MAM
Guest column: Trends which will define 2021 for programmatic advertising
NEW DELHI: The following digital advertising trends will influence the shift to programmatic buying and help brands optimise ad spend.
Data and cookie deprecation
There has already been a lot of talk around data and how the third-party cookie deprecation is going to allow the media industry to evolve, looking into new (or old, think contextual) ways to help the brands reach out to their consumers. 2021 would be the year where marketers, publishers and adtech stakeholders will become increasingly self-reliant in establishing their own CDPs, DMPs and unique audience identifiers. We also see the emergence of mediator technologies such as data clean rooms on the back of blockchain architecture that will allow these siloed data sets to talk to each other in a privacy compliant way.
Media Commerce
E-commerce spends have been steadily increasing year-on-year and with Covid, some categories like grocery, FMCGs, apparel, health & personal Care have grown tremendously. In the next three years, the share of e-commerce is predicted to be just shy of eight per cent of total retail in India, hitting approximately $120 billion in revenue by 2024. According to the research published by Kantar on the State of E-commerce 2021, the online purchase journey can be complex and spans across multiple online and offline touch points. Thus brands need to be able to build a cohesive omnichannel strategy across all digital platforms be it search, social, email, retail or marketplaces. In addition to winning the product promotion on retailers or marketplaces’ own inventory, marketers should be looking to leverage the strong deterministic e-commerce data signals to reach their audiences across all digital platforms outside of O&O inventory. With media commerce driving awareness, consideration and final conversions brands should look for both qualitative and quantitative signals to measure effectiveness of their media investments, and not just ROAS.
Creative innovation and hyper-personalisation at scale
We’re already a mobile-first market, which is getting even bigger with better network performance on 4G and 5G. This has opened a huge opportunity to drive creative innovations across all channels – video, audio, gaming, commerce. Tech advancements and low latency mean advanced features such as AR/VR will load easily – visual search, social media lens, shoppable media, immersive gaming formats are certainly on the horizon. Ad formats such as interactive video, conversational audio and voice search ad-formats are already creating a true intent-based dialogue and engagement with consumers. Apart from the innovations-formats, data-driven creative storytelling will allow marketers to deliver personalised communication to their audiences at scale.
(The author is head of product & marketing science, Xaxis India. Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to their views.)
MUMBAI: In India’s fast-moving payments race, Visa has just swiped in a new leader. The company has named Suresh Sethi as its India country head, marking a key leadership shift as it sharpens its focus on digital payments growth in the market. Sethi steps into the role following his recent exit from Protean eGov Technologies, where he served as chief executive officer. He succeeds Sandeep Ghosh, who has moved on after more than four years at Visa to pursue an external opportunity.
The appointment comes at a time when Visa is doubling down on its expansion strategy across India and the wider region, deepening partnerships and accelerating adoption in an increasingly competitive digital payments ecosystem.
Sethi brings with him a broad, cross-market perspective shaped by decades of experience across corporate banking, retail financial services, mobile money and large-scale government technology initiatives. He began his career at Citigroup, where he spent 14 years working across India, Africa, South America and the United States, focusing on transaction banking services within the corporate bank.
His appointment signals a blend of institutional experience and market familiarity qualities that could prove critical as Visa navigates a landscape where fintech innovation, regulatory evolution and consumer adoption are all accelerating at once.
As digital payments in India continue to scale rapidly, the leadership change underscores a simple reality, in a market where every tap, scan and swipe counts, who leads the charge can matter just as much as the technology itself.
