Good Ads Matter continued with its first season of round tables in December. The marketer round table discussed the significance of ‘good ads’ in marketing and its impact on business.
This panel comprised Alok Mohanan, senior vice president - brand marketing, Dream11; Amit Doshi, CMO, Britannia; Mayur Hola, brand head, Swiggy; Shagun Seda, senior vice president, head - brand and creative marketing, Viacom18; Smita Salgaonkar, principal architect – martech, Google; Sriram G, head - strategy, production, operations, offline and website sales, The Whole Truth Foods. This panel was moderated by PG Aditiya, co-founder and chief creative officer, Talented.
While the full round tables will be revealed in January, as print partners, Manifest offers its readers a sneak peek into the panels.
Doshi: Good ads matter because salesmen, or people who sell the products and services that the company makes cannot be everywhere. And that’s fundamentally the job of advertising, to provide that air cover and be where your salesperson cannot be. A good ad is like that invisible salesperson who has got to generate more revenue. And, there were always way many more bad ads at any point in time than there were good ads. I would say it’s a slow single-digit percentage of ads that are truly breakthrough or above mediocre. When you combine that with the lack of attention today that exists because of the world that we live in, it’s even more important that we turn in more good ads than bad ads.
Hola: When I joined Swiggy I was told that my single-minded goal here is that whatever we spend, it’s impact should be ‘disproportionate’. It’s a no-brainer then that whatever one creates thereafter has to be great, and even good won’t be good enough. One just has to be great today if you want to cut through everything that’s happening. One of our many competitors spends twice of what we do in one of the categories we operate in. So, the only way for us to even get a little mention is by doing some good work at the very least.
Mohanan: Everything good matters, right? Otherwise, what are we doing this work for? Why would any consumer take anything bad? So also, those who are looking to get an advertising service would want a good ad. We need to look at it from the short-term versus long-term lens. In our ads, especially on the large screen, we don’t say anything about the product. But what we have delivered is something distinct, and we have been able to build connections to our product consistently. We are delivering that through the stories of cricket or cricketers. We don’t have our brand logo coming in. Britannia has done this wonderfully well for many decades. If you do take a long-term view, things will fall into place in my opinion.
Salgaonkar: The constant pursuit in advertising has been to create personalised, good ads that make an emotional connect. Given the market that we operate in, we always operate by cost. So, somewhere we are trying to constantly optimise and modulate. At some point, there used to be a lot of emphasis on the quality of the idea, but now we are also trying to balance it with the cost at which it can be delivered. It is no longer a director-led idea, one is also trying to do a lot of stakeholder management while trying to deliver an idea.
Seda: I don’t think that the relevance of ads or ideas has gone away. It still does matter quite a lot, and is the only way businesses can survive. No matter what the world says about data and machines taking over, advertising is about emotions and storytelling.
Sriram G: At a macro level marketing is probably the largest social experiment in the whole world. Trillions of dollars are being funded to drive behaviour change of people one has never met. There is a responsibility that when so much resources and time is going into something, one has to make it matter. It has to be made in a way that it’s effective, delivers on its objectives, and at the same time, it’s entertaining and informative, preferably, but at least one of them for the viewer as well. So from that lens, I think it’s a worthy goal to strive to put out good ads because way too much is going into it for it to be half-hearted.
This story first appeared in the January issue of Manifest. Get your copy here.
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