“Cutting noise out of data is the biggest challenge today”: Gaurav Jeet Singh, Unilever

Marketing has always been data-based. We have used sales data, marketing data, data from studies, we have used data in terms of brand pyramids. Again, TV has demanded hardcore data-based planning.

What is drawing a lot of attention these days is the scale at which data is being generated. That’s because the consumer is spending a lot more time on interfaces where you have the ability to generate return-path data. That is where digital 2.0 has become so powerful. It has allowed data signals to pass back and that, for me, is a very big change - the sheer scale of data and how we leverage it. That scale opens up an opportunity to market to consumers in a more relevant fashion.

The challenge is quite paradoxical. In TV and print, there is a certain lack of consumer-level data, but there is enough of it for you to use it powerfully in an actionable fashion. In the case of digital, the irony is that there is so much data that you get data-lost and you don’t know how to use it emphatically for business results!

Hence, the core opportunity sits in balancing this paradox of a lot of data in digital but very little actionability as against very little data but a clear course of action in other media. The reach numbers are clear as are the readership numbers. There aren’t too many variables thrown at you.

We need to find a golden mean on all mediums to be able to use data irrespective of which platform it gets generated on.

The issue is not more. In a country of our size, the opportunity lies in figuring out if we can get larger representative samples for all mediums and not just TV. We have more data today than we have ever had in the history of marketing and this allows us to take more informed calls and decisions. Like it is always said, data is a glass half-full or half-empty, I look at it as a glass half-full as there is enough data for you to leverage and do meaningful marketing. The lack of data is certainly not stopping us from doing so.

I firmly believe that you get the agency you deserve and the agency gets the client it deserves. Every client defines its agency relationship in its own fashion. The way I see the relationship in terms of media agencies is that it is essentially a partnership that you need to leverage fully. That is also true for the agency. It needs to leverage the opportunity that the client provides.

Specialist agencies and boutique houses are the bane of marketing and media! I say this because marketers are increasingly looking for an integrated view of consumers and media investments, an integrated view of how consumers are interacting.

For me, the real value is when someone can give me a medium-agnostic route to grow brands. The bottom line does not care about how that growth came; what it cares about is that for the investment we made, what returns did we get. From a media perspective, growth is when you get an effective reach around your campaigns with the most relevant audiences. That’s a science and it is agnostic to all mediums.

To my mind, it is a lot more complex than what we make it out to be. In-housing or out-housing is the lesser question. The bigger fact is that there is no agency or organisation which has the wherewithal or the deep expertise (to do it all).

That is why the future is all about partnerships. These could be cross-functional within the organisation, these could be partnerships with competitors in some cases or perhaps with startups. Hence, I don’t see the old world of owning the entire interface as being the answer. It will be about how you create platforms where you can leverage the skill sets and value that any new partner could bring into the mix and then take it to scale.

We are looking at that audience very differently. We have access to that audience through media, which was not the case before. In the last 10 years, there has been an evolution in how consumers are using media in rural areas. Because of the deep penetration of mobile data, mobile devices are selling there and opening up media platforms. We see the role of voice in that consumer set. It is a completely different audience that engages with digital in a very different fashion to what we thought. It is a new opportunity that has now opened up, and one which was not available before.

Every time digital goes into an interface you get more data. There is no dearth of data. The dearth is in data intelligence. What the data is saying is more critical to understand rather than just having more data. This is the case not only for rural but right across all markets.

Is programmatic a greater opportunity to really serve audiences? The answer is yes. But it is again the responsibility of the media buyer to get the right kind of media partner on to that programmatic platform. For example, in our case, we are very clear that we first look at the viewability and verifiability of audiences before deciding if we must engage with a platform or not. We have third party trackers that we insist on while bringing somebody on board. We are not going down the vector of nonviewable, non-verifiable platforms just because the price is attractive. We must have three elements above all else. One, are the impressions viewable by everyone? Two, can we verify that they are catering to the set target audience? And three, is the environment brand-safe?

The bigger challenge is to be able to differentiate between what data is valuable and useful compared to what data is noise. With so much data around, there is a possibility that you might get lost in the noise and miss a powerful insight. How do you cut out the noise and keep the valuable insights and use it to grow your business is the single largest challenge today.