What Manish Sinha teaches about AI in marketing

Recently, in the last 3-4 years, the focus has fundamentally shifted towards storytelling. Traditionally, brand building content-led campaigns have been the forte of B2C space. How important is it for the B2B companies? I think it has always been important. It's just that it is called by a slightly different name there. It's called thought leadership. In the B2B space, especially in the technology B2B space, it has always been done by writing papers and telling people about new innovations that are coming up. These days, it has become even more

interesting because people are actually doing vision videos. Here's how the future will look like, not just technology papers. So, at some level, that is very intent content. And in the B2B space, people start believing that you are smart and capable based on the content that you have out there. So, it's very, very valuable. Also, in B2B marketing, is a lot more focused towards performance campaigns. Is there a real scope for storytelling here? It has traditionally been easier to measure performance.

And that's the reason why we hear a lot more of what we measure. But I think recently, in the last three, four years, the focus has fundamentally shifted towards storytelling. Because data on performance is becoming a little bit of the background. So, a lot of people want to know, okay, so you have this particular number of impressions that your stories are having, but is it making an impact? And there comes the whole possibility of understanding, are you actually

making an impression rather than just counting impressions? So, that only happens if you have a story to tell. That only happens when you see that people are engaging, they are talking back to you. Right? With social media, we are seeing that storytelling is coming back quite a bit. Although, it's small capsules, small storytelling, but I think it's becoming very, very important now in B2B. Right. And also, coming to brand building as such, it's a very mid to a long-term activity. So,

in such a scenario, how would you measure the success of brand campaigns? I think it's easier in B2C. Because there is just a lot more data and you can analyze if people, there are surveys that are done by third parties that here is an amount of recall that you have and stuff like that. In B2B, the way you actually do it is through the voice of customer. So, the real brand building is focused on the customers. So, like for example, in STL, I don't really spend as much

time to figure out if everyone in India will know about STL. But do the telcos and the cloud companies and the government that's building the networks, do they know about us? And the way we find that out is actually doing voice of customer interactions and try to get them done by the third party sometimes. And in some sense, that's where also your question about storytelling comes back. If people just say, yeah, we have heard of you, it's not impactful enough. But if they can tell you back a story they

have heard about you, now you know that they know about your brand. And obviously, it is assisted by other things like digital content, remarketing and social media. But the way to check if your brand is being built is voice of customer. Coming to the fact that you just talked about going back to a story or probably a brand recall value. Intel did a fab job of, you know, it's a powerful B2B brand. It does great stories for that matter. I mean, that's one example I'm seeing. Is it important for B2B brands

to, you know, increase the recall value in customers per se? How important is it? How are they doing it? I think this is a very important topic of discussion. And the jury is out on how important it is for the money it takes, right? If there was a way to create a consumer brand without being supremely expensive, I think everyone should be a consumer brand. Now you talk about Intel. Intel did something very interesting. They started becoming a household name by calling themselves out on every device that was sold by

calling itself Intel inside. That was actually brand building through contracting. In some sense, in India and in hundreds of countries around the world, you get the internet through optical fiber. And at least about 60% of India's data is traveling on one STL fiber or the other to get to you. But you don't know it yet, right? So if there was a way for people to say that they understand that this is a fundamental infrastructure that they are using, could they say STL inside? I'd love that, right?

Could we do that at an economic value today? The jury is still out on that. The Intel story is very interesting. There are other stories like that, where the customer knows about a brand because of an associated consumer brand, rather than of the main brand, right? So HP story, right? HP enterprise is not known by people, but they know the HP brand because of the, you know, the printers and the laptops. So they make an extension. So I think there is, it's unclear whether it's worth the money,

but it's certainly valuable. Interesting. Also, I mean, coming to the whole, all roads probably lead to the conversation about AI, the role of AI and machine learning in storytelling. But as a marketeer, do you believe that somewhere it's also about gut feeling, intuition, taking chances? So where in, where can a marketeer strike the right balance here? I think the easy work is getting done by AI right now. So looking at what people care about, whether they clicked on something or not, whether they

acted on the call to action or not, whether they responded positively or not, these types of things are being understood in mass data analysis by AI. But what to do with it is still in the realm of the creative, right? And the marketer and not just the marketer, I think, even if you go into product designing or any other field, hopefully not finance and accounting, creativity is very, very important. And creativity will continue to be important for some time because we have to create new things and AI

still analyzes the past. So I think it will remain incredibly important. There are advances where AI is actually innovating by like even creating pictures and paintings. But I think it's still very early days for AI and humans also evolve. So I think we have a long, long way to be creative as marketers.