Industry Speak

OOH-Digital combination works well for us

"The onus will be on marketers to create compelling and thought-provocative creative propositions that truly move people, otherwise customer indifference is going to harm business goals. "

 In conversation with allaboutoutdoor.com, Abhik Sanyal, Head – Consumer Marketing, DSP Investment Managers speaks at length about the ‘Markets Fluctuate’ campaign, the significance of OOH and much more.

What was your objective from the 'Markets Fluctuate' OOH campaign? Was the objective achieved?

Our objective was to communicate a simple thought: Markets fluctuate, so be prepared with Dynamic Asset Allocation Funds.

At DSP Mutual Fund, we strongly believe that Dynamic Asset Allocation Funds (DAAFs) are a mutual fund product category that remains relevant at all times, given that markets always go through ups & downs and investors get worried because of these fluctuations. Since DAAFs invest in both equity (to aim to build wealth) as well as debt (to aim to preserve wealth) and also adjust asset allocation dynamically, they can help people effectively deal with such market fluctuations. Therefore, DAAFs are an easy but intelligent product relevant for all investors - whether new or experienced.

Our outdoor campaign did quite well- leading to a significant increase in awareness and curiosity for the DAAFs product category as compared to pre-campaign baselines.

What was the brief given to the agency? Please take us through the campaign.

Our brief to ourselves and our outdoor agency was simple: To grab viewer attention while building category awareness for Dynamic Asset Allocation Funds across high potential cities/towns for mutual fund investments all over India.

In our always-on quest to make finance fun, we took one new step this time: we were very bold with our messaging and went with a headline that was printed upside down. This we thought would gain attention and curiosity from viewers and hopefully make them stop in their tracks and take notice.

Our outdoor media agency, Milestone Brandcom also helped in planning and delivering a comprehensive and well thought-out media plan across markets, especially when it came to industry-leading innovations - including an upside down car-on-car idea in Mumbai that gained us a lot of visibility and coverage.

How did DSP's OOH strategy evolve in 2019? What are your plans for 2020?

OOH has always been an important part of DSP Mutual Fund's communication strategy and gives us an interesting and powerful canvas to reach out and create impact across markets. What's evolving is simply our ability to take more risk when it comes to trying out innovative messages with the help of strategically thought-out media plans and innovations to deliver constructive message impact and penetration.

We recognize that viewers today do not have the time or interest in looking at advertisements from countless brands all around them so as marketers, if we do present something to them, it better be something with meaning to them or something genuinely thought-provoking. The presentation of the message therefore becomes critical- and without a creative agency to do this for us, our team relishes this challenge any time we consider outdoor and aim to do better, all by ourselves.

Our strategy for 2020 on this front is broadly going to be the same as what we've been doing in the past few years: provocative messaging on the foundational pillars of minimalism and simplicity. This has always been a challenge for the BFSI industry, given that most regular people look at financial messaging with confusion and a perception of complexity. This is where we're trying to break barriers.

Which platforms are you prioritizing for the next 12 to 18 months?

From an overall communication perspective, always-on, targeted digital will be our mainstay and we will tactically use other media options like Outdoor to build impact and intrigue from time to time.

What are the challenges you face with OOH media?

The challenges in OOH media are similar to those in other media- how to create provocative but relevant messaging, how to distribute budgets and build a plan chasing impact vs frequency, what sort of sites to choose based on which parameters, how to get people to interact with your campaign, how do you track & measure the effectiveness of the campaign and of course, governance and control of a large campaign with hundreds of touch points spread out far and wide geographically. Our agency Milestone Brandcom works very closely with us to give us inputs on the creatives, on the media plan, for campaign governance as well as on measurement of coverage and effectiveness. Our learning in this domain has evolved over the years and our close partnership with our agency has certainly helped in dealing with these challenges to a large extent.

Unified OOH communication is a big challenge, so how are you measuring your OOH campaigns and their effectiveness?

Depending on the campaign objective and the choice of mediums, we create proxies to capture outcomes and measure successes and/or failures. For instance, in our Markets Fluctuate campaign, our intent was to create category awareness which we captured by measuring a change in Google searches for the category, campaign landing page visits, social media chatter, among other metrics. Given that we did not have any other medium as part of our media mix at the same time, we could see a direct correlation and track effectiveness.

Last couple of years we also ran outdoor campaigns with the headline "AXE YOUR TAX" for pushing our tax saving fund, where the metrics we measured were slightly different as the intent there was product promotion rather than category awareness. Of course for all outdoor campaigns we run, our agency also provides us with Campaign effectiveness reports where we capture metrics like Eyeballs garnered/Adjusted Opportunity to Contact, Daily Effective Circulation, overall Visibility Index per market, Gross Impression Points etc.

Which markets are driving growth for you?

Are you also targeting rural and Tier II and III markets?
While a large proportion of the industry business continues to come in from the top 10 markets, we continue to see increasing growth from Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets too. Through a balanced media mix and communication strategy, we utilize different methods through the year to reach out and engage with different segments of audiences across India.

What changes do you anticipate in OOH space?

Outdoor is as effective as your creative and with increased brand clutter (noise) and decreased free-time for a potential customer to actually consume communication, the battle for consumer mindspace is only going to become tougher. Therefore, the onus will be on marketers to create compelling and thought-provocative creative propositions that truly move people, otherwise customer indifference is going to harm business goals.

The industry will also need to move to increased transparency, more accountability, higher interplay with digital for enhanced effectiveness & better consumer journeys, programmatic & smart DOOH along with a strong focus on measurability especially when it comes to ROI.

Interview by: Aarti Pahwa