Ritesh Singh is currently the CEO at ARM Digital Media Pvt. Ltd. He has more than 14 years of experience across activation and digital space, during which he has worked with noteworthy national and multinational brands as their extended arm. Later, Ritesh, along with likeminded partners, started ARM Digital, a digital consulting company. 

In his current avatar, as the CEO of ARM Digital, Ritesh has worked with a diverse list of clients including Gionee, NIIT Ltd, Zee Learn, Pearl Academy, Panasonic, Citibank, MTS, among others. Ritesh strongly believes in convergence of media, with digital at core with expertise in designing strategies to deliver benefits from all mediums, TV, Print, Radio, OOH or Activation.

Prior to this, he was the National Director at MEC Interaction, and has also held several key positions at Starcom MediaVest Group. In his earlier role before ARM Digital, he led the conception and deployment of digital strategy. His experience spans an array of clients including Samsung, Aircel, Western Union, General Motors, SAB Miller and Himalaya.

In this exclusive interview with Ratnika Swami for India Digital Review, Ritesh talks about the role of a media planner, what to keep in mind while buying inventory for digital campaigns, and the challenges faced by media planners today. Excerpts: 

Q. With outcome-based campaigns and algorithm-based decisions, how do you think is the role of media planners evolving? Do you think it will move from planning to just monitoring/controlling in the coming years?

When was the last time any individual as a customer or brand manager or marketing manger said, ‘We don’t need more value for money?’ ROI has always been a major driver of media campaign planning/buying/management. As for the roles of Media Planners, they will always remain vital to the success of a media campaign. Today, thanks to the large data mapping capabilities, you can map the journey of a user right from his entry to his exit, therefore it is possible to plan a campaign at several stages of the same journey and optimise it in order to achieve the desired ROI which could be simply awareness driven or hardcore metric like sales driven.  While all of this data is available, are we really making the optimal use of it to plan the campaigns based purely on the data? Not so sure, and that is precisely where you will always feel the need of an expert planner on board, even though major parts of optimisation and even execution to a certain degree is machine driven. 

Q. As a Media planner, what are the biggest challenges you face, especially in being able to optimally tap into the digital medium? What are the most important things you keep in mind while planning to buy inventory for a digital campaign?

One of the major challenges that we face is that of data suffocation. By that I mean, there is too much data available, we talk about digital being a medium that is measurable and I agree, but what has largely been missing has been using this data as the launchpad of the planning 2.0 if we may say that. Most people in the industry are still using age old methods for planning, while the massive collection of data is basically lying there begging for it to be interpreted. The big challenge here is for us to effectively utilise and channelise this data and come up with the right solution. Another major issue is that while we talk ‘multi-screen’ and ‘going mobile,’ we still are very much nascent in the space. How many players in the market are considering things like Dual Screens as an absolutely key component of their planning? Not a lot, so from the perspective of evolving forms and formats too, we have not made the strides that we should have.The most important things that we keep in mind while we buy inventory is largely divided into four broad segments: The key is obviously the client objective, the second is always the audience affinity and knowing where the target audience is, we then take a look at the past performance from campaigns and finally there is consideration for costings. Several other practises such as real time monitoring and optimisation play a key role here too. 

Q. How does programmatic buying or any other tech tool impact your job (whether it has become easier or tougher)? 

With programmatic buying, the major challenge is that the brands themselves today, have not married to the idea of programmatic buying model. It is the ‘always on’ nature of programmatic buying that perhaps is holding the evolution. And a major factor that is holding this trial back is that we are at an evolving stage and stuck somewhere in between machine-managed media and man-managed media, with there being no single window interface which would help us monitor everything and make choices. It is only when we move to a full self service models, lot of which are in work, a bit like Google's Self service or even Facebook's Self service model, would we be able to seriously consider programmatic buying as a viable consideration. 

Q. What are the main takeaways from this job? Does your experience help you plan for a performance campaign which is result/outcome oriented? If yes, could you please share a couple of instances?

Media campaigns have always been result oriented. The only thing that you could argue has changed is the spectrum of numbers. Where you may be talking about a few hundreds a couple of years ago, you are talking in millions today, so its just extrapolation in terms of numbers achieved. Everything is bigger. So the job as such of a media planner is still the same bridge between objectives and right strategy/planning/buying/optimisation and that will continue to remain as it is for a while at least. 

On the experience front, yes experience is always a valuable asset more so in media planning than in several other verticals of digital marketing. For example, for a personal electronics brand which is new in India and is largely focussing its efforts on brand awareness, brand building to clearly outlining a point of differentiation through good communication, great visuals, strong features etc to say a B2B brand which is running media in order to acquire leads for a franchisee where fee alone is well into single decimal million figures, the planning process and methodology is so diverse. This is where all your experience counts as you plan very differently based on the objective of the campaign right from acquisition to consideration to say purchase. 

Q. Are there any industry trends and technologies that you find exciting right now that might help your clients?

Some of the key trends we feel would be absolute crucial in 2015 are:   

1. Real time live agile actions,

2. ensuring you stick to your point of view based on experience of the past,

3. Walking mobile first instead of just seducing ourselves with the idea of everything mobile repeatedly, 

4. Foundations for programmatic buying and,

5. Finally marrying the offline online experience using more rich media and integrated content.

Q. What issues or challenges are your clients facing right now?

It is a classic problem of clutter or simply put, population vs pollution. There is way too much on the plate that is being served and in too many flavours, sometimes in trying to taste every possible exotic cuisine we end up losing our own identity or the major objective and that is exactly what is happening with clients as there is too much to chew upon. 

Q. Could you mention some recent campaigns that you found noteworthy? And what do you think makes them stand out?

There was a twitter media buy, we had purchased the top trend on May 16th with #MoreThanSlim. It was a planned exercise as that was the day when the Lok Sabha election results were to be announced, and we knew the entire conversation on twitter will be about margins. Since the hero product at the time for Gionee was at that point the slimmest phone in the world, it set a nice mandate where we could connect the most followed event of the country to our product for an insane level of engagement. The result was a lot of new followers on board as well as a moment of big win when Indian National Congress used the hashtag in their tweet. It was advanced planning as well as foresight that really stood out more than the brilliant result, which saw Twitter themselves create a business case study out of the campaign and publishing it.

Q. Going forward, how do you think will the relationships with publishers, brands or other players in the digital ecosystem hold sway for media buyers? 

The relationship will continue to remain the same. Yes, we will move to a more machine managed ecosystem eventually but the bridge that the media planner is between the brand and publisher will continue to exist and largely nothing will change even if we move to a fully self service platform. 

Q. Any words of advice you would like to share with your peers and the community at large?

A senior industry leader, today head of the biggest media agency said, "We are only as good as today". And I think that it is an important thought to keep in the mind as far as the community at large goes. Past accolades, glories and awards, is waste of time, live in today. We must ask ourselves 'Are we doing something new each day?'