Atique Kazi - Xaxis https://www.xaxis.com The outcome media company Thu, 11 Oct 2018 23:30:23 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 https://www.xaxis.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-xaxis-favicon-32x32.png Atique Kazi - Xaxis https://www.xaxis.com 32 32 Artificial Intelligence – the Next Wave in Indian Advertising https://www.xaxis.com/artificial-intelligence-the-next-wave-in-indian-advertising/ Thu, 11 Oct 2018 23:30:23 +0000 https://staging.lively-rate.flywheelsites.com/?p=89820

Originally posted on Adgully | October 10, 2018
AI is drastically transforming how we live and work and will forever change how people consume information and make purchasing decisions. And given the fundamental nature of the industry, it is no surprise that advertising is already being impacted by AI technology.
AI is being used in a variety of ways to improve advertising effectiveness. It has been used to find and define audiences, refine creative messaging, generate audience personas, and develop bidding strategies that optimize for clients’ stated goals. AI delivers cognitive insights that can be used to mine data, looking for trends and patterns. They are most obviously suited to tackling discrete issues, such as predicting a particular customer's likely behaviour and anticipating their reaction.

AI in the Indian advertising market

Our highly complex advertising market is one of the fastest growing in the world, mirroring the rise of the country’s middle class, with its increasing disposable income.
Close to 40% of India’s advertising spend still goes to TV, while digital media contributes to approximately 17% of the total ad spend.  However, this number is gradually growing, and it is expected that by 2020 approximately 22% of total ad expenditure will be on digital.
The key to this growth is the tremendous penetration and affordability of the internet. 500 million Indian internet users benefit from high-speed, low-cost connectivity across the country. However, this huge audience is anything but monolithic.  Vast differences abound – 22 different languages, the rural/urban divide, cultural and ethnic preferences all serve to make mass advertising to a digital audience a losing proposition.

Efficiently reaching digital audiences

In fact, the only way to efficiently reach digital audiences at scale across the vast Indian population is to use programmatic media buying, which targets the right prospects with specific ad campaigns. As media moves towards being digital, digital moves towards being programmatic. We can see this happening in the world of video, which is becoming increasingly scalable and measurable.
Programmatic means buying digital advertising space automatically rather than manually, with computers using data to decide in real time which ads to buy and how much to pay for them.
Lingering perceptions of AI as robotic and impersonal may jar with the essentially human nature of advertising, but in fact an AI-powered ad strategy enhances the industry’s ability to reach real individual human beings.

AI-driven campaigns tailor ads to each consumer’s preferences

AI technology helps define the campaign goal, devises a plan that leads to desired outcomes, runs tests and gathers data, takes action and constantly refines for increased cost efficiency, and – importantly – uses human talent well. Programmatic calls for people who know how to interpret goals, understand the programmatic advertising landscape and can create and refine algorithms to the specific needs at hand.
AI allows us to integrate more data and intelligence into every action than ever before, enabling us to create a completely customized experience tailored to each person’s own preferences and purchasing behaviours, match our clients’ brands with the most interested audiences, and continually optimize campaigns to deliver better results in less time.
About the Author:
Atique Kazi, Managing Director, Xaxis India
Atique Kazi joined Xaxis India in 2013 and has been with the organisation for more than 5 years. Prior to Xaxis he has worked in organisations such as Yahoo India, The Economist and The Times of India. He is enthusiastic about the adoption of digital technologies to transform organisations. He believes that the uptake of programmatic is not slow in India. As media becomes more and more digitally charged he is optimistic about the future of programmatic.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW AI  WORKS IN PROGRAMMATIC MARKETING, READ OUR WHITEPAPER ABOUT DIGITAL STRATEGY WITH AI.

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]]> Data & technology: The keys to advertising to one billion people https://www.xaxis.com/data-technology-the-keys-to-advertising-to-one-billion-people/ Wed, 31 Jan 2018 15:12:45 +0000 https://staging.lively-rate.flywheelsites.com/?p=31787 India has an enormous digital audience that can often be viewed as too overwhelming for domestic advertisers, much less international advertisers.
To quantify the size of the opportunity, consider that India is estimated to have more than 450 million Internet users, second only to China (nearly 700 million), and well ahead of USA in third, which notches up 240 million people on the Internet.
This size brings complexity, whether it's rural-urban consumption differences, ethnic and cultural nuances, or fast changing consumer preferences, underpinned by 22 different languages and six distinct metropolitan areas. A cookie cutter mass advertising approach simply does not work for brand advertisers.
Furthermore, India has a multitude of different advertising and consumer experience touch-points, and the opportunity to connect with consumers across many channels is significant and growing.
However, print and TV advertising sits at the top of the media mix, as advertisers look to capture as many eyeballs and impressions as they can. In addition, with some businesses adopting long tail approaches, ad experiences have also sometimes been compromised.
Indian advertisers are also more reluctant to adopt certain ad technologies from overseas companies because these companies’ services are deemed to be more expensive. With a mindset of output being more important than outcome, there are still a lot of advertisers who do not view a marginal incremental ad spend as an investment in return for performance.
The truth is that digital, especially mobile, represents a huge opportunity for brand advertisers committed to understanding India, and all of its colour and vibrancy. The fusion of data and algorithms will enable advertisers to better reach the right target audiences on the right medium, including the largest middle class in the world, which now numbers more than 200 million people.
New solutions for a new era
We expect more sophisticated digital advertising to emerge in the next few years, as brands understand they must adopt a more targeted approach. New technology in digital advertising is being adopted quickly, but there is still hesitancy towards investing in tools that can improve the performance of digital media campaigns.
Those advertising technology solutions include a move to audience-based buying, software algorithms that analyse context and behaviour online, and artificial intelligence tools that optimise the digital media buying process.
Even though programmatic spend is still in the single digits, it is gaining serious headway due to the fact that telecom data charges are also becoming cheaper. This also means an increase in digital consumption and access.
This definitely resonates for a mobile-centric nation that has affordable bandwidth to serve all types of brand ads and digital content. With traditional TV still going strong and mobile usage and connectivity picking up, cross screen/device advertising is another treasure box waiting to be unlocked.
In addition, with an increasing number of people watching videos on platforms such as YouTube, Google and Facebook, and with these platforms becoming the extended platforms of big TV networks, new opportunities are present for digital marketers to be more creative with their ads and content, especially in the area of short-form videos.
Onwards and upwards
The Indian market is definitely not turning a blind eye to the advancement of digital advertising and the results it can bring, even if complexity brings a need to be smart with your investments.
The only way to efficiently reach digital audiences at scale across the vast Indian population is to deploy programmatic media buying, enabling specific ad campaigns to reach the right prospects. As media moves towards being digital, digital moves towards being programmatic. We can see this happening in the world of video, which is becoming increasingly scalable and measurable.
This will solve a lot of challenges as measurement metrics will be able to convey a higher degree of certainty regarding how brand videos drive sales, underpinned by better attribution tools which, in short, deliver on outcomes.
My belief is that when campaigns are measured well, outcomes will naturally become the focus. The measured results will speak for themselves and justify the investment in digital. This can turn the focus from the output equation, to achieving positive business for a brand.
Want to advertise to one billion people? You're going to need good data and technology to achieve the feat.
Atique Kazi is the director, India at Xaxis
Blog article originally featured on Campaign. 
 

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