The first day of Zee Melt 2017 kickstarted at NSCI, Worli on 31 May and was packed with a plethora of conferences by experts and veterans of the industry. Under the Osmosis Conferences, the first half comprised of a session on ‘Creativity & Effectiveness’ which was conducted by three speakers – James Hurman, Arun Pattabhiraman and Samir Singh.
James Hurman is a New Zealander who founded an innovation company Previously Unavailable after a career as a strategic planner in the advertising industry. In 2013, he was named the world’s #1 planning director in the Big Won Rankings, and has authored The Case for Creativity, a book about the link between creativity and effectiveness.
He started his session with a debate which has been going around in the advertising agencies – creativity is harmful for effectiveness. Quoting Germany’s FMCG marketing director, he said, “Creativity is irrelevant at best. Often, it is downright harmful to advertising success.” Another view however said, “Other things being equal, creativity is an advertiser’s best bet.” So the fundamental question he raised was: Does creativity work? Agencies that were sceptical of creativity are of the opinion that only creativity without planning and strategy is detrimental. Due to these contradictory schools of thought on creativity, Hurman carried out his own research of ad agencies and found that more creatively awarded ad agencies only won the effectiveness awards. He gave example of brands like Volkswagen, Addidas and Coca Cola, which had consistently used creative ad campaigns to lure consumers.
His company Previously Unavailable took up a challenge of rebuilding an almost dead beer brand, DB Export, in the country of New Zealand and they were successful. DB Export did become the most consumed beer in NZ, thanks to Previously Unavailable’s creative methods of selling it. “Creativity is not only associated with ad,” Hurman stated. “It is used in product management, strategy, customer service, sales, promotions, and everything else to do with the product.”
The next session was by InMobi, vice president and global head (marketing), Arun Pattabhiraman on ‘Mobile Video Done Right’. InMobi is a mobile advertising and discovery platform. With more media time being spent on mobile devices than desktop computers, there is a rise in the urgency of advancement in mobile video advertising and effective formats for doing that. People today are spending 90 per cent of their device time inside apps and hence, video on these devices must be re-imagined in order to capitalise on this shift in consumer behaviour. Pattabhiraman, with his deep experience in global mobile and internet business, spoke about the value that mobile video advertising can bring to marketers and media decision makers, and the increase it can lead in brand awareness as well as ad engagement and interactivity rates. He explained the four major challenges that are currently faced by mobile video advertising –
a. Mobile videos don’t load quickly enough: Mobile video ads take over five seconds to load and user attention steeply declines after the two second mark. This latency severely damages the consumer experience and contributes to user drop-off.
b. The legacy of desktop and VPAID: Mobile video advertising continues to be powered by outdated browser-based technology that is unsuited to mobile native environments.
c. Concerns with mobile video: Advertising messages load slower than the content. Hence, the consumer taps off before the ad loads. These issues with video viewability have occurred due to consumer experience not being optimised towards the native behaviour of the device.
d. Mobile video creatives aren’t mobile-optimised: Most clients do not focus on building a unique and relevant experience and are simply repurposing desktop or TV video creatives and running 30-second landscape creatives. Video ads across connected devices have to be explicitly designed, to make use of those elements of a mobile device that facilitate interaction.
He then suggested ways of doing the business right, with
1. Focus on in-app mobile video
2. Work with independent MRC accredited partners for viewability
3. Leverage mobile optimised video creatives and
4. Scale campaigns with programmatic buying.
“Doing mobile video right is a win-win situation for consumers as well as buyers,” he said, concluding his session.
Last up was a talk by Samir Singh on ‘Capturing Attention in a Mobile Video Nation’. An industry head of agency business at Google, Singh works closely with the advertising agency ecosystem to help brands leverage the full value of digital. In the India of 80s, reach was difficult but getting attention was easy. “Now, reaching the mass is easy but getting attention is almost impossible,” Singh said. He stressed on the factors – sight, sound and emotion to tell a story that grabs attention. In a nutshell, he stated that marketers should focus on watch-time to reach, capture and hold the attention of the viewers.
With their proximity to digital media and research on consumer experience, the speakers provided the latest insights and problem-solving techniques for products and brands, and left the audience deeply satisfied.