Industry experts bullish on ad spends projections for festive season of 2022
The world of marketing is never still, it moves at the speed of light. The pandemic has further fastened that speed as brands are geared up enthusiastically for the festive season. The second edition of CMO’s Charcha 2022 was hosted by Adgully, keeping in perspective the revival story in the post pandemic world with the theme ‘The Festive Blueprint for Brands’.
The expectations are high for the festival season this year, which will roll out with the Raksha Bandhan-Independence Day-Janmashtami-Ganesh Mahotsav period, before flowing into Onam and forward. As has been the norm over the years, festive season is the period when brands rev up their marketing activities and tap into the positive consumer sentiments. A major part of the annual sales happen during this period. Thus, not surprisingly, all eyes are on the festive season this year, as it would be the marker for how strong the country’s economic revival is post the pandemic period and also set the course for future growth.
At the second edition of the CMO’s Charcha, 2022, a panel discussion was held on the topic “Ad spends projections for festive season 2022”. The session was chaired by Neel Pandya, CEO – Europe & APAC, Pixis, and the panelists included –
Dinesh Rathod, CEO, Madison Media Omega
Jyothrimayee JT, CEO, HiveMinds
Vibhor Mehrotra, Chief Digital Officer, Zenith
Yatin Balyan, Managing Partner, National Head of Media Investment, Omnicom Media Group India
Nitin Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, TAM
Neel Pandya commenced the discussions with a question on whether ad spends will be greater in the post Covid period. He started the discussion by saying "This is that time of the year where every advertiser and marketer have one question popping up which is how is festive season going to be treated this year. It is first to check how the clutter is going to be and secondly whether the budget is enough to do the media mix across all medias' or we focus on one media and significantly increase the presence". He further added “Performance will always be there but branding will open up during the festive season. You will witness KBC produced by two title sponsors and others. 15 years ago when we have started our careers, FMCG was dominant while in sponsorship we could see Pepsi logos, HUL logos, and all of a sudden these new age startup brands such as Unacademy and others coming up and spending on digital. More and more marketers, in post Covid period specially have started becoming so conscious that every penny that they spend, they need a better ROI out of it and hence measurement comes into the picture. Everything boils down to the budget which the marketer has. If the budget is limited, the marketer really want a ROI to come out of it. When the budget is extended, they do a combination on and off because of the omnichannel strategy and attribution across platforms. The top two categories are ecommerce, auto and to some extent retail. Digital measurement is going to be a key factor.”
Dinesh Rathod said that at the beginning of the year with their advertising report, it was concluded that the growth of the industry is going to be about 20%. He said “Last year we clocked about 79k crores, this year we are projecting to be 89k crores. Typically H2 is much larger than H1, and during the festive season, it will be much more than 20%. There is a lot of growth from the FMCG advertisers, who have not slowed down despite of inflation. There is a lot of certainty among the audience today as the uncertainty of not having a job and the future being uncertain is not there anymore. So people are opening up their purses and spending and all our festivals are about celebrations where we visit families, buy new clothes, new things, making it a buoyant festive season. The projections are that we will surpass our pre Covid numbers. Retail is going to see a lot of action”.
He added “In terms of media, we have big ticket items lined up which involve three big sporting events that are going to come up. We have the Asia Cup, then the T20 World Cup, FIFA World Cup. Besides these sporting events, there are the reality shows starting such as KBC which started some days back. Then we have the Gujarat and Himachal elections in December, along with Karnataka and three or four North Eastern states that are going to go for elections some time in March”.
Vibhor Mehrotra said “We are seeing about 10-10.5 $ being spent with the base of 22% year on year, two to three years, again driven by digital growing it around 60 – 65% year on year, on the back off, not just the Covid times, but now whatever journey we had in three months or six months, that have continued. Vernacular, video or voice are what are kind of driving strong growth on digital. Festive will be buoyant for us specifically for the FMCG and consumer durable fronts. However with all the app based clients, we might not see a similar kind of investments coming through and that’s a big watchout for most of us, because we have a good set of unicorn clients across the board. Consumer durables and auto will grow”.
Yatin Balyan noted “We are in a very interesting and challenging era. We have come across the pandemic and no year is same as the previous year. There is no algorithm to say how this thing will plan out. 2021 was like 12 – 13% or above 98 cents and the heavy lifting was done in H2 and because there was a second wave in H1, the heavy lifting happened by 40-45%. Ecommerce is the category which will thrive in these four to five months, they have an exceptionally good drive. We see a huge surge in demand for premiumization of durables be it TV, refrigerator and others.”
Jyothrimayee JT said “In the ecommerce side, all the platforms, backed by beauty, jewellery and many of these players who will continue to spend, we are however have to have discount on gaming, crypto, edtech and everything that happened. That is not going to repeat but ecommerce will be still on the top growth pattern. Again something which has been on the down tone from a percentage growth travel, could be back, though its still not very guaranteed. Right after the festive season, we have the holiday season, the wedding season, there is a possibility that in terms of percentage growth, travel might recover.” She further added “Omnichannel is back. Its no longer over indexed on online anymore. So when it was online, performance got skewed, both because of the conservative nature of the two years and also because it was measurable, you can drive sales and everything. This festive season will be different. Branding will open the floodgates, there would be huge push on the branding media. And even wherever there is performance, it would be more about nurturing whatever awareness and concentration have been built there. Branding index will be much higher this festive season”.
Nitin Kumar gave out his opinion that at first it is important to look at what has happened from the last two years and that the way media mix is operating, its in the operation stage right now, where digital is booming and in this festive season also, it is anticipated that digital will be on the top. He said “Numbers that we have point towards 50% growth in digital as compared to 34% of the traditional medium. A brand needs to get discovered, and if you look at the evolution that has happened from an audience perspective, you need to be in all those spaces. So its important that the media mix is also evolved according to how the audience are evolving in terms of consuming the media. In terms of measurement there are still some questions that are to be answered, some dots that are still to be connected. While we interact with a lot of agencies, advertisers even podcasters, who have started spending, but when you look at measurement, its not an end to end kind of solution, there are various data points that are emerging.” He further added that there is a need to have a robust measurement system that is reliable.