Bobble.ai s Ankit Prasad & HDFC's Jahid Ahmed on navigating digital marketing

Bobble.ai, one of the global leaders in Conversation Media Platforms, recently partnered with Adgully Network to host an exclusive roundtable conference, titled ‘Step Ahead’. This event, strategically curated for GroupM, aimed to foster a deeper connection between these two organisations.

Bobble.ai is on a mission to enhance the conversation experience of smartphone users, making them much more expressive, localised and intelligent. It does so via various deep tech innovations around typing, language, content, voice and camera, all bundled into its flagship product, a smartphone keyboard. It currently enjoys a massive user base of 85 million+ users in India and South East Asia. Having worked with over 100+ leading brands in the industry, Bobble is the go-to platform for brands looking to take their marketing campaigns a notch above, with a more targeted and personalised approach for the consumers. All the technology innovations, including features like personalised Bobblehead Stickers, interactive content formats and an entire Super App ecosystem that facilitates conversational consumption of products and services are bundled within the Bobble AI smartphone keyboard service.

The BFSI and fintech sector has been creating waves with innovations in their marketing and advertising strategies – be it the use of chatbots, Artificial Intelligence, deep data mining, voice-led heat maps, and much more.

The Step Ahead conference saw an insightful fireside chat, where Ankit Prasad, Founder of Bobble.ai, engaged with Jahid Ahmed, Senior Vice President, HDFC Bank.

At the outset, Ankit Prasad confessed that he is a big fan of one of the campaigns by HDFC – ‘Vigil Aunty’ – which he keeps following on Instagram. It is an initiative of HDFC to create an influencer, named ‘Vigil Aunty’, to raise awareness about online frauds. In the course of the conversation, Jahid Ahmed explained how they use this influencer to educate people about various fraud tactics and how the whole idea germinated.

In keeping with the topic – ‘Latest Innovations in Advertising Strategy’ – Prasad steered the conversation towards eliciting some of the stories of recent innovative campaigns that have been done for HDFC – how those innovative campaigns were planned, what was the objective, how were they executed, and what was the outcome, and much more.

Jahid Ahmed responded by saying, “When we look at innovation – be it tools or be it campaigns – we focus on outcomes. The outcome can be on any spectrum, it need not be always acquisition-led outcome.” He added that HDFC followed hardcore metrics and the focus remained on purpose-driven activity or an acquisition activity.

Prasad remarked here, “I really like the fact that you are not just thinking of positioning your brand, but rather you are thinking of a larger go-to financial literacy. HDFC is already a household name, however the initiatives to make people aware about the new developments like the UPI app or UPI via credit card – I think that is the thought process which various brands lack.”

Speaking on ideas, Prasad wanted to find out how HDFC selects which is an outstanding idea and which is a good-to-have idea?; what are the red flags?; how an idea is eliminated; and what are the green flags to actually know which ideas are worth considering?

“I think knowing that thought process will eventually help the audience in filtering those ideas at their end before taking it to marketers like yourself,” he added.

Talking about bringing method into this madness of pitches, Ahmed reiterated that they stuck to their core –be it tools or be it campaigns that are getting presented. “Firstly, it has to be aligned with the whole purpose of the brand. Second, it has to have a very meaningful impact. And lastly, the amount of work required to integrate vis-a-vis the impact that it will show overall. These are the things that we do to evaluate the benefit – whether it is a campaign or a tool, how does it help us?,” he explained. 

Prasad, here, turned the attention towards breaking through the clutter in the market, which is even more prominent during the festive season, or during important events such as the IPL or cricket season or during important occasions, when the audience’s mindspace is also crowded with so many brands trying to lure them during those days. “Probably innovation is one of the key factors which would make someone stand out. What are your plans for the festive season ahead? How do you want to stand out amongst various banking and fintech companies who would be luring their customers?,” he asked.

While agreeing that it is a cluttered world, Ahmed added, “but at the end of day it also pays.” He stressed on “context to the platform” and elaborated, “If it is digital heavy, then it has to be digital first, and within digital first also each platform has its own nuance. So, how are you thinking of each of these platforms and then making it as per the platform is what actually will help you to break through the clutter.”

