effective media solution.  

Could you share some trends that have had a profound impact on how brands approach their media strategies?

The pre-pandemic era was very different. Every medium had a role to play. The consumers were spending far more time, consuming different kinds of media.  It has been pretty redefined now.  

Currently, it is an era of audio-visual.  It is an era where short-form content works better than long-form content.  

People don't have the patience. We see this trend changing in terms of how they are consuming content and entertainment. 

From a media mix perspective, television and digital are by far the two key mediums today across most of our brands.  

Back in the pre-pandemic era,  we would see the role of print being as effective as the role of outdoor, cinema and radio. Today, I see that the choices of media have got very limited.  Brands are pretty focused on TV plus digital because that's what the trend is. Of course, you do look at out-of-home and print for specific tactical campaigns. But this is a broad trend,  which I have noticed from pure consumption of content.

There is also a lot of on-the-go consumption of content. Hence, it becomes extremely critical for brands to identify the key moments in how they can be more relevant in those critical consumption moments when consumers will be more receptive to that particular category.  

How does Initiative customize its media strategies to suit different brands' marketing goals, especially when it comes to offline and online media strategies?  

Our starting point is always understanding the business problem of a client. 

Then, we take the audience-backward approach. We don't work media-backward, we work audience-backward.   

As we work audience-backward, we are in a situation where media doesn't matter. We are in a very media-neutral environment because a consumer might be consuming different kinds of content across TV, print, digital, via influencers, etcetera, throughout the day.   

When we approach the audience backward, the output is very different. As a result, we don't have an offline plan or an online plan. Eventually, yes, we will land into an offline and an offline plan,  but we don't think media-backward that way. We work on integrated media thinking. 

This is at the back of a lot of data and analytics and modeling to understand the attribution, on which medium is more effective if I have to drive sales or awareness.

Consumer behavior has been evolving rapidly, especially in the digital age. How do media strategies help in understanding and adapting to these changing consumer behaviors? 

On digital, we are able to make media strategies far more addressable and accountable. Hence, on the basis of the data signals, we are able to define a cohort basis.  

Depending on what the brand task is, you can do awareness-led campaigns through digital, performance-led campaigns or full funnel. Then, you're able to build that back into the next campaign.  

Building brand love is a goal for many brands. What do you believe are the crucial elements that brands need to understand about consumer behavior, when working out their media plans, to create a strong emotional connection with their audience?

A lot of brands need to drive a higher-order connect with their audiences. The question is how do I get brand love or higher brand affinity? 

Those are the times when we try and do stuff which is beyond the regular plan. There are times when you get into content, you create IPs and you create big sponsorships. 

For example, one of our brands Coca-Cola wanted to create brand love. We connected how their consumers were resonating with music. And that's how Coke Studi happened. Coke Studio was done not to get sales. It was created to increase brand love.

For Amazon, we were doing something like a fashion up with YouTube where we were trying to get influencers or mini celebrities to do a chat show where they would talk about their wardrobe styles. You do certain engagement-driven initiatives,  which helps move that matrix of emotional connect with the brand beyond the TVC. 

Brands which stand for purpose have a higher longevity and they are far more receptive which makes consumers resonate more with that brand.   

In the realm of media planning, how is artificial intelligence (AI) playing a role in optimizing strategies and enhancing the effectiveness of campaigns? Could you provide me examples of AI's impact on media planning in recent times?

We've used an amazing technology of Rephase, where people like you and me could all be featured along with SRK in the ad. Of course, it's at the back of AI. It’s more to enable the backend tech for these tech-led innovations per se. 

We are using a lot of advanced data tech in our analytics. I am yet to tell you whether we are using AI there. A lot of our tools are now working at sustainability-led devices to reduce carbon footprint because clients are really wanting to focus on that.