Sometime during the end of BC (Before Covid19 lockdown) era, the South Side Story launch event in Chennai by TAM Media Research and MediaNews4U featured the best in the business, bringing the old and new talents together. More so, when the focus was on South India, with the highlight being the release of South Side Story 2020 edition which has truly become a ready reckoner for the fraternity.
Current mindset from the captured conversations
In recent years, especially in events like these, we have been hearing so much about technological advances in everything around us and particularly about the digital transformation in media. Invariably we get to hear most, particularly from the mainstream media background, talking about digital media and its increasing relevance in every plan. Most often, we find these conversations to be coated with ’not-so-happy’ kind of vibe when it comes to addressing the importance of digital trends. This thought is prevalent as it seemingly eats into the budgets earmarked for the conventional media. On the other hand, this sounds strange and even funny to the younger professionals who are majorly exposed only to digital media.
Digital Media has gotten all the attention in such an unprecedented way that the world has embraced it readily. The rise is only clearly evident. Having said that, it is absolutely inevitable to ignore the power of technology and the surging opportunities created in the digital space. It is a matter of fact that we should start accepting this change happily by finding ways to make the best use of it in every aspect of our businesses.
Digital space and technology for a new & changing world
‘The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.’ – Nathaniel Branden.
As media marketers, the best possible way to look at this scenario, if some of you haven’t yet, is to find out how best we can use the powerful digital transformation and its nuances to our advantage. It is important to open our minds to be aware and fathom a world of opportunities as we are looking to enter a post covid19 era in business. Truth be told, the way we did things are not going to be the same. It is only intelligent to expect a big change in the way businesses are conducted the world over. To accept and adapt is the key.
A ‘never-seen-before’ kind of pandemic experience, literally brings down the businesses to their knees and make them realise the compelling need for cost control, increased operational efficiency by doing things differently and the fundamentals such as capex investments. This will be a reality across categories of businesses. We all know that in such financially stressful times, the axe dreadfully falls on the media spends. And this is exactly what makes the use of digital space even more critical for us to put up our best foot forward to stride against this rough winds.
Artificial Intelligence is here to aid human intelligence
In current day & age, Artificial Intelligence with its incredible abilities is impacting every aspect of our lives. It has come to stay in many forms such as our mobile devices, chatbots, self-driving cars and ‘who-knows-what-next’. AI is undeniably the most powerful tool that is designed to understand consumer behaviour in terms of their habits, needs, wants, preferences, activity patterns, aspirations and more. It doesn’t stop there, but actually helps deliver such customised experiences to the varied sets of audiences, which is exactly what every business, brand, product or service is looking for.
Through its incredible ability to analyse data and to be trained to decode complexities, AI is revolutionising the way businesses are done across industries such as in Healthcare, Retail, Banking, Financial, Education, Image Management & Election Campaign engineering and indeed Media Marketing. We are currently floating in a world of big data and every right decision has increasingly become dependent on hardcore data and its effective analytics.
AI & Machine learning as game changers in marketing
Our fundamentals always remind us of how well we are equipped to identify the audience, understand the markets, create the winning communication patterns, choose the best possible platforms to reach and influence them in decision making. When these fundamentals remain the same, our approach to master these are now subject to change. Here is an opportunity to master that approach through AI & ML as it helps every media professional with razor-sharp precision, higher efficiency levels, much deeper analysis, greater data mining, effective performance tracking, all through the valuable insights generated by progressive learning algorithms.
It helps us understand the audience better and to provide improved user experience. The use of these tech-driven solutions helps us in effective marketing, increases our overall productivity through result-oriented strategising patterns based on data-driven analytics and most importantly results in better ROI.
Solutions through Behaviour Analysis & Predictive Analytics
There is an increasing demand for professionals in the realm of data science and programming the world over. This is a clear indication of how companies are looking at the best skills to unlock the big opportunities by decoding critical data. The internet or as we call it, the ‘digital space’ is a complex matrix for consumer behaviour patterns in the form of data sets that cannot be possibly cracked by human intelligence alone. We find ourselves compelled to look for solutions to effectively analyse these data, for successful execution of business plans.
Specific AI tools that are created for the media industry helps in Behaviour Analysis and it also enables us to approach our campaign strategy / plan with an unbeatable Predictive Analytics. Media Intelligence & social listening tools used in measuring, managing and magnifying the reputation of a brand or a corporate identity in an increasingly connected world becomes very critical. Predictive Analytics helps spot the trends before they’re trending by decoding hyper local data into usable and valuable insights for highly competitive markets.
The way forward is clearly tech-driven.
Effective use of this technology will be the differentiator in the coming days. Across categories, businesses will look to connect only with the relevant consumers which will be driven largely by the highly vetted data in real time. These dynamic data points and their relevance will help create most effective solutions in
- Product strategy
- Market identification
- Sales forecast
- Communication pattern
- Media strategy
- Execution & delivery
For companies, it will be a smart investment to employ such tech-driven solution providers for maximum returns.
Many experts are predicting that the effect of covid19 will fuel the next big wave of innovation that will shape businesses differently for decades to come. Keeping in mind that a pandemic impacts us in biological, psychological and economic dimensions, it results in some definitive patterns in the way we humans behave and do things. Based on these facts, eCommerce is one such model perceived to fare well in the post covid19 era. The best use of technology and the digital space is already proving to be as a winning eCommerce enabler.
In the healthcare industry, the best of the medical minds & the top research houses around the world are using Artificial Intelligence in search of solutions, be it genome sequencing to decoding protein patterns that can help develop hope.
Interestingly in Politics, election campaign engineering is increasingly turning to effective use of AI driven insights that enables media monitoring, social listening, social media management, PR Analytics and other Influencer Engagement abilities.
It is clearly evident that apart from Media Marketing, various other industry categories such as Healthcare, eCommerce, Finance, Retail, Education, Travel, Politics, will increasingly look for tech-driven solutions to stay ahead in the game. We are looking at a big CHANGE indeed after this GREAT PAUSE for a better future.
Immanuel Raj Kumar