Prasad here was reminded of the times when smartphones were growing exponentially and added that “In the consumer tech world, when we are building applications and services for the consumers through mobile app, we also used to have a website. And then our investors started coming to us and asking us to shut down the website, start thinking mobile first. The only way you will start thinking mobile first is by shutting down the website.” He also referred to fashion portal Myntra, which, at one point in time, had also shut down their website to be a mobile-first app. Eventually, they brought back their website, but at least they forced their team to think mobile-first and it served like a catalyst.

“I guess it is a similar kind of phase that marketers are going through, because they are used to thinking offline and now they are force-feeding those ideas into digital, while digital has its own charm, its own dynamics and its own equations, that they need to take care of,” Prasad noted.

Ahmed here remarked that the advantage of digital is also its disadvantage. He said, “The advantage of digital is personalisation, but personalisation takes away impact. Personalisation is more closer to nudge.” According to him, there are three success parameters – first is top of the funnel (TOMA), second is acquisition, and the third is stakeholder management.

“Stakeholder management is only possible when there is an impact campaign. Impact versus personalisation is a great conversation, so if you are creating personalisation, how are you creating personalisation to scale up and then to be seen, and then to be understood and then the engagement to whatever the desired metrics is – is what the question is, which takes away the whole impact from digital. That’s where the digital team has to create inventories to create that impact – not in terms of viewability, as viewability impact is not possible in digital, but then the quality of the ad has to be so good that then the engagement has to be high,” Ahmed further said.

Prasad added here that digital is not really a bigger screen – such as interstitial ads. “The impact is the kind of deeper engagement that you are able to create with the end consumer and the virality that you can achieve out of it. Because one of the beauty of digital is not just personalisation, but also virality, which was missing in the offline world. Probably there was word of mouth, of course, but then it was not that easy to make things viral,” Prasad noted.

While highlighting the crucial role of data, Prasad asked about how HDFC leveraged data, content and the context to come up with innovative digital campaigns.

“Data is pretty much at the heart of all our campaigns,” said Ahmed, adding that HDFC used data to understand and identify whom to give what kind of an offer. He further said that the bank also did propensity modelling and ‘next best action’. “On the website, while the content remains the same, but the banner section of the website is 99% different for everybody who comes in. If you have come for the first time that will be the hardcoded offer that will be shown to you,” he said.

“It’s brilliant how marketers play with our minds, using the data and the creative and the context,” Prasad quipped.

He continued by asking Ahmed to share some stories of recent innovations that HDFC had done. This turned the conversation towards digital frauds. Before venturing further into the topic, Ahmed mentioned that if India is aiming at a $3 trillion economy, the digital economy is going to be $1 trillion, to highlight the growing might of digital. However, the biggest deterrent today for people to come on to digital is the frauds that are happening. “And the fraud is nothing to do with hacking into banking accounts, but they are just playing with your mind because of three reasons – greed, fear or incentivisation,” noted Ahmed.

In order to keep people informed about how to stay safe in the digital world, Ahmed spoke about how HDFC created its own influencer, called ‘Vigil Aunty’. “We roped in Anu Menon as the ‘Vigil Aunty’, and the quirkiness that she brings into the whole fact is phenomenal. We got 2 million fans of this influencer in around 3 months,” informed Ahmed.

On a different take on innovation, Prasad pointed out a reality that today innovation is being done only for awards, when many a times it is a deterrent to the innovation actually, because it was not given enough budget and an opportunity to be actually executed at scale. “I want to understand from a brand perspective, when you look at innovation do you aspire to scale it up at some point of time with the expectation that this innovation, if it is successful, should be consuming most of my budget, instead of me spending on the things that I have already been spending on and I am looking for a new opportunity where I can spend more budget?,” he asked.

Ahmed responded by saying, “The way we will break it up is 10% for experiment. If the experiment is working, then we go ahead and see if it is scalable or not. But for it to be considered a mainstream, it will have to prove that it is the desired channel, it is scalable and it is showing results.”

On a parting note, Prasad noted that creating one’s own influencers has become much easier today with generative AI, “but I am not sure how impactful that is since it is not proven yet”.