2017 will be a year of consolidation & aggregation: Anil K Nair

Anil K Nair, CEO & Managing Partner, Digital Law & Kenneth Saatchi & Saatchi, writes about the shape of things to come for the advertising industry in India in 2017. 

End of year 2016 left us poised like the penultimate day of a cliff hanger test match, wherein anything can happen. 2017 promises to be one such year. With a new president in the USA. New global alliances and power structures forming. And closer home, a marauding Prime Minister in a ‘no prisoners’ war against graft and corruption.  

Amidst all this uncertainty, doom gloom and chaos, there will be a fair bit of collateral damage and the advertising industry will be the first to catch the flu if anyone sneezes. 

This year of churn will see the wheat separated from the chaff. Brands that provide real value will survive and thrive. Startups, creative agency brands, media offerings will all be put to the same acid test.  

I expect this year to be one of belt tightening, consolidation, aggregation and one of jettisoning of redundancies. 

I see ‘Phygital’ as being one of the big themes and thrust areas this year. Digital driving people to physical stores or to purchase oriented action. Programmatic Messaging delivered over time as opposed to a point-in-time, with the journeys criss-crossing physical, digital and vice versa. 

I feel that more money will move into contextual strategic branded content in 2017. Content that subliminally segways onto the various newsfeeds and timelines that our ever mobile, content gobbling consumer from an anytime, always on perspective. 

With digital payments reaching a tipping point and large swathes of India getting digitised, digital privacy and security will be a recurring narrative and brands that quickly take strong positions on the same will be seen as leaders and innovators. 

The better side of all this digitisation and adoption is data. Data driven marketing and creative will challenge the business to come up with contextual, adaptive, quick churn creatives that touch the nerve spots and help in conversion. 

I see a small cold war brewing between traditional agencies on one the hand and tech/ content players on the other for the client budgets. But eventually what will win is collaboration between the various players, backed by good old strategic thinking, insight driven marketing and the craft of storytelling adapted to this new anywhere, anytime, always on world.

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