Dabur’s Sanath Ravindran Pulikkal decodes data-driven marketing in the OTT world

Spotlight was turned on precision consumer targeting using data-driven marketing insights in an ever-increasing OTT era at the fifth edition of Adgully’s SCREENXX Summit & Award 2023. Sanath Ravindran Pulikkal, Head of Marketing - Home Care Category, Dabur India, made a highly informative presentation as part of his keynote address on the topic – ‘Data-driven marketing: Utilising consumer insights in the age of OTT’.

Pulikkal’s address covered a wide range of areas – from data-driven marketing, how consumer profiles are created and expressed in the age of OTT, to stats on the Indian media landscape, impact of digital on traditional marketing, to the surging OTT market and more, and culminated with a case study on how Odonil Neem Air Freshener created awareness about the product on OTT platforms.

Indian Media Landscape

While speaking on the Indian media landscape, Pulikkal shared that there are about 89 crore TV viewers out of a 130 crore population. TV Households stood at about 30 crore – of which 20 crore would be rural and 10 crore would be urban.

Internet users formed a very sizeable chunk of about 83 crore.

There are about 50 crore smartphone users – out of which about 49 crore do online video, 46 crore do social platform, and about 10 crore form part of the paid OTT subscriber base, shared Pulikkal.

The Rise of Digital and the Impact on Traditional Marketing

While speaking on how Digital versus TV spends have progressed, Pulikkal said that total spends of TV + Digital Adex works out to be about Rs 91,000 crore, and 53% of that has been appropriated by Digital. “It’s a huge shift when you compare to 2019. Covid happened and post-Covid there was a shift towards getting digital spaces into homes.

“Right now, if you see Digital versus TV, Digital is obviously winning. Google, the biggest media house in the country today, last year reported Rs 25,000 crore of ad sales. It’s a big number,” he added.

Continuing further, Pulikkal said, “OTT, which is part of video, forms about 29% of the total ad spends. So, out of about Rs 45,000 crore, about Rs 15,000 crore is spent on OTT and that’s growing by leaps and bounds if you compare it to the last few years, when it was next to nothing.”

Explosive growth: The surging OTT market

According to Pulikkal, while there are several reasons for the growth of the OTT market, one reason preceded them – which he called the Big Bang. “This Big Bang happened in 2015 with the Jio revolution, which spawned the Internet. There were a lot of factors going in for the Digital age in India. One was, there was a younger population, where about 50%-55% of India was under the age of 30 years, who adopted OTT in a big way,” he noted.

Another factor was that India was and still is a single TV market, where 98% of the households own a single TV.

Adoption of digital payments increased significantly. That’s another revolution that happened and OTT enjoyed riding on digital payments.

One language world is also one reason that has spawned the OTT revolution in the sense that there are Korean dramas and dubbed South Indian movies, which have become mainstream these days.

Content preference – OTT platforms provide original, exclusive and diverse content, which is a key user need.

Pulikkal then stepped into the AVOD OTT landscape, where he discussed about how marketers are targeting consumers, irrespective of what kind of device they use. He also dwelled on AVOD profile and audience segmentation, as well as spoke on consumption analysis at length.

He informed that around 80% of the audience that marketers seek watch DRR (Drama, Reality, Romance) content in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali languages. “One of the things that has happened over the past two to two-and-a-half years is that regional content has taken over and has started to become very pronounced. While earlier Hindi content used to be around 80%, it has come down to 60%. So, over a period of time regional languages and preferences have overshadowed the mainstream and have taken preference in the language space,” he added.

These are edited excerpts. For the complete keynote address, please watch below: