The battle for customers’ attention has never been more fierce: Divya Karani

Adgully is back with a new edition of its annual feature – TRENDING NOW – where we present the strategies and views of a cross-section of industry leaders as they go about reclaiming lost time and market opportunities and build for a stronger future, armed with the lessons of the pandemic period.

Over the next few weeks, Trending Now will bring insights from industry leaders on how their organisations are gearing up to seize the opportunities in 2022, break through the Covid disruptions and find growth and remain resilient.

In the first interaction as part of Trending Now 2022, Divya Karani, CEO, Media – South Asia, dentsu, speaks about the trends that will dominate in the media sector in 2022, the challenges and the new opportunities in the year ahead, the resilience and recovery in the times ahead.

What are the trends that you expect to dominate in your sector in 2022?

We have never been more connected. Today, technology connects us to more people, many communities. It connects us to unlimited entertainment, information, and educational content. It connects us to services like transport, food delivery and shopping with a simple touch. It connects our friends, our families, our cities and our homes. And in doing so, it has upended our way of being, bringing about many lasting shifts in consumer behaviour.

Again, the opportunity is out there. We now live in a new environment, and we must remain flexible enough to adjust to new habits and behaviours.

1. Commerce everywhere making home the new commerce frontier for brands. Consumers have come to expect the flexibility of omnichannel shopping, which includes the ability to research and buy both online and in-store, as well as combinations of the two. Many other parts of life are becoming omnichannel as hybrid models combining digital and in-person engagement become more common. The growing number of options for shoppable experiences aids marketers in bridging the gap between inspiration and purchase. The rise of aided commerce, which assists consumers in finding and purchasing goods, adds still another layer.
2. Media, Entertainment and Brand names are being redefined, converging, and overlapping. While TV networks experiment with streaming, Netflix is experimenting with linear TV and video formats borrowed from social media! Amazon is now not only a retail behemoth and one of the fastest-growing advertising platforms, but it is also the world’s largest marketer!

What are the challenges and new opportunities that you see emerging in the year ahead?

As data and technology advancements emerge at an ever-increasing pace and consumer expectations follow suit, we are all accountable for owning and maximising the total customer experience.

With the shift in consumer engagement channels and a lack of physical interactions, brands must be laser focused on delivering value to their customers in a nimble way. Meeting them wherever and however they decide to engage. This requires orchestration of the full customer experience, starting with the product itself and continuing across the entire customer life cycle, from awareness to consideration to purchase to service and loyalty.

Providing that total customer experience is about the delivery of hyper-personalised moments, using data, technology, and analytics.

All of these new connections create new opportunities for people and businesses to thrive. Culture, technology, data, content, and commerce are all converging to create new growth spots. Businesses that survive at these crossroads develop the fastest, and media is one of their most potent tools.

This ever-changing media ecosystem provides opportunity for brands to thrive, but it also means that the battle for customers’ attention has never been more fierce. Building attention-grabbing experiences and the growing significance of inclusive marketing to reach a broad population, brands may use consumer intent to convert attention into sales.

At dentsu media, in appreciation of this, we unite brand and performance to drive growth in a way that also builds brands. Our different perspective helps companies capture the value at every touch point of the consumer journey to drive sales, build customer lifetime value, and develop long term brand health. We deliver results today while laying the groundwork for future success by employing a distinct performance mindset in all we do.

Despite the challenging times we live in, we at dentsu, believe there have never been so many opportunities. We are firmly optimistic about the future and resolved to make it happen, today.

How is this year’s turnout to be in this sector as compared to the last two years? How strong will the recovery be? What are the changes that have happened in this sector in the last two years? How strong will this sector’s growth be compared to the last two years as well as the pre-Covid period?

Our world, our sectors, our annual forecasts and plans have had to become modular and flexible.

The pervasiveness of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) revolution has accelerated, lines across sectors have blurred, because of these market conditions. New brands are emerging every day with business models and brands that previously never considered DTC structures are now building them. That’s because the commerce and media platforms of the digital world have created an environment conducive to this business model, reducing the barriers to market entry.

This is a journey, so we must think for both the short and long term while building an agile organisation that can adapt as we learn about our customers and grow in our sophistication.