On a global level, the Indian market will become even more important in the New Year, as it’s where we feel we can add maximum value.
By Bindu Balakrishnan, Country Head India, DCMN
A holistic approach: As we head into 2022, we see our clients’ needs are evolving: many brands are realising that performance marketing is a powerful, but short-term strategy – and to really cut through the clutter, they need to build brand salience. As a result, marketing activities are becoming more holistic. Brands are no longer looking at a specific channel and how it performs in terms of direct KPIs. Instead, they are coming at it from a long-term lens, and wanting to understand how channels are performing and influencing each other – for example, the impact that a TV advertisement might have on search, retargeting or app store optimisation.
As brands’ needs are changing, so are our priorities as their growth partner. In the coming months, we’ll be focusing on bringing brand and performance marketing strategies even closer together to offer holistic, 360 degree campaigns that power our clients’ growth. Measuring return on investment will become more necessary than ever, so we’ll also be focused on developing new measurement solutions to prove the value of this comprehensive approach – which leads me to the next two points.
Cracking the black box: In 2022, we’ll continue bringing greater transparency when it comes to measurement and attribution – particularly for offline and seemingly “untrackable” channels like TV, radio and out of home. This is a continuation of our work from 2021, where we broadened our company’s proprietary TV attribution product DC Analytics into an all-encompassing offline measurement tool, most notably by integrating radio and offline measurement. For TV spots, for example, we integrate a tracking pixel onto clients’ home pages or apps, from which we can then measure and correlate page visits or downloads to a specific TV spot.
While some marketers are still cautious about spending ad budgets on these so-called “black box” channels, our tool brings clarity and confidence to brands investing in offline media – and proves that they can be used to drive both performance and brand awareness.
Know more to grow more: Alongside our measurement solution, we’ll also be doubling down on our data-driven approach, especially in the branding domain. This is all the more important as brands invest into holistic marketing activities which are heavily awareness-focused. In terms of our services, we’ll expand our creative concept testing – for example, testing storyboards or the creatives themselves to see if they drive brand awareness and performance.
We’ll also be expanding DCMN’s Digital Brand Tracker, one of our flagship tools that tracks hundreds of brands’ performance and helps our clients understand how their brand awareness is evolving and how they measure up to competitors. This will help marketers answer trickier, more nuanced questions, such as what impact a campaign had on awareness attributes like likeability and brand recognition. These improvements will give a fuller picture of marketing campaign impact and be invaluable to help grow our clients’ brands.
People-first: DCMN has always been a people-first business, and the impact of COVID really reinforced this. Throughout the last 18 months, our management has been steadfast in not needing to downsize or make any redundancies, and we have introduced new measures to help employees through this difficult time – such as partnering with an online therapy platform and promoting a healthy work-life balance.
This won’t change in the new year: we believe in offering our employees work-life balance with measures like unlimited paid holidays, flexible working hours etc. which is a huge bonus for hiring and retention too. We don’t expect our team members to be working from 9 to 5 every day, but instead they can choose their own schedule to accommodate childcare, hobbies or exercise.
Continue to expand our market share: While DCMN is headquartered in Berlin, Germany; India is one of the agency’s strongest markets. Our focus is on working with digital brands, who we call the market leaders of tomorrow – and this is no different for India.
On a global level, the Indian market will become even more important in the New Year, as it’s where we feel we can add maximum value. Alongside expanding our tools and products, we’ll also be growing the India team across a range of functions.
With over 40 Indian start-ups entering the unicorn club in 2021, it’s never been a more exciting time to work in the digital space – and India is the perfect place for us to expand and consolidate our market share.
