Antonio Helio Waszyk, Chairman and MD of Nestle India while presenting his keynote session on how to keep brands relevant to changing consumers, stated that for any communication strategy to be effective the three broad points are -

• It needs to be attractive and engaging
• The use of digital medium is crucial
• Has to be customised according to regional preferences

Waszyk also shared that using these key factors, Nestle India crafted a campaign for Nescafe called the Know your neighbours contest on Facebook that engaged young audience and gathered more than a million participation online.

The importance of social media is being realised by not only by FMCG brands but also luxury brands like BMW. Christian Saffer, CMO of BMW India shared how they leveraged the social media, to run contest during their X3 launch. Select 10 winners of this contest were invited for special event for test driving the newly launched vehicle.

Facebook is one of the most important platforms for us, but India has not arrived at an desirable online purchase scenario when it comes to luxury products in comparison to European countries

- Christian Saffer, CMO of BMW India

Sandeep Kaul, Head of Personal Care division of ITC, talked about how communication through contextual interpretation is what a brand needs to get noticed, accepted and maximize their impact. ITC has used social media not only in terms of engaging with consumers but also in product development.

Further to this, Ashisht Patil, the Marketing and Creative Head of Y Films ( part of YashRaj Films) while talking about youth in India, explained how the young generation have gained importance in purchase decision within a household. The main challenge with youngsters of today is to keep them engaged, and the best way to achieve this is through constant

• Innovation
• Participation
• Gratification

which should be done through effective platforms online. This according to Patil has helped their brand which is targeted specially to the youth, leverage recall. University of Freshology, another campaign targeted to the youth by Coca cola’s Sprite, also followed the innovation path and kept the brand’s core essence well integrated in all the communications.

whatever idea the brand follows what is important is how well a communication is woven within the brand’s identity

Srinivas Murthy, Director of Marketing (Flavours & Thumbs up) of Coca Cola India

How a direct marketing brand use social media platforms to both engage consumers and business consultant, this perspective was presented by Sharmili Rajput, MD of Oriflame India. Oriflame’s initiatives like Dare To Be and Make that change, have helped them not only create brand awareness but also increase their direct marketing agent base. Rajput stated that Oriflame is soon going to start using social media platforms to sell their products.

Being true to the product’s value, is another important aspect for any communication strategy. Vidyur Vyas, Marketing Director of PecpsiCO Foods presented, presented this concept and how it helped gained momentum for their new product Quaker Oats. He pointed out three perspective for any good communication strategy -

• Engage with consumer rather that telling them what to do
• Tell them full story rather than stressing on the half-truth
• Be honest rather than boast about yourself

Good Morning Heart an initiative by Quaker Oats is based on these principles. Vyas stated that, throughout the campaign they conveyed a clear message to the target group that their product alone does not ensure lot of health benefits, and a consumer needs to adopt regular exercise along with a healthy lifestyle to achieve desirable results.

To sum an effective communication strategy is all about -

• Innovation
• Engagement
• Gratification
• Being truthful

The summit saw a host of speakers from various industries like FMCG, Luxury and Film Production, where each shared their respective brand case study and what worked for their brand.

• How Neuro science is helping brands understand the consumer behaviour and help them leverage their brand presence and acceptance
• The Indian consumer’s instincts
• The changing rule of shopper marketing
• The importance of rural India as a strong emerging market
• Connecting with Indian Digital consumers
• The Innovation Imperative

The event was kick started by a Keynote by the CEO of Nielsen, David Calhoun who spoke about how developing countries are crucial markets for brands because of growing number of consumers and how developed nations are struggling to find more opportunity. He also stated that social media is an important tool for demand creation and help reach and earn consumers.

Piyush Mathur, President India Region at Nielsen

There has been an emerging trend on the usage of neurology in consumer study. It has helped marketers understand how consumers perceive a brand and what impetus is required for them to pick a brand from a retail shelf. A detailed view on the same was shared by Dr A.K. Pradeep, CEO of Neuro Focus Inc that provides neurological testing for consumer research.

The first half of the conference saw speakers like Arun Maira, Member Planning Commission and Samundra Bhattacharya, Sales Head PepsiCo who discussed about various aspects of market developments and consumer insights from the Indian perspective. It also had a panel discussion on the changing rules of shopper marketing where the comparison between modern retail and the Kirana store was discussed.

