What Rajul Kulshreshtha teaches about AI in marketing

There is no dent that is happening in TV as a medium and there is of course digital has grown. There is no doubt about it. But it is not to the extent of you know obliterating television. Hi Rajul and welcome to Brandmasters. Hi. You have been an integral part of the media story in India for over 2 decades. You have worked in various agencies, established your own. What according to you have been the biggest shifts in media planning? In one word, it is complications.

Okay, I mean there have been various kinds of complications ever since one began working. So the first time we had a, we used to have complications about print. Then as we moved around in the decade, we had television coming into fray. We had the privatization of TV. That was a yet another complication. Then we had cable and television was another complication. Now you have digital. So we have got complications right through in the last 27 years that I have been working.

And it has been fun because if everything was status quo, it would have become very boring. Right? Talking of complications and the digital landscape, it is huge. It is massive. Yes. And I mean what are the questions that the brand should keep in their mind while putting the digital in their media mix? I am of the view and this is my view, not of the organization I work for, is that a brand doesn't need to start with saying, Do I need to go digital? Do I need to go TV? Do I need to go cinema? A brand should not do that.

A brand should be asking, what do I want to do? And it has to be media agnostic. That question has to be purely media agnostic because then the brand will be able to do justice to what it really wants to do. So I think the brand has to become a little more media agnostic in its approach because there are choices. 10 years ago, 20 years ago, we knew it was television. The only question was what channel? And the only question was how much do you want to buy on the channel? So I think that has changed. Right.

Also, a lot of modern marketeers are advocates of digital transformation per se. And a lot of them believe that the traditional media is less effective or less impactful when it comes to millennials per se. Do you agree, disagree? What is your, I mean, should we change the narrative with respect to digital? I am not sure if I agree with all of it. Okay. I mean, I have children who are actually in that age group. Right. And they do not watch TV. But they watch certain kinds of television. Okay.

So it's very content-driven watching or very content-driven consumption of media. They watch a lot of digital, of course, because they are in that age group. They are the new kids on the block. But they don't give up television just because they have something else to watch. So there are a lot of things that they still want to watch, which is on TV. So I don't think that is entirely true. There is a lot more bias towards digital as a medium. Yes, of course. But a lot of brands have also realized that digital also has an inflection point.

Digital also has marginal diminishing returns. And therefore, the whole argument of top of the funnel story, saying how do I build top of the funnel? Digital does not allow you to build it as yet. So you have to have a medium that is going to build the top of the funnel. Even now, okay, you've got the thing integrated. There will come a time when it will be only digital. Five years on the line, ten years on the line. Because if TV was not important, the advertising on TV should have taken a big hit. Unfortunately or fortunately, it has not.

Numbers still stack up. There is no dent that is happening in TV as a medium. And of course, digital has grown. There is no doubt about it. But it is not to the extent of obliterating television. Also, talking of offline versus online interactions per se with a brand. Do you think it is the same or are there specific things that specific channels look for? As in when it comes to interacting with the offline medium. There isn't much scope. The millennials look for personalization. There is more of the interaction thing.

Whereas the online medium gives in that kind of leverage. Of course it does. It does. You completely agree. So that is an advantage that the online medium has. Like we heard earlier on, there is engagement versus reach as a matrix. How do you measure it is another story. But yes, there is a lot more engagement on the digital medium. People are more involved. Of course they are. There is no doubt about it. And that gives the online channels a leverage. It does. It depends entirely on the category.

Talking of future, how does the future look like when it comes to media planning? I certainly know that digital is on the rise. The problem with, not the problem, the challenge with digital is again, what do you want to do with it? What does a brand want to do with it? Okay, and how do you, I mean there are a lot more sophisticated technologies that are emerging now. There is AI, there is machine learning, there are bots and there are so many things that are coming on digital, which affect the brand and the way that consumers interact with the brand.

But yet, you know, I mean if you are on a chat with a bot, you can only do so much. You can't go the whole log until you get somebody on the other line. So Amazