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Madison Media Group elevates Vinay Hegde as chief buying officer
MUMBAI: Madison Media has announced the promotion of Vinay Hegde as chief buying officer. He will report to Amol Dighe, CEO, Madison Media Ultra and head of investments. Madison Media’s buying teams across offices will now report to Hegde. Hegde takes over from Neelkamal Sharma, who has decided to pursue opportunities outside Madison Media.
Hegde has been with Madison Media for three years as senior VP buying and is a part of Madison’s central buying team since 2016, and worked across agency’s clients. Hegde has over 25 years of experience, having worked at Mindshare Fulcrum for over 10 years, where he handled buying for the Unilever business. He has also worked with Disney as director, revenue strategy, in addition to having worked at Starcom, HTA and Percept.
Madison Media & OOH Group CEO Vikram Sakhuja says, “I am delighted to have Vinay head our buying. He brings analytic and strategic strength to our buying function, and is ideally suited to discover new buying and trading models in this highly dynamic media environment. I would also like to thank Neel for his contribution to Madison over the years.”
Commenting on this development, Dighe says, "I am confident that Vinay will enhance and strengthen Madison’s buying and deliver more value to clients through his strong negotiation skills and market Madison Media Group is a part of Madison World which also has specialist units in advertising, business analytics, out-of-home, PR, mobile, retail, sports and entertainment; employing over 1,000 communication professionals across India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Bangladesh. He has an excellent rapport with Media Partners and his understanding of the Indian television environment is second to none. Always goes for a win-win.”
Madison Media has had a great run this awards season having won, Marketing Team of the Year for Asian Paints, at Indian Marketing Awards; Agency of the Year at Digies Digital Awards; Brand of the Year for Viacom 18 at DMA Echo Asia Awards; Mobile Agency of the Year at IDMA Digital Awards; in addition to winning over 150 awards since January 2019.
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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.
