‘We would like to be seen as the best client servicing agency in India’

‘We Would Like To Be Seen As The Best Client Servicing Agency In India’

With over two decades of experience in the media industry, Anita Kotwani, CEO, Carat India, has been contributing to the creation and setting up of new categories like Gaming, Digital & Content. Over the years, she has managed to successfully keep up with the latest trends.

‘We Would Like To Be Seen As The Best Client Servicing Agency In India’

Kotwani shared Carat India’s mission and vision for India, addressing client requirements and much more.

‘We Would Like To Be Seen As The Best Client Servicing Agency In India’

‘We Would Like To Be Seen As The Best Client Servicing Agency In India’

‘We Would Like To Be Seen As The Best Client Servicing Agency In India’

Excerpts from the conversation:

‘We Would Like To Be Seen As The Best Client Servicing Agency In India’

Carat is a globally renowned agency. What’s its mission and vision for clients in India?

We would like to be seen as the ‘best client servicing agency in India’. Our vision ‘Designing For People’, takes into account our deep understanding of our client’s businesses and their consumers.

It concentrates on the new age areas that our clients are focussed on and further drives their business outcomes. As an agency, we are at the forefront, committed to building the domain practices, tools, and technology that drive the results for our clients.

We endeavour to bring in the ‘best of the industry talent pool’ for our clients. We ensure that our team of professionals delivers outstanding work for our clients. Since we belong to the service industry, we are people focused and that is of paramount importance to us, as an agency.

As a leading media agency, what’s your recommended media mix for brands of today?

A perfect media mix tells the right story, to the right audience, at the right time. Think of it like having dal khichdi at your cosy home or a portion of Sushi at a premium restaurant. The right timing & environment means everything. Since we work with dozens of brands from varied categories, sizes, scopes & TG, it is our core mission to consistently drive sustainability and most importantly to justify our efforts with business outcomes.

The enablers to achieve the said outcomes are the most fundamental elements of media reach, frequency, and impact. The right thresholds of these elements call for a cross-platform, integrated media mix – tying back to the right timing & environment is the key.

While channels like social media, news, OOH, print, etc. have a prominent place in the mix, the ever-growing platform YoY & something that does not see an end to exponential growth in the near future is OTT. The testimony to this fact is the Ormax report which identified 424 million active OTT subscribers in the country this year, a result of 20% growth from the previous year. The numbers speak for themselves, the audience is there, presumably for every brand from every category.

The reachable massive audience is being backed by precision targeting & a plethora of offerings to advertise in multiple ad formats & integrations, the power to conquer is vested with the brands today. All in all, say a platform like Disney+ Hotstar becomes a medium with scale & power to drive impact & influence the audience. There is no reason why OTT shouldn’t be a part of every brand’s media mix.

You spoke about Disney+ Hotstar as a medium to drive impact at scale. Can you elaborate on how Carat leverages the platform to amplify its clients’ campaigns?

Disney+ Hotstar is a hybrid model of OTT where both subscribed & unsubscribed audiences have the highest monthly visits & unique visits across Indian OTTs in 2022. A blend of niche & regional language content on Disney+ Hotstar has helped Carat clients to target the exact audience across different brands. Not only targeting but in-content advertisement integrated with Disney+ Hotstar’s popular original shows have been an advantage to organically connect with our target audience. Apart from the entertainment shows, sports on Disney+ Hotstar have always had the highest affinity with our audience. Carat has reached out to the mass audience with bulk buying & targeting for marquee live cricket events like the ICC world cup, Asia Cup, and bilaterals. Whereas, when it comes to a niche audience, targeting football events such as EPL & Tennis events such as Wimbledon served clients, not just with regular inventory but sponsorship buys as well.

Can you throw some light on the campaigns you successfully executed with the platform?

