MAM
Himanshu Bajaj appointed as BYJU’S Learning Centre business head
Mumbai: Ed-tech company BYJU’S on Thursday announced the appointment of Himanshu Bajaj as head of business to lead its BYJU’S Learning Centre.
BYJU’S Learning Centre offers students a hybrid model of learning by combining the best of offline and online learning methodologies.
In his role, Bajaj will be responsible for development and expansion of BYJU’S Learning Centre, along with providing strategic business growth and thought leadership direction for the brand and the business. He will report directly to BYJU’S chief operating officer Mrinal Mohit.
BYJU’S chief people officer Pravin Prakash said, “With Himanshu’s extensive years of diverse experience in front-ending business for various corporates, he will help scale and add value to the offerings of BYJU’S Learning Centre. We are pleased to welcome him on board and look forward to working with him to strengthen our business further and support him in achieving the goals.”
With over 18 years of consulting and industry experience working with the both public and private sectors, Himanshu has worked for leading local and global transformation programs for consumer goods and retail clients across Asia, Europe, and Africa. He has also led projects in sales and marketing, real estate, chemicals, energy, and logistics. His experience includes managing global projects as well as country-specific projects across India, Paris, UK, the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Dubai, South Africa.
Before joining BYJU’S, Bajaj worked with Kearney and led its consumer and retail practice across Asia Pacific. He has also worked with Fedex in Singapore and Hong Kong and TSMG in Mumbai.
Commenting on his appointment, Himanshu Bajaj said, “I am delighted to be associated with BYJU’S first of its platform that offers a hybrid model of learning. Since its inception, BYJU’S has led the way forward with its transformative power of education through an innovative online learning model. I am looking forward to furthering the value and developing the business across geographies – displaying a promising future in revamping the face of education for students.”
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.
