“Investments in growing addressable opportunities critical to move beyond search”

Narayan Devanathan, Chief Client Officer, dentsu India, writes about the budget expectations of the A&M industry, while stressing on bringing both production and consumption within the reach of India’s vast multi-lingual audiences.

Among the many deep impacts of the pandemic is that more cash has gotten out of people’s hands via greater expenses for healthcare, WFH set-ups, remote education for kids, and on top of it, dealing with the effects of a year of further price inflation and, for the salaried class, no pay raises (and in many cases, pay cuts). This means that people will look for more cash in hand, whether through higher standard deduction rates or lower tax rates or other sops.

Secondly, people will look for more cash/ sources of livelihood closer to home. The migrant crisis of 2020 showcased a great opportunity to create economic hubs closer to hubs of labour availability; whether by backing MSME growth or macro industrial growth, investments in skilling and establishment of socio-economic hubs closer to the source of labour rather than near the source of capital will be key to leveraging India’s workforce dividend.

For the A&M industry, with digital set to grow to well over a third of the overall advertising spends in the country by 2023, such distributed and multiple economic engines will mean good news in terms of overall growth. Investments in growing addressable opportunities via voice, video and social commerce will be critical in moving beyond the world of search and text-based content & commerce, bringing both production and consumption within the reach of India’s vast multi-lingual audiences and truly growing the middle class beyond narrow, urban, English-aware cohorts.