MAM
Planning & buying in India’s digital video landscape: A primer
MUMBAI: Even as ‘digital marketing’, ‘digital ad spends’, ‘mobile advertising’ and ‘online videos’ become part of the colloquial Indian advertising lingo, planning and buying digital media is a world removed from the television-driven number-crunching that account managers at the leading media agencies were so far used to.
While multiple data points have made the business more technical, at the same time, it’s ironically way more dependent on specialists, who often go by the fabled ‘instincts’ formula to filter out the information overload.
Lack of standard metrics of measurement often requires one to look at the media mix as a whole integrated entity and try different permutations and combinations to get the desired reach, efficiency or brand outcome. Working in silos is no longer an option. There is a reason why the profile of the digital media planner (in some cases she is called the video planner) is emerging as one of the most coveted jobs in M&E industry across the globe.
As the industry undergoes a digital cataclysm in the various forms of video content online, there is a need to simplify it for the layman so that he or she at least gets a basic insight into the ways of planning and buying digital media. So here’s the primer:
From efficiency to effectiveness:
More often than not brands, which are slowly adapting to digital marketing, go with the quick, and ‘cost-effective’ plans’, to minimize their risks, using digital media as an add-on to their larger television strategy. The challenge current digital planners are unanimously facing is to convince these clients to move from efficiency-centric planning to ‘effective’ plans that will bring them a brand outcome.
To start with, digital planning can be approached from two angles — one is based on efficiency, and the other is based on effectiveness that depends on the end goal.
Digital planning keeping ‘efficiency’ in mind comes when a brand wants to reach a certain desired target audience quickly and cost effectively. It allows incremental reach or incremental GRPs.
“Let’s say your TV planning gives you 70 percent reach. You can plan so that your digital strategy can add five more points to that; that planning has been done keeping efficiency in mind,” Maxus India Digital- west general manager Sairam Ranganathan gives an example.
On the flip-side, effectiveness-based digital plan directly impacts a brand’s awareness, consumer’s purchase intent, etc. “While the first gives you a media output the latter gives you a band outcome,” Ranganathan adds.
But the transition isn’t far off.
“Though it finally comes down to what the objective of the campaign is, we planners can no longer afford to see it(digital plan) as a sidekick to traditional media, but review it as they may very well overlook an existing audience if it is a right fit,” shares Havas Media Group, India and South Asia CEO Anita Nayyar.
Further, it is seen on multiple occasions, that when TV and digital are intertwined – that’s when a planner hits the sweet spot of the campaign.
Measurement through different agency lenses:
Fundamentally planning and buying media on digital platforms follows the same core principles of establishing the media objective, setting the strategy, implementation, evaluation and follow-up.
It starts with understanding the consumer and how he or she uses the various digital tools at their disposal. Based on which the creative format is singled out and possible targeting options are explored to bring the communication and the consumer together.
It requires slicing and dicing of data gathered through several propriety tools that are at the planner’s disposal. Thus measurement, like every other media, plays a key role in a digital media plan as well. This is where digital planning deviates from its traditional counterpart; especially when ‘videos’ is the buzz word.
“When it comes to digital videos, there is no single source data available to us planners,” says Ranganathan. “Comscore does share some data of measuring digital reach but it only calculates desktop viewership, and doesn’t include mobile, when most OTT players see higher play time on smartphones and other devices.”
“Since there are no uniform measurement metrics across the industry, and multi-fold data points to consider while planning, each major agency has its own set of propriety tools that helps it slice and the dice data,” shares Ranganathan.
From a number perspective, planners have the figures that the various publishers such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and the OTT players share, which is then coupled with the planners’ own insight based on data gathered overtime.
“Planners at Havas typically benchmark video properties using a mix of tools and empirical data that they have accumulated over the years. These are then superimposed on current market trends to derive estimates of performance vis-à-vis cost thus arriving at optimal plans.
Today, increasingly we are planning and implementing an audiovisual plan rather than a TV plan, especially in case of TVC asset marketing. Here, traditional metrics of TV buying also play a major role – as Havas Media uses proprietary tools like ‘Smart Planner’, combining metrics of a TV plan and the metrics of online video (OLV),” explains Anita Nayyar.
Similarly Maxus India has communication planning tool called Resolve that is available to its clients, while Dentsu Aegis Network, which is the parent company of Isobar India uses in-house propreity tool Consumer Connection System (CCS) for its clients.
Apart from this, Facebook Insights, comScore, Google Analytics, Google Trends, TGI survey data from Kantar Media are some of the other universally available tools that the planners look into.
