By: James Emmanuel

India’s digital advertisement share is expected to grow to 25-30 per cent of total advertisement expenditure by 2020, a top-level official of a leading digital marketing firm said.

In an exclusive interview with exchange4media, Rakesh Yadav, chief executive officer and co-founder of Adglobal360, said that most brands that have tried and tested digital now spend more than 20 per cent on the medium. “Looking at this trend, we can easily say that by 2020, digital can account for as high as 25-30 per cent of the total ad spends in India,” he added.

Adglobal360, which is specialized in extensive digital marketing services, serves more than 690 global clients in diverse business verticals.

Yadav added that digital marketing generates a lot of data from the campaigns that run across various channels. Google Analytics segments each visit by a user on a website in more than 40 different top-level buckets and then these can be further segmented into hundreds. It is practically impossible to process this and other data sets from digital touchpoints manually.

“For example, if someone is shopping for a shoe from a webstore, there is no point in doing a manual analysis and then calibrating the campaigns as this can take from few hours to few days,” said the Adglobal360 chief, adding; “On the contrary, nowadays chatbots offer real-time discounts after assessing the buying potential of the visitor on the basis of the tonality of the chats with them and by their past buying behaviour. Conversions are up to 20-22 per cent faster with these tools.”

There are also artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools that stitch and create banner ads for all the products that customers have browsed on a website and offers a bundled discounted pricing.

Referring to the trend in the Middle East, he said that the region is still a couple of years behind India in terms of technology or digital adoption, though it is a great place to be present as there is a lot of scope to grow. Singapore is a small country and has different digital needs as compared to other countries of the region, he said, adding that USA is by far one of the most evolved markets when it comes to digital marketing. “The biggest attraction for us in USA is the thriving SME segment that is willing to jump onto the marketing technology bandwagon and get their sales engines rolling.”

Yadav noted that advertisement frauds are limited when the client runs campaigns through tier 1 platforms such as Google AdWords and DoubleClick. Their impact increases as the sophistication of the platform decreases. “Companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are investing millions of dollars to identify and rectify fraud clicks and reimburse advertisers.”Talking about the emerging competition, he said that there was a lot of competition when it comes to typical SEO or SEM work, for which one can find a lot of agencies and freelancers. “Our strength is that we act as consultants and growth partners for our clients and do not view our relationship with them as transactional in nature.” 

Yadav also said that digital marketing was a subset of marketing. It is not meant to be an absolute alternative to print or TV, at least not in the current scenario. It is not a magic potion that can solve all challenges that a client faces. Also, a lot of time is spent on creating a viable and long-term digital strategy and then it needs to be broken down into smaller actionable or trackable milestones.

He opened that new age digital marketers still need to learn more about the fundamentals of branding and positioning. Even though digital tools have a lot of AI built into them, it does not mean that people should become oblivious to communication basics, he pointed out.