MAM
Channel Factory onboards Alex Littlejohn as MD, APAC
Mumbai: Channel Factory, the global brand suitability and YouTube measurement programme partner, has brought on board Alex Littlejohn as managing director (MD) to spearhead its growth in the APAC region.
In his new role, Littlejohn will be responsible for growing the brand’s existing operations in Singapore and will be tasked with launching the business into the broader APAC region with local offices across SEA and Australia slated for launch in Q4 2021, said the press statement.
Littlejohn has extensive experience in scaling adtech businesses having held the position of president international for Adconion Media Group for eight years where he was responsible for growing the team from a standing start to over 250 employees across eight European and four APAC markets. Following Adconion’s acquisition by Singtel (SGX), he served at Amobee as senior vice president for APAC.
“Alex clearly brings years of incredibly valuable experience to Channel Factory and we could not be more excited to welcome him to the team,” said Channel Factory founder & CEO, Tony Chen. “His impressive record and successful wins speak for themselves and we have full confidence in him to lead our business growth across the APAC region in each local market as we increase our global footprint and push the ad industry to be more conscious while we approach a new decade of recovery and regeneration.”
Littlejohn has been recognised in the 40 most influential people under 40 years in the media and marketing twice, on two continents, and has been awarded multiple times in multiple markets for his contributions to the industry.
“I am excited to be joining Channel Factory at such a pivotal time for the business,” said Littlejohn. “Our Mission is to build a better Video ecosystem that connects creators, brands, and consumers, and as one of only seven accredited YouTube measurement partners globally, I am excited to further develop the existing Channel Factory operations in the region.”
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