For one of our premium tech clients, Intel, we ran a few of our successful campaigns on Disney+ Hotstar. For the varied Intel campaigns across genres like gaming, education, and B2B segment, to reach out to the regional audience or niche audience of content & creators, Disney+ Hotstar was able to give us the right inventory with the right audience. For example, for an education campaign, we were reaching out to parents & students and were able to pull off Appographic Targeting with not only video inventory but also through carousel banners that detailed information about the product. In terms of ad inventory, Disney+ Hotstar stands out of all the OTTs with a mix of billboard, and video ads along with carousel cards or branded cards or a website page view, and native ads. All of these helped us to achieve CTR above 1%. A special call out to the website page views where we were not breaking the flow of consuming content and the audience could check the entire website page while watching the video ad without leaving the platform. Even the Connected TV targeting cohort on Disney+ Hotstar has given us a VTR of 96% with a huge brand recall. Overall, Disney+ Hotstar has always been an efficient buy for our clients.

Any campaign success that you could highlight during the T20 World Cup in 2022?

With Hero MotoCorp launching its premium 2W EV scooter VIDA in 3 cities (Delhi, Mumbai & Jaipur) during the festive period of 2022, we leveraged the T20 world cup on Disney+ Hotstar to build a connect with the brand’s tagline – ‘MAKEWAY for VIDA’ to drive awareness around the new launch.

We leveraged Moment Marketing on live cricket to drive message association for ‘MAKEWAY for VIDA’ via squeeze-ups at key moments during the matches (multiple moments were taken such as opening batsman and fielding team walking in, DRS moments, 1^st over after drinks break, etc.)

With custom and contextual live match integration, we were able to grab maximum eyeballs across the intended markets and establish our communication plank with ‘MAKWAY for VIDA’, which helped in increasing search volume and organic traffic resulting in positive movement in brand and business metrics.

You spoke of campaigns that leveraged Disney+ Hotstar’s sports properties. Can you also throw light on campaigns that did well on entertainment as well?

The latest one would be the H&M campaign, Brighter Than Ever. Festive is the biggest campaign of the year for H&M and this calls for a strategy that helps us deliver higher and more relevant reach to build awareness and tap the right audience to build consideration.

Disney+ Hotstar, being the biggest OTT platform in India, gave us the reach and helped us activate a full-funnel strategy starting from building impact, driving awareness, and consideration leading to action. Using the High impact property, ‘Midroll take over’ to build the quick reach of ~9MN users in a day.

The combination of CTV inventory and bespoke audience targeting helped us drive sustenance throughout the campaign duration. Retargeting these video viewers with shorter thematic films helped us build recall, driving consideration, and closing the loop to drive business action. The campaign was exposed to ~12 Mn NCCS. The audience helped us drive reach, impact, and action.

Another campaign that I can think of is the one we did recently for Croma during the festive season of 2022, where we targeted audiences based on their online transaction history. Disney+ Hotstar, in partnership with a leading payment gateway, had just launched its Transacting Audience cohorts. to enable advertisers to target audiences based on their online spending history and purchasing habits. We were one of its very first partners to leverage this cohort and create a successful campaign for Croma. To connect with consumers across geographies during the festive season, Croma launched its festive offers campaign in different languages. Disney+ Hotstar enabled us to hyper-target relevant transacting audiences divided by geographies, which means we reached the right audience with the right ad. The campaign was a huge success amongst the Transacting Audience as the uplift was ~8X higher on brand awareness and 3X higher on ad awareness and purchase intent vis-à-vis the non-transacting audience. The uplifts were driven by the 25-54-year-olds, possibly because of the disposable income of the group to afford durables.

What OTT trends do you see widely popularising in 2023?

Niche content that caters to specific cohorts will gain traction and get only better as the size of connected TV rises.

In 2023, what is going to increase is the consumption of content in the form of gaming and education. Regional-level content is also going to grow.

5G is going to trigger streaming demand to a very large extent and further get amplified. It is going to be a key catalyst in terms of driving OTT from where it is today reaching out to the masses, deep within rural India.

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John Davis