India Today Group’s Vivek Malhotra on what goes through an average CMO’s day

The chief marketing officer today is straddling many worlds. Amid the rapid digital transformation, the CMO has to carve out a path that will offer not just the maximum RoI to his/ her company, but also build a strong brand equity.

Delivering a special address at Adgully’s CMOS’ Charcha 2023, held in Delhi yesterday (February 10), Vivek Malhotra, Group CMO and COO, Consumer Revenue, India Today Group, decoded what goes through an average CMO’s day.

At the outset he acknowledged that today’s questions are around AI and whether it’s going to be replacing most of us or whether it will be helping. “These are questions that most of us don’t have answers to,” he admitted.

Speaking on what transpires in a typical day in the life of a CMO of a media organisation, Malhotra said, “When we are working with over 20-25 brands, we usually get stuck into an arithmetic of triggers, retention and dropouts. 90 per cent of the day goes into only looking at data for these. And today, we should all be honestly admitting that algos are doing a wonderful job, for example, in my own company my acquisitions that happen through GDN are almost mirroring the stuff that I get organic. So, my retention rates are there and that is for everybody to see that the machine is working as good as what my organic consumer would have done. But having said that, when I am close to winding up my day, I always look back and say, hey have I taken a decision where I actually derailed the customer from the emotional path that I had set up for him.”

He added, “A lot of our business actually depends on news, so starting from broadcast, which is AajTak, India Today and there’s the emotionally Good News Today, to the digital business, our video-first platforms – a lot of them actually arise from the business of news. What happens there is that you always have look at trust.”

Malhotra further shared, globally, a lot of what the anchors are speaking in a particular international channel actually gets thrown up by algos and the key words that drive TRPs are actually sort of brought up by the algos. “So, a rain could actually become a storm, a storm could become a thunderstorm and therefore, higher and higher TRPs. But is that what I want to do with my channels, my products? Maybe the answer is ‘No’.”

Malhotra said that most of the CMOs today are struggling between with two paths, “where we are with algos, with spreadsheets, spending 50 per cent of our might and the rest 50 per cent of our might in balancing the decisions that this arithmetic is throwing up for us.”

Click here to watch the complete addres by Vivek Malhotra.