Mobile has become the first choice of media for most of the advertisers – Amit Duggal

Amit Duggal is a proficient and award winning digital marketer with over 15 years of experience across global organisations, having worked in numerous start-ups and some of world’s top agencies including Travelguru, Mindshare and Madison etc. Amit is currently working with the Omnicom Group, India as Vice President – Digital Planning,

Amit`s experience cuts across diverse categories such as telecom, automobile, mobile, technology, FMCG, consumer durables, politics etc. and has ledmultiple teams to strategically plan and execute award winning campaigns.

In a candid chat with IDR team, he spoke about his expectations from the new age planners, his favourite digital campaign, his favourite digital destinations and more.

Little tough questions to start with, What are your expectations from the new age media planners?

First of all, I would like to say there should not be any difference between new age media planners and conventional media planners. The one quality I look for before hiring is the intent and capability to stay abreast with trends. Someone who is a keen learner will always succeed in the digital medium. I believe that it is imperative to be a story teller, most of the media planners have a great skill to read data but if they can create a story out of it, it becomes a lethal combination. The person who can spin a story from numbers will always find a bright future in the media industry.

How do you see Mobile changing the way digital advertising is done in India

Mobile has become the first choice of media for most of the advertisers. While for the last couple of years, we have been hearing that this year will be the year for mobile but actually last year post Reliance Jio was introduced, we have actually seen the inflexion point in terms of time spent and new users coming from mobile. The other important aspect is that consumers have plethora choices to consume the kind of content they enjoy on mobile screens through OTT’s (Prime, Hotstar, Netflix, TVF, Voot, etc). so much so that all the other screens are becoming redundant.  Mobile has become an integral part of any TG. Beyond social media which has 90% of traffic coming from mobile, Gaming is a critical genre when we look at mothers. Even platforms like parenting sites (Parentune, Mycity4kids) which are huge in metros on mobile garner decent traction.

Even published data supports this. As per comScore global mobile report 2017-

-75% of digital minutes are happening on mobile devices.
– 88% of time spent on mobile are on apps
– 70% of the internet base is mobile only in India.
– 25-44 years have little higher skew towards mobile when younger audience is compared with older audiences
– 76% of the audience on mobile are males
– Categories like IM, Incentives, Weather, Job search, Food contributes to over 60% of mobile only usage

3 trends in Mobile Advertising Industry that you think will change the way for future

I personally feel that we are moving towards an artificial world which is powered by machine learning. Following are few trends to watch out for:-

– Voice Assistant
– Augmented Reality
– Radio frequency connectivity

I just hope we won’t have a situation like Skynet!

Video Content and Native Content are the 2 buzzwords, are you seeing lot of clients now demanding for these ideas from knowledge resources like yourself

Yes! Brands are exploring options across screens to get the right content which resonates with the brand philosophy.  Most of the advertisers know that consumers are spending majority of their time on mobile, Video and native plays an important medium to disseminate information. It’s immersive within content and leads to far better brand building, which has long-term implication on positioning.

After Facebook and Google, what are the next top 5 destinations that you would like the brands that you represent are on?

Personally, we don’t follow any order for any platform. Our approach is very simple, we look at platforms where we find our audiences as per the brand requirement irrespective if it is Social media, OTT, News, and Business etc.

We keep it very simple:-

1)        Look for audience and their preferred media habits

2)        Be screen / platform agnostic

What are the digital advertising trends you forecast for the festive season

A lot of first time users are expected to come online during this festive season thanks to heavy advertising and promotion by E-Com players. Increased comfort with mobile transactions, fueled by mobile wallets/UPI penetration, can unlock growth for multiple categories & platforms.

It will be a good opportunity for brands to leverage them on Social media & mobile space

 All time Favourite campaign. Why?

Thanda matlab Coca-Cola. A simple word like Thanda which was used by most of the people around country for anything cold was used in a way that it became synonym to Coca-Cola.  The word,”Thanda” had so much power to connect with masses. It still remains one of my favorite campaigns.