To each is its own: OTT ad rates
Just like measurement is up to each planner’s own interpretation, when it comes to solely digital videos, the buying metrics set by each player differs as well.
“Different OTT players have different models or may even have a mix of different rates as per buy type – for example – YouTube offers videos at either CPCV (Cost Per Completed View) which are executed on a bidding model or pre-rolls which are sold on CPM. Video rates also depend upon the kind of content/ duration/ targeting for the video – these factors have a huge impact on pricing. It’s not a case of one-size fits all – every plan/property has a different rate (as it could be served via a bid model). Price ranges of typical video ads can range from Rs 2 to Rs 5 ± 25% for a CPCV,” shares Nayyar.
While Facebook offers videos on CPV (Cost Per View) or CPE (Cost Per Engagement), players like Vdopia, etc. offer videos at CPCV or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) or Fixed Buy (roadblock units, etc.).
Since ‘prime time’ doesn’t exist as a concept in the world of digital videos, premium rates are dependent how ‘hot’ the IP is and how sharp targeting the brands can do through it.
“In digital the rate increases with more targeting parameters. Hypothetically speaking, if a brand wants to reach a TG of 15 + with no cap on the upper limit, for per thousand such people, may earn the player Rs 100. But if a brand wants to reach out to an audience between the age of 15 to 20 years of age who reside in Mumbai city only, the sharper targeting reduces the audience inventory, and therefore increases the price. Simple demand supply ratio if you look at it,” explains Ranganathan.
Currently, most OTT players sell their ad inventories in packages to sponsors; they don’t sell individual ad spots. “Once the packages are sold for a fixed amount of sponsorship amount that guarantees a certain inventory of views, shares, etc; the remnant inventory (if any) can be made into packages of 10 to 20 spots and sold to advertisers,” points out Isobar India vice president Gopa Kumar.
Having a head start over the rest of players, Hotstar clearly commands premium rates among all the OTT players at the moment, although the ad rates are subjected to different packages to different brands.
“While everyone else is catching up to it, since Star India has invested so much into its OTT player, it clearly is the industry leader and therefore commands premium rates,” shared a well known digital planner under promise of anonymity.
“During IPL season 9, Hotstar charged Rs 5 crore for associate sponsorship, which went up to Rs 8 to Rs 12 crore for their title sponsorship,” guesstimated the planner, adding that the rates are almost catching up with television sponsorship rates.
Buying spots on Youtube and Facebook is a different ball game altogether that mustn’t be compared to the other OTT players in the market. The social media giants allow a biddable form of spot sale and one can buy the spots in real time as well. “This pure demand supply game somewhat democratizes the process for advertisers and gives them the flexibility to work with a limited budget or go bullish on a lucrative ad spot that would yield it good reach. While CPM based sales are available on YouTube to clients buying bulk in a package, most of Facebook video inventory is sold through auctions,” shares Kumar.
Until all the players meet at a level playing field in terms of reach and content, and a uniform measurement standard is introduced in the OTT world, is it unfair for brands to comply with prices set by individual players based on their internal measurement?
“It isn’t unfair as brands have a choice to not advertise on OTT if they don’t buy the figures provided by the publishers/ players. Digital isn’t limited to OTT; it has 20 to 30 different touch points through which consumers can be reached. In fact OTTs are only a section of it,” Ranganathan adds.
Do advertisers really understand digital videos?
Advertising on TV has a history checkered with benchmarks that the brands have witnessed. The challenge with digital media is that these signposts are yet to be set. Therefore to expect clients to completely get the nuances of digital planning is unfair.
To put matters into perspective, out of Rs 100 spent on advertising in India, only Rs 10 to Rs 14 (keeping several leading industry reports in mind ) is going in digital ad spends, which includes its multiple avenues such as SEO marketing and display ads. Digital video is a small part of the latter. Thus, brands may not be too vested in the medium yet.
Having said that planners admit that in the last couple of years, brands have shown more confidence in digital video ads. They no longer ask ‘why digital’ but ‘what in digital.’ Videos are a better part of this ‘what.’
And that is indeed good news for the digital players wanting brands to buy in to their sales inventories.
MAM
Never put a ceiling on yourself: Edstead CBO Charu Budhiraja’s bold advice to the next generation of women
Edstead’s CBO on trading the hard sell for human truth, and why ‘let the work do the talking’ is more than just a mantra
MUMBAI: There is a particular kind of storytelling that does not announce itself. It does not interrupt your evening with a jingle, or flash a logo at you every thirty seconds. It simply pulls you in, holds you there, and leaves you thinking long after the screen goes dark. Charu Budhiraja has spent over two decades figuring out how to make that happen, and she will tell you, with the ease of someone who has learned this the hard way, that the secret is disarmingly simple: be real.
