As Director of Brand & Media, Amitesh Rao is currently focusing on developing the MTS brand into a key organizational asset that enables compelling propositions for consumers, and informs the culture and belief systems of the company for internal stakeholders. Earlier Rao has worked with brands like Pepsi, Nestle, Microsoft etc. from many standpoints – as chief executive, marketing head, communications specialist, sales manager and entrepreneur.

How does the digital medium - both internet and mobile - figure in MTS' plans to reach out to consumers?

We have been a data-focused brand and telecom growth story in India is driven by data in a large way. The profitability is not there in voice and globally, companies are realizing that and the money is in VAS and data. We are building a core competency in data and absolutely the digital medium becomes heart and soul of the platform through which we reach our consumers. I would say this is the most important medium.

What is the most successful digital campaign of MTS in the past year that you would like to highlight?

Actually, we are very young brand and the first two years we spent entirely on setting up the business, infrastructure, scaling up to the threshold level which allows the company to be viable. So, most of the work on branding side was acquisition driven and we did not invest much in digital in early years of our operation. It was more like discount driven land grab strategy.

This year we will start to shift the gears and have gained leadership in data in some markets already and are doing very well in most markets. What we believe is we are kicking off with some of the biggest digital initiative the world has seen, it’s not just India actually.

At the centre of our digital strategy is something called Red Energy. The social status especially for youngsters they have now gained online. Earlier a social status was ascertained with a big car, wealthy father, and beautiful girlfriend. But, now there are youngsters who have all those things, but are denied of a social status unless they have an online status.

One of the young guys engaging with another company said that his USP was that Barkha Dutt follows him on Twitter. These guys are nobody but their blogs, tweets, views on life, politics, etc. are very interesting, and therefore they have a following and a status. What we are trying to do is recognise these people and reward their online social status with digital world campaigns.

What that means is you are 18 years old, you get pocket money, seen as a responsible person and online you have a serious presence, MTS will take that influence that you have online and exchange it for real life status.  So, irrespective of whether they are big or not because their status is high on internet they are able to get real world benefit out of it.

There is a very good blogger on cricket who is get nothing out of it other than people following him because he has that online influential status. We gave an opportunity for commentary in a five day test match with Ravi Shastri. It is almost like monetising the talent.

So, according to you, any online brand building activity can only be effective when it’s completion happens offline, is that so?

I don’t say that this is the only way; it is one of the important ways and certain areas and you have to have that connection, there are also pure online place that does work for brands. 

With new forms of content such as videos and apps coming up on internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India?

There is lot of published content, lot of syndicated content but especially for a young brand like us, real content is just generated by users. That’s the type of content we are very keen on encouraging, building and facilitating.  Of course there are other standard form of content like games on demand, music on demand are there but the real content is that people are making not what we are making.

Any plans for Video or in-app advertising?

We are exploring it; we have actually developed a very interesting new technology which literally on a Rs. 1000 phone can stream videos. 

As a brand when you go to your digital media partners, publishers or agencies, what are your questions to them?

There are two types of requirements, on the first we need an agency that understands the brand, what it is trying to be and is able to translate that into interaction, into engagement and obviously there is creativity required for that, technical skill and knowledge required for that, passion and enthusiasm required for that.

It is such a fluctuating, complicating sort of environment in digital and frankly we ourselves are not the biggest experts on that. So we expect our agency to have pulse on what is the most efficient way to reach out to people, what sort of platforms are working, what sort of platforms are not working.     

Internet is said to be a measurable medium. What is your take on this? Have we overdone the measurement quotient and made this medium hard to understand for the brand marketers?

It’s not like hard physics that nobody understands. A lot of it is common sense. Principles of media don’t change on TV and digital, the terms of measurement change but the basics are same.

Mobile is being held as a great medium for brand communication, but still, very less amount is spent on the particular medium. What is your take on this?

We had a study in India recently and found people using smart phones and I am talking about 18-30 age group. They are just using 27 per cent of their time of the use of the phone for voice and SMS, the rest of the time has nothing to do with connectivity. They are searching something, watching some multimedia, playing some game, they will be on chat, they will be checking mails. So, one fourth of the guy’s attention is on voice and SMS. The revenue doesn’t reflect at yet but it very clearly tells you where it is moving, writing on a wall. So, obviously from a business perspective that’s where you want to be.               

Smart phones they have made person more close to it that social media? What are your activities on social network?

Red energy as I discussed earlier, we generate red energy scores. Anybody needs just to go there and plug in information and you get a score of red energy. That score is calculated based on what you have been doing on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, some blog that you write across all social media. If you post your video on YouTube that gets 200 comments obviously you have scored good because of that, if your retweets are very high you get very good score for that. If you post some video on Facebook, people who don’t comment also comment on your video than that gives you a boost. 

It is very complicated algorithm which computes a score on 1-100 scale based on your entire social media footprint and what you have been doing and you get score and credits, credits are like money and with that you can buy a seat for commentary booth with Ravi Shastri etc.

Talking about social media, there are lot of agencies who pitch for buying fans for you. What is your take on this? What are your strategies on this?

What’s point of fooling yourself, I mean you can try and fool yourself and meet some internal targets this year, but if the intention is to genuinely create brand that people engage with, than it is suicide because consumers specially online consumers are not fools and there is no way to hide things in the long run so that’s the way.

For you, social media strategy should be concentrated on conversation or content?

Both, I think content creates conversation and opinions create conversation and  we are interested in is engagement. A lot of brands try to measure how much they are interacting with consumers, which in my view is not necessary. What we try to see is how much the internet is interacting with consumers and if the interaction with internet is high that’s rewarding for you, that’s where we are coming. We are not asking you to do something new or change your behaviour or come to MTS site and do something.

In this telecom sector both online and offline transaction takes place, but consumers do research online and buy products offline. Whats your take on it? How do you look at it?

It is very rapidly changing. This whole cash on delivery system has completely shifted the paradigm and personally also it’s a huge surprise and there are some good providers and we have some brands like FlipKart, FashionAndYou, who are reliable, people use them once and are very happy with it, it’s very seamless, very convenient, its changing for sure.               

How do you see your marketing objectives aligning with what digital media offers in the future?

It’s not just marketing objective, it’s our business objective coming from it and because we are data brand. The most important thing for us is to determine how much people will use internet. The objective is very clear, it is improving and increasing data usage.

With Abhay Anand