Conversations around Connected TV, WhatsApp commerce, vernacular will grow: Vipul Kedia

The start of a new year is seen as bringing in new operational efficiencies, stronger strategies, a far greater emphasis on building deep bonds with various stakeholders and consumers. In keeping with the current market ecosystem, technology and a human approach are seen as going hand in hand.

As 2023 kicks off, Adgully has approached key industry leaders to Crystal Gaze into 2023, as part of our annual Trending Now series, to highlight the major trends and developments that they see dominating the industry in the year ahead.

Vipul Kedia, Chief Data & Platforms Officer, Affle, and Head – MAAS Platform India, speaks about seeing a shift in how marketers approach and target multiple touchpoints in 2023, stronger demand for highly personalised contextual experiences in advertising, higher share claimed by newer channels such as Connected TV, and much more.

Key trends that will dominate marketing in 2023

We have seen an amalgamation of online and offline consumer journeys and we will see a shift in how marketers approach and target multiple touchpoints. Unifying themes and messaging across connected devices, with digital out-of-home, omnichannel marketing, and proximity & drive-to-store campaigns will be key to understanding the user journeys and how they interact across mediums.

In this regard, segmentation will be critical to target the potential customers – not only based on demographics, but utilising niche data technologies that allow the advertisers to create user cohorts based on language, persona, location, etc. Affle’s proprietary mDMP data management platform enables insight-driven audience marketing that allows marketers to reach wider segments.

Another key trend for 2023 is going to be around hyper-personalisation and it’s only likely to get stronger as the demand for highly personalised contextual experiences in advertising picks up. Advertisers will continue to invest in ad technologies that can enable them to segment their consumers through smart user cohorts that go beyond demographics segmentation and also include language-based, interest-based user cohorts. As a leading consumer technology company, our solutions are designed to build a digital ad future while keeping user privacy at the center of it.

Conversations around Connected TV (CTV), WhatsApp commerce and marketing, and vernacular will continue to gain strength as brands look to go deeper into the cities and towns and target the next 100 million users.

Major expectations

While digital advertising as a percentage of total advertising in developed markets already constitutes over half of the budgets, in India and other emerging markets it is still much lower. There is significant room for growth in these markets and for advertising budgets to shift to digital. Emerging markets are showing consistent growth and are a focal point for Affle’s businesses as well. While there are headwinds in the US and European markets, we are in a much better position as a large proportion of our business is anchored in India and other emerging markets, particularly Vietnam, Indonesia, LatAm, and Africa.

Newer channels such as Connected TV – which has already made inroads in the Indian advertising ecosystem – will further continue to achieve higher share and proliferate as part of the overall advertising medium mix in the emerging markets.

The future of technology is opportunity-rich and we remain optimistic about it as more enterprises, businesses, and governments across geographies continue to adopt digital and radically transform, to make themselves deeply connected with consumers and other value chain partners. We will continue to leverage the new market dynamics and unlock greater growth opportunities driven by the mobile-first priorities powering the connected ecosystem.