Let us talk about Digital Disruption
Umang Bedi, Managing Director, South Asia Adobe, in his opening remarks said that
Adobe’s focus, as a company is now on changing the world through digital experiences," Bedi
asked the delegates to ponder over "the four Ms" viz. "Make,
manage, measure and monetise," which are the four crucial stages in the
lifecycle of online content.
Rama
Bijapurkar, an ace management consultant, talked about what the words 'digital marketing' mean
to her. "I'm here to demolish all the things I don't understand"
about this topic, she began, referring to all the jargon that gets tossed about
whenever the realm of digital is discussed.
"Strategy,
segmentation, digital, disruption" are words that people throw around a
lot these days, she pointed out.
Even so, she
conceded that today, there's no real distinction between 'marketing' and
'digital marketing', as all marketing has a strong digital element. "It's
just like how there's no difference between marketing' and 'youth marketing' in
a young country like India," Bijapurkar explained.
To her, as far as
digital marketing goes, the most important thing is "adding value to the
customer" - of course, value as the customer perceives it - and
simultaneously "extracting value from the customer."
Going on to speak
about the importance of the mobile platform, she said, "The cell phone is
the central nervous system of India."
Bijapurkar
concluded, "Today, digital is mainstream. In most industries, the
'plumbing' of business has become digital. Now how marketers use the analytics
and tools they have at their disposal, depends on their imagination. Today, we
can mine for patterns... so let's harvest these capabilities and not get bogged
down by jargon."
Suresh Vittal Kotha of Adobe spoke about how
the digital advent has caused "the power to shift from the hands of the
marketer to the consumer" given the fact that the digital space is an open
platform on which one can talk freely about any product and one's experience
with that product.
He also talked
about the changing role of the CMO in the today’s environment.
He shared some interesting figures:
Today, 64 per cent of all marketers expect their
roles to change over the next 12 months.
40 per cent of all marketers want to re-invent their respective roles.
But only 14 per cent know how to
do so.
"Being a
marketer is hard in today's digital era; one has to tackle all the real-time
opportunities available," he emphathised with the CMO community at large.
Kotha cautioned,
"Looking at the customer through a 'lens of silos' will not work, going
forward," referring to the separate TV lens, web lens, in-store lens,
mobile lens, etc. that marketers tend to use to analyse their customers at
various media touch-points. Instead, he recommends perceptually fusing all
these media channels together and gaining a more holistic view of the customer
pool. Of course, eventually, the aim, according to him, is to personalise
content. "We're looking at building a 'segment of one'," he said,
referring to one single target individual and marketing to her, based on her
likes/dislikes, wants and needs.
Siva Ganeshanandan,
who heads company’s South East Asia operations, spoke about the endless opportunities on the
mobile platform to the marketers.
"We need to bring mobile apps under the control of the marketer," he
said, speaking about tools like "geo-targeting" and
"geo-fencing." He cited something that well known American consumer
electronics brand , Best Buy did. The company leveraged information about the way
in which people use its app, to predict their subsequent behavior. For
instance, the team found that 30 per cent of those who used the app to get
information about the store's locations actually went in and made an in-store
purchase sometime over the next 14 days.
Umakant Sista of
Adobe tried to dymstyfy big data.
"Broadly, there are three definitions of big data - they pertain to volume,
variety and velocity," he said, referring to the gigantic number
of data points available to marketers today which may be called as volume
, in both structured and unstructured form
that is called variety, including the various
real-time pieces of information that one can access today i.e. velocity.
He quoted SanDisk, flash memory storage solutions
and software manufacturer, on the subject: "The volume of business data is
expected to double every 1.2 years." Referring to Gartner's Hype Cycle,
Sista said, "Overall, 2013 was a big year for big data; there was a lot of
hype around it. But 2014 is a year of disenchantment."
The ultimate goal
of big data, of course, is to tap insights. In this regard, he said,
"Though finding an insight from a pool of big data is akin to looking for
a needle in a haystack, data scientists are actually looking to add more hay to
the stack."
"There's more to digital than social and
mobile : The most memorable statements came from the next speaker, Mark Henley:
"The future is going to be digital", "Don't be misled into
thinking your digital experiences are going to be just about social and mobile;
there's a lot more to it than those two" and "Your customers drive
your organisation's behaviour."
Anurag Goel spoke
about the importance of "value management" at the organisation level
and "making business cases that are CFO-ready.""A startling 73
per cent of all organisations," he shared, "don't measure
value."
Not surprising, due
to these new initiatives Adobe's partner business has grown by 92 per cent, in
the first half (H1) of 2014, as compared to last year . It was Adobe's Damon
Scarr, director of partner sales, APAC digital marketing, who shared that it
could be possible due to alignment plan
between Adobe and its partners. doing so
market by market, having QBRs or quarterly business reviews, bolstering the
company's global partner enablement plan with regional support, bridging the
gap between the company's media partners and its marketing partners, and
lastly, expanding the company's partner ecosystem within the public sector.
When asked ‘What
next for Adobe?
"Focus is on
entering new markets," Scarr said.
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