RP Singh is the Chief Curator of the Content Marketing Summit Asia. He has been curating this not-for-profit summit since its inception. He has previously worked with reputed agencies such as Ogilvy, Starcom and GroupM in the past.
In this Leaderspeak he speaks about how CMS Asia has grown over the years and the plans ahead.
Excerpts.
How has your journey been with creating and curating CMS Asia since 2013? How did it all start?
The journey through all the editions across India, Singapore and Australia has been overwhelming so far.
6 years ago, we wanted to organize a small workshop on Content Marketing with about 30 people. There was a lot of interest shown from the participants,very soon those 30 people became 100 people; and eventually over 250 people attended the first edition in Delhi. Once we saw this huge response from marketing fraternity, we didn’t think twice to announce the 2nd edition of the Content Marketing Summit, and the rest is history.
How do you ensure that every edition of CMS has its unique set of CMOs who bring in their rich experience and diversity to the summit?
We follow certain principles and a strong criteria while choosing our speakers every year. This allows us to bring new learning and experiences to the audience through our speakers.
We create and curate content with speakers individually to ensure maximum learning for our delegates, and a great experience for our speakers as well when they interact with the audience.
We have equal amount of focus on speakers from B2C and B2B organizations to not incline towards either of the segments and this helps us in targeting both kinds of marketers to attend the event. We also pay special attention to gender diversity and try to get 50-50 split of both genders when it comes to choosing speakers.
How has Content Moguls shaping up? What does it essentially do and what can Marketers from the Indian M&E space benefit from it?
ContentMoguls50 is the result of our effortsin the last 2 years. For so many years, a lot of participants at CMS Asia, have been asking us to start a felicitation platform for Content Marketers. We wanted to do it the CMS Asia way and we did not want to come across as yet another award platform because there are too many already.As a result, the respect for these recently created awards platforms is ever decreasing. We wanted to stay true to our cause of developing the content marketing ecosystem, not only in India but also in the entire APAC region. We put together a global Jury which is a good representation from all leading markets across APAC & other regions.
Content Marketers will be able to showcase their work to the larger community through this platform and at the same time, will be able to exchange learning with other participants. The idea is to find 50 finest content marketers every year from across the APAC region. Asia Content Marketing Association (ACMA) has come forward to support this initiative from Singapore, which I believe, is a positive sign for us.
How was CMS in Mumbai? What were the key highlights?
Every year, we beat our own benchmarks and records at CMS Asia and the recently concluded 9th edition in Mumbai was no different. We have grown in terms of attendance, quality and overall buzz around the event.
If I have to pick two key highlights, that will be the Live Content Marketing Pitch for a real client brief where 22 agencies have participated to pitch for Unilever business. Secondly, our content marketing awards for South Asia region that were awarded in 11 categories this year. It is quite satisfying for me personally, to see CMS Asia making impact in Indian marketing scene.
What according to you are the key challenges in the ever changing and evolving media, marketing and advertising space which CMOs have to face?
This is no secret. There are multiple challenges which today’s marketer is trying to manage. From a content marketing perspective, the biggest of all is consumers’ decreasing attention to advertising in general. Ad blockers have made their way into users’ mobile devices and over 40% of the digital ads are blocked. Brands want to start content based marketing, therefore, but they do not know where to start and how much to invest in each aspect of content marketing. Finding right partners for their content marketing efforts is another major challenge grappling the marketers today.
What have been your learnings from curating CMS all through these years?
I have personally learnt a lot by curating this for last 9 editions. Different markets have provided different type of learning. South East Asia & Australia/New Zealand markets demand much more planning well in advance whereas South Asia is manageable within a few months to the event. On the other hand, maximum speaker blackouts happen in South Asia as compared to other regions which keeps us always on toes to find replacements within 7-10 days from the event date. All these CMS Asia markets are at different maturity levels when it comes to Content Marketing discipline and that itself is a great learning for us on how then to create a program which can appeal to specific audiences in those markets. The biggest learning of all is, there are enough takers of good content. So we try to focus on the cause of spreading &evangelizing the content marketing ecosystem and we are finding enough friends & partners who share the same philosophy as ours.
