Is your business and marketing strategy vaccinated?
Industry Discussion | Authors: Eimear O’Rourke, Xandr; Mandar Kambli, Twitch
Over the past 18 months, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all aspects of life. We’ve experienced a seismic shift in how we behave as consumers and as marketers over this time period. Our time spent with media, including new formats like OTT and streaming, has increased dramatically. Meanwhile our purchasing behaviour as consumers has moved online.
As the overall vaccination rates are increasing and as the focus moves to scaling vaccination efforts, we as a programmatic council pose the question: what do we need to do to vaccinate our marketing and business efforts? Is there a business and marketing ‘vaccination’ strategy that can help us to build ‘immunity’?
With a total number of 250 million+ reported covid cases to date, businesses across SEA and India have been grappling with this challenge for nearly two years now. Programmatic is being adopted rapidly, moving from a traditional media planning and buying method to a much more evolved data-led and automated way of marketing.
With challenging economic conditions and business uncertainty, CMOs are under more pressure than ever to deliver tangible and measurable results for every dollar spent. Brands have also increased focus on performance, agile working and flexible processes. Previously campaigns were set up as reserved inventory with lots of advance planning, however marketers are keen to avoid commitments in a rapidly changing environment, and programmatic is agile enough to accommodate this much needed flexibility.
These factors have been driving growth across sectors. The finance vertical for example, with the inclusion of emerging services like crypto, has exploded over the past eighteen months.This reflects the freeing of capital in-market, and the unique proposition of programmatic to reach the consumer even where mass media might struggle to reach in a pandemic.
Ecommerce has seen clear growth too, and as data-driven marketers the path to programmatic has been well-defined. We’re seeing renewed interest from this sector in OTT opportunities, given the time spent by consumers and the leaned-in TV experience, coupled with the power of digital planning and reporting capabilities.
We’ve also observed lots of new SMBs moving online and on to programmatic: projects like Singapore’s restaurant rescue have helped to upskill traditional merchants in digital skills, and bring consumers back to their favourite providers, albeit virtually.
However, coming into Q4, brands are cautious: it’s clear the cost of circulation of goods has skyrocketed over the past eighteen months, with markets like Vietnam and Thailand facing significant supply chain challenges as we head into the biggest quarter of the year.
For marketers as businesses, the methods of working have changed too. Regionally, lockdowns in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Australia and global conditions shifting rapidly, no business is back to the office 100% of the time yet. With COVID infection rates changing daily, and many restrictions to attending the office in Singapore, it’s more challenging to arrange meetings and often employees require multiple levels of approval to attend in person.
Here the flexibility is challenging but can have advantages: with hiring for example, it’s become possible to hire the best talent wherever they are. That means if the company office is in Delhi but a developer becomes available in Bangalore, that hiring can now happen pretty seamlessly. The challenge is then how to build culture outside the office: some innovative ideas have come to the fore, such as hosting a company Minecraft server to foster community in a virtual environment.
In these unprecedented times where the office environment has changed, marketing businesses need trusted networks. Organisations like the IAB SEA+India are playing an increasing role in an advisory capacity on matters such as recruiting, new business, scaling existing efforts and staying abreast of business practices.
As we near the year end and look to the future, most marketing businesses in Southeast Asia and India are aiming to be ‘fully vaccinated’ within 6-12 months, depending on many macro factors. However, the Programmatic Council sees a positive impact on marketing strategy with a move towards ‘fully vaccinated’ practices.