As chief business officer at Edstead, a Mumbai-based purpose-first content studio, Budhiraja sits at the intersection of creative instinct and commercial strategy. It is a position she has built towards across a career that winds through Ogilvy, Endemol, and Warner Bros. Discovery, and one that has seen her make films for Unilever and PepsiCo, shepherd long-form documentary partnerships, and watch the entire language of branded content change around her. She has sat in rooms where the brief was to sell, and in rooms where the brief was to mean something. Her life’s work, in a sense, has been making the case that those two rooms are the same room.
Ask Budhiraja what two decades in the industry have actually taught her, and she does not reach for the expected answer about strategy or scale. She reaches for empathy. “Over the last two decades, one thing I’ve learnt clearly is that storytelling works best when it connects with real human insights,” she says. “As a woman leader, I believe empathy naturally becomes a stronger part of the process. It helps you listen more carefully to people, experiences, and emotions behind a story.” This, she argues, is not a personality trait dressed up as a professional skill. It is a craft advantage, one that shapes how you enter a story, what you choose to stay with, and how you decide what a brand should and should not say.
That perspective, she says, is what allows a narrative to feel both authentic and commercially purposeful at once. “When storytelling balances both human insight and brand intent, that’s when it truly resonates.” The balance sounds elegant in theory. Getting there, as anyone who has ever tried to align a marketing department with a documentary filmmaker will know, is rather less tidy in practice. But Budhiraja makes it sound like something you can actually plan for, which is perhaps the most useful thing about the way she thinks.
She sees this same quality reflected in how women leaders more broadly approach the documentary space. There is, she observes, a natural inclination among them to look beyond the surface of a story and into its emotional and social architecture. “This lens helps brands tell stories that are not only strategically relevant but also authentic and impactful,” she explains. “When purpose-led storytelling is rooted in real experiences and voices, the narrative aligns more organically with a brand’s larger values and purpose.” It is not that men cannot do this, she is too careful a thinker to make that argument. It is that women in leadership have often had more practice doing it, and that the results tend to show.
The story of how branded content got to where it is today is one Budhiraja has watched from the inside, and in some stretches helped to write. The early days of the format were campaign-driven and product-led. Films for brands like Unilever and PepsiCo were, by her own account, “creatively exciting” but built around a marketing message and measured in short cycles. The audience, in that model, was a target. The story was a vehicle. The logo was the destination.
That model has not aged well. “Audiences are far more aware and selective about what they watch,” Budhiraja says plainly. “They engage with content that feels meaningful rather than promotional.” The shift is not simply aesthetic. It reflects a deeper change in the relationship between audiences and the media they consume, one accelerated by streaming, by social platforms, and by a general collapse of patience for anything that feels like it is wasting your time. Brands that have not adapted to this are finding out the hard way that money spent on content people skip is not really money spent at all.
What has replaced the old model, at least in the work Edstead does, is something considerably more ambitious. “Research-led, purpose-driven documentaries and series allow brands to participate in larger conversations and tell stories that feel authentic, relevant, and culturally grounded,” Budhiraja explains. The word ‘participate’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Not dominate. Not sponsor. Participate. It implies a certain humility about where the brand sits in the story, and a willingness to let the story be bigger than the brand. That is, it turns out, exactly the point.
“It’s less about advertising and more about creating stories people genuinely want to engage with.”
At Edstead, the philosophy takes shape as a very specific way of working. Partnerships are built not around visibility or reach, but around shared purpose, and the process begins not with a client brief but with culture itself. “The process begins with identifying stories that already exist within culture and society, and then collaborating with brands whose values naturally align with those narratives,” Budhiraja explains. The idea is that a brand should never feel grafted onto a story. It should feel like it was always part of the landscape the story is set in.
Long-form storytelling is central to this. A documentary or a branded series gives a brand the room to breathe inside a narrative, to become part of it rather than an interruption of it. “We rely heavily on research and long-form storytelling formats, which allow brands to integrate into the narrative more organically rather than feeling like an add-on,” she says. “When a partnership is genuinely aligned with the story, it creates a far deeper connection with audiences while delivering meaningful value for the brand.”
