In his current role, as Country Head, he leads the client development & oversees operations and publisher partnerships to deliver best in class programmatic solutions for brands.
Programmatic advertising for many of us may seem a far-off thing in India’s digital future, but last year GroupM’s programmatic arm, Xaxis delivered 2,500+ programmatic campaigns with an average of 200 campaigns per month.
MediaNews4u in a conversation with Bharat Khatri – Country Lead, Xaxis India.
Excerpts:
It’s been 5 years with Xaxis, out of which 18 months as Country Head – your views on how has Programmatic evolved?
During the inception days, programmatic was seen as a channel or medium to run lower-funnel marketing campaigns, or in other words, performance campaigns. However, we’ve seen a drastic shift over the past three years as brands have evolved and advertisers have started using programmatic to automate their digital media buying and activate full-funnel campaigns. Programmatic has delivered the promise of enhancing the brand’s overall value by helping to engage the same consumer at different stages of the purchase journey and enabling advertisers to carry out full-funnel campaigns across several media channels at the same time.
How has buying changed in the recent years after the advent of Programmatic?
From automation of buying & selling of media to pragmatic shift in buying right audiences vs placements, we have come a long way over the past one decade in our programmatic buying journey. One of the best ways to seek better campaign performance is through continuous optimization, which programmatic buying offers as a default feature to help marketers understand in almost real-time which placement in performing best as per the planned media objectives.
In the recent years with the emergence of AI & ML in programmatic, we are now able to augment the buying process by building a custom bidding algorithm to buy the right impression at right time and most importantly at right price. This is the new age blend of human & machine intelligence buying wherein by understanding historic log level granular data like time of the day, ad format type, handset type, creative copy etc., we are able to create a brand’s unique proxy for its desired business outcomes.
Also, with the use of new age verification tools (IAS, MOAT, Nielsen) we are now able to minimize the risk of fraud in our supply chain thus creating more efficient & brand-safe buying for brands.
Programmatic strategy & how have you gone about upgrading skill sets in the organization?
One size doesn’t fit all, same is the case when we craft programmatic strategies for brands.
Depending on which vertical (CPG, Auto, Telecom, Consumer Electronics, BFSI, Retail, Ecomm) the brand fall in, our client engagement team builds a brand centric custom solution focused towards Custom Outcome Indicators which are as closely tied as possible to an advertiser’s real business objective. For example, for an automobile brand we reverse-engineered the campaign objective from a form filled to actual store visits for test drives followed by cars sold. So as a company driven by client centricity, we are evolving our advanced programmatic solutions and services by enhancing our team skills through strenuous trainings around building custom bidding algorithms using our proprietary AI tool COPILOT, along with instilling a mindset in each employee to build & launch omni-channel campaigns for brands.