Through the course of the event the importance and relevance of embracing social media was discussed, Brad Smallwood, Global Head – Insights and Measurement at Facebook added to this by discussing how a deeper understanding through insights and measurement is also crucial to weigh how the brand is performing on such platforms and how listening to the community is important to evolve a campaign.

Brad Smallwood stated that strategies on social media should focus beyond fans as they are amongst the existing consumers, the key lies in how marketers engage them to spinoff conversation in the community about the brand. To explain this further he shared an insight on how for Obama’s page on Facebook it is important to keep his 1million plus fans engaged in order to reach the 3 million plus profiles that his fans are connected to, which is important to increase his support.

The like button is only an opportunity. Not an end.

- Brad Smallwood.

He also stated how an important tool of measurement CTR is not correlated to the brand’s engagement on a Facebook page. The drivers of brand engagement on social media are –

Farshad Family, MD Media at Nielsen, shared Nielsen’s analysis among brands in the telecom, soft drink and auto categories reveals that a higher brand-page count does not translate to a higher level of engagement. In the study, engagement was defined as how a consumer interacts on the brand page by:

• Visiting the page
• Downloading and using an app on a page and/or sharing
• Commenting and “liking” updates on a timeline

Engagement is also influential in the buying process. Of the 39 percent of consumers who consider a recommendation for a product on a social networking site when making a purchase decision, three out of four will often/sometimes purchase the products based on the review.

If brands hope to achieve active engagement with consumers as a means to drive sales, they need to converse more with consumers and build interest,

stated Farshad Family.

A Nielsen study also revealed that there are going to be more than 40million users who will access social media from mobile phones by end of next year. According to Farshad Family

Mobile use has gone well beyond phone calls and texting. As Indian consumers are willing to invest more money and time into smartphones, social networking is the focal point of smartphone usage.

Internet and 3G is amongst the top most important priority while buying a mobile phone for Indian consumers and also the desire to upgrade their handset while buying a new phone is more amongst them.

This was followed by a panel discussion where it was discussed that Social Media is about co-creation. The evolution and increased usage of mobile smartphone’s only proves how long and thriving this journey is going to be.

The panellist from L to R Farshad Family (moderator); Anupama Ahluwalia, CMO at Coca Cola India; Vikram Sakhuja, CEO at GroupM; Arpita Menon, Head of Media Planning at Star TV; Sahana Sarma, Partner at McKinsey & Company and Brad Smallwood, Head Insights & Measurement at Facebook

The last panel of the day was on Winning – What will take in tomorrow’s India, which had diverse panellist with FMCG repsentatives, Saugata Gupta, CEO Consumer Products at Marico and Prakash Iyer, MD at Kimberly Clark Lever on one side and Kirthiga Reddy, Head at Facebook India and Piyush Mathur on the other.This was moderated by Adrian Terron, VP Marketing and Communications at Nielsen India. They spoke about  emerging trends ranging from mobile technology to rural markets. Kirthiga Reddy, mentioned that rural India is equally important for Facebook and the the growth of its usage lies within the integration of social networks with mobile phones. Samipendra Chaudhury, VP Finance at Nielson India addressed the closing remarks and summed up the event.

Day 1 featured a session by Mahesh Murthy, Founder, Pinstorm and Managing Partner, Seedfund who delivered a talk on ‘How the rules of brand engagement have changed in the new online and offline world?’

