What Punit Modhgil teaches about AI in marketing

My next guest, Puneet, has held a number of positions in product management, sales, and marketing with leading technology brands such as Microsoft and Oracle. He was a founder of Octane and is now the CMO of Value First Digital. Puneet was awarded the prestigious DMAI Knight Recognition in 2015 for his contribution to the marketing fraternity. Today, Puneet will tell us how brands can use data to deliver personalization at a grand scale and for the country's massive and largely untapped vernacular consumer base. Over to you, Puneet.

So, namaste to each one of you. So, the three points I have, first of them is about the opportunity. Many of us shared the opportunity we see in front of us with the local languages, media. If you look at the categories of content, A, B, C, and N, this is my MSN days, astrology, Bollywood, cricket, and now news. In all these four categories, audience engagement and local languages, media, print, television, far outweighs consumption in English. So, that's the non-digital world. On digital, we have to catch up, but audience is coming online.

So, the opportunity size is growing fast. We call about the internet. 1.0 happened to us when we saw internet on desktop. Internet 2.0 happened to us in 2010, 2012 with Mobile First. And many of us are writing about this and reading about this, saying internet 3.0 will be about local languages and local innovation. If the next 600 million folks will start using the internet, English will not be their first choice of communication. So, what is the opportunity size? Huge. And the second is the adoption cycle.

Most marketeers in India have just implemented essential CRM tools, some level of marketing automation. In fact, our research shows that less than 50% marketing teams have implemented some level of automation. We're just about to move from batch and blast mode. So, we just moved to the next level of automation to do personalization at scale. And here comes the next big opportunity where you're talking about 15, 20 languages. So, it's going to be very challenging.

We've just managed to bring the content line item on a marketing budget in the last few years. And suddenly, you have to have now subline items for different teams doing different language content. The third part is the automation, which is where I see opportunity. If you look at things like voice search, some of you alluded to the local content not being very search-friendly, discoverability, because it's the written text. And some of you talked about the higher level of electricity in India. How do you tackle that?

Google says 20% of the searches in India are already voice searches. And they're saying in the next two years, 2020, it will become 50% or more. So, all search queries on Google, thanks to the interfaces on smartphones, Alexa, and all that stuff, it's going to move towards voice search. So, voice search is one such opportunity I see. The second is video content. I was watching cricket last week, India, Sri Lanka series. And I was on this OTT application, and I was looking at the media options.

English, there were about 270K, 2.71 lakh viewers online, concurrent viewers. There was 3.5 lakhs on Hindi. And just out of curiosity, I switched to Telugu, and they had some 3.2 lakhs concurrent users. So, I think this is the level of it woke me up. So, this is the one part which will challenge us, and this will make us think about that part. If you look at machine learning, if you look at chatbots, for example, you're seeing a lot of examples of chatbots being language agnostic. They can speak to you in multiple languages.

And when you click on a broken conversation saying, I'm not happy with my experience, it takes you to a live call center where, again, it can be the language of your choice. So, I believe the technology is here to help. But personalization at scale, we have an issue in terms of complexity, and that can only be solved through the next level of marketing automation. With that, let me stop here and see if you take a question. So, in this session with Ashna, and even you mentioned that creating content and products in vernacular

for all the micro markets that exist in India is a costly affair, right? So, how do you think technology playing a role in really making it cost effective, both for content creators as well as marketers, to really get us to that inflection point, which is a question I asked earlier also. So, how do you think technology playing a role, and what you guys are doing to make it cost effective at scale to enable that transformation? Technology, the power of computing, the computing engines are becoming very powerful.

You're carrying more power on your smartphone than probably a lot of your desktops and laptops in 10 years back, right? So, the computing engines are getting a lot more horsepower to drive. What's been lacking in the last five to seven years is the conversational UI, the chatbot technology, for example, and being able to decipher your voice and do voice-based recognition. That all is changing very fast. So, I don't believe from a content production perspective, you'll see massive cost reduction because of technology usage,

but distribution, deployment, and tracking usage, and conversion metrics is where you can see a lot more scale because of automation. So, you can actually personalize at scale, though content creation will maybe still be a laborious, time-consuming, cost-sensitive process. Thank you, Buneet. Fantastic.