Edstead’s role in all of this, as Budhiraja frames it, is that of a bridge. On one side sits brand intent, which arrives with commercial objectives, a communications strategy, and a board that wants to see results. On the other sits authentic storytelling, which arrives with a subject, a point of view, and an audience that can smell inauthenticity from the other side of a streaming platform. Bringing those two sides together without either losing its integrity is the studio’s founding proposition. “In many ways, our role is to bridge that gap between brand intent and authentic storytelling, ensuring that the narrative remains culturally relevant and impactful,” she says.
Making meaningful content is, of course, only half the challenge. The other half is making sure it actually reaches people. Edstead approaches this by designing content to travel from the outset, building stories that can move across platforms and formats and find different kinds of audiences along the way. “The idea is to create stories that are culturally relevant and emotionally engaging, so audiences feel invested in them,” Budhiraja says. “When a story connects on that level, it naturally sparks conversation.” That conversation is ultimately what converts emotional engagement into brand value. It cannot be bought. It can only be earned by getting the story right in the first place.
On the question of what authentic narrative does for a brand, Budhiraja is at her most direct, and her answer cuts through a good deal of industry noise in a single breath. Years of watching what sticks and what does not have given her a clear view on the matter, and it has very little to do with production values or the size of the media buy behind a campaign. “I can tell you with certainty that the content that stayed with people was never about the biggest budget or the most perfect execution. It was about truth,” she says. “When a brand has the courage to step back and let an authentic story lead, audiences feel it immediately. That shift from watching to feeling is what no media plan can engineer. It has to be earned. And in my experience, the only way to earn it is to be real.”
“That shift from watching to feeling is what no media plan can engineer. It has to be earned.”
Looking ahead, Budhiraja sees the trajectory of branded storytelling continuing to move away from the world of campaigns and into the world of culture. The most impactful branded content, she argues, is already indistinguishable from meaningful storytelling, and the gap between the two will only narrow further. “Branded storytelling today is moving beyond campaigns and entering the realm of culture,” she says. “The most impactful branded content doesn’t feel like marketing at all, it feels like meaningful storytelling.”
The implication for marketers is significant. The skills that built careers in traditional advertising are not the same skills that will build the next generation of brand stories. Budhiraja is direct about this shift. “Going forward, marketers will need to think more like creators and storytellers rather than traditional advertisers,” she says. “Purpose-led narratives, creative collaborations, and platform-native content will shape the future, especially as audiences expect more personalised and culturally relevant stories.” The industry, she suggests, is not quite there yet. But it is moving, and the direction is clear.
Budhiraja’s own journey through this industry has not been without friction. Across media networks, agencies, and now a purpose-first studio, she has encountered the quiet, persistent scepticism that can follow women into leadership roles, moments where being a woman meant being questioned more than the work warranted. She does not dramatise this, but she does not skip past it either. “There have definitely been moments where you feel questioned more because you are a woman,” she says. “Those experiences are not uncommon in leadership roles across industries.”
Her response has been consistent, and it is, characteristically, a storyteller’s response. Do not get louder. Get better. Let the work make the argument you cannot make in a meeting room. “Over time, I realised that the strongest response is not louder words but stronger work,” she says. “When a story connects and creates impact, it speaks for itself. My approach has always been simple: let the storytelling and your work do the talking.” It is advice she has lived by long enough that it no longer sounds like advice. It sounds like fact.
For the next generation of women trying to build careers at the intersection of creativity, strategy, and business growth in purpose-driven media, Budhiraja has a lot to say, and none of it is soft. She is not interested in offering comfort. She is interested in offering clarity. “Experiment relentlessly, and never let anyone, including yourself, put a ceiling on what you can do,” she begins. “Ask questions, and make sure they’re the right ones. Say yes to learning, say yes to adapting, and always learn beyond the boundaries of your current role, because the moment you stop, you limit yourself.”
The women who thrive at this intersection, she believes, are the ones who understand all three disciplines deeply and are not afraid to move fluidly between them. Specialism has its place, but it is versatility paired with conviction that builds careers with staying power. “The women who thrive at the intersection of creativity, strategy, and partnerships are the ones who understand all three deeply and aren’t afraid to move between them,” she says. Then she adds what is, perhaps, the most personal piece of counsel she offers: “And above everything: trust your instincts, hold your opinions, and own your perspective.”
It sounds simple. It is not. But then, most of the truest things about storytelling are like that. They look obvious from the outside and turn out, on closer inspection, to be the product of a great deal of practice, patience, and a willingness to keep asking whether the story you are telling is the one that actually needs to be told. Budhiraja has been asking that question for over two decades. The industry, catching up slowly but surely, is beginning to understand why it matters.