Some of the key marketing trends that Mahesh spoke about included 

1. Digital media is no longer a niche. At 100 million in India, internet users cross the television and satellite users by a long mark.
2. The reach of social media platforms like Google (100 million), YouTube(31 million) and Yahoo (28 million) is higher than the reach of the television properties like IPL (6 million) and Star Plus (5 million).
3. Similarly, the rise in mobile users is much more than the reach of television users.
4. Not all of digital media is growing equally. Newer social media platforms like Blogspot, Youtube and Facebook are growing at a faster rate in terms of unique visitors per day, when compared to the traditional media platforms like Yahoo and Rediff.
5. The development in size, spread and ubiquity of social networks must be noted in order to capitalize on the same.
6. The true change is in consumer behaviour,which is deeper. A Nielsen study on ‘who do consumers trust?’ shows that recommendations by friends and then recommendations by strangers influence decision making. This makes Facebook and Twitter important platforms to reach the consumers and influence the decision making process.
7. Social media can enable brands to reach the consumer directly by creating a medium of engagement on social networking sites rather than reaching the consumers via a mainstream medium.
8. It pays more to invest in unpaid media rather than paid media because of its the reach and spread.
9. The focus of brands should shift to creative budget from media budget.
10. Since traditional media is vacating editorial to engage in marketing and advertising, brands can use this as an opportunity to create unbiased editorials on social media and engage the customers.
11. The success of social media lies not just in the number of fans, but also performance metrics and engagement levels.
12. Marketing must be treated as a 24/7 job since the customers engage with the brand at all times regardless of time of the day or day of the week.
13. It is important to break the walls among different categories like marketing, consumer service, sales and brand management and bring them together into one cycle. The challenge lies into engaging with all aspects of the brand in real time.
14. The era of the digital specialist is gone and brands now need to be much more agile and technologically adept in order to survive.

Here is a quick video from his session at the conference.

Venue: Jacob Javits Convention Center, New York, USA

Date: May 25-26, 2011

BlogWorld & New Media Expo focuses on content creation, curation and distribution to reach a large audience and also how one can use content well to monetize.

This is a paid event.

There has been one political figure in India, often referred to as the Twitter Minister, who through his early adoption of social media has enabled it become mainstream. Shashi Tharoor.

Member of Parliament, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala and with over 9 lac followers on Twitter, among the most popular public figures in India, Shashi Tharoor was in New Delhi last week to speak about ‘The Reach & Impact of Social Media’. He spoke about the political uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, about growing interest of politicians such as Mamta Banerjee in social media, about Sachin Tendulkar surpassing him in terms of followers on Twitter (“records are for Sachin”, he quipped) and of interesting ways of using Twitter adopted by some of the political adversaries who actually dictate their Tweets.

We took a couple of videos on the go. We will be uploading more soon.

The audience reactions were fairly varied – some found the data points to be insightful and others felt it was somewhat a sales spiel for Google.  We recorded some on-the-go videos of his keynote. Do share with us your thoughts and learnings from this.

The Day 1 was a packed affair with parallel tracks, sponsored workshops, large exhibition area all providing great opportunities for both learning and networking. Like one gets to see ladies flaunt their Gucci bags at a fashion week, the event had iPads, iPods, flip cameras galore. We took some quick on the go videos at the sessions which we have shared in this post.

Elisa Steele, Executive VP & CMO, Yahoo! spoke on the theme, “The Future of Digital Marketing: Engaging Consumers Like Never Before”

Some of the panel sessions saw some heated discussions and some incisive questions from the participants. Here’s a look at the panel sessions on agency transitions and data & metrics.

Agency Transitions

Panel Session – Agency Remuneration Models: What is the right mix?
Moderator – Manish Vij, Founder, Vun Network

Panelists

• Vikram Sakhuja, CEO, Southeast Asia, Group M
• Sameer Suneja, MD, Perfetti Van Melle India
• Anjali Hegde, CEO, Interactive Universal

Data & Metrics

Panel Session – Digital Acquisition and Optimisation
Moderator – R Sundar, CEO, Times Business Solutions Limited

Panelists

• Mahesh Murthy – Founder, Pinstorm and Managing Partner, Seedfund
• Eric Gerritsen, VP Sales and Business Development, Never Blue
• Ratish Nair, Co-Founder, Ad-Magnet
• Dhruv Shringi, CEO & Co-Founder, Yatra Online Pvt Ltd.

A special segment called ‘Marketing Masters’ featured sessions by marketers on actionable trends, stats & case studies presentations.

Here is a video from the presentation by Christopher Miglino, Co-Founder and CEO Social Reality, a provider of social media and cause marketing solutions to brands.

We will be sharing more content, stats, videos from ad:tech over coming few days. Stay posted.

Venue: Grand Hyatt Mumbai, Santacruz (East)

Date: June 1-2, 2011

Innotribe Mumbai will examine the dynamics between banked and unbanked communities. Participants to range from global banks, carriers and mobile device vendors, platform and service providers to local and international entrepreneurs. Also part of the agenda is the mobile payments business and the challenges faced by mobile financial services.

This is a paid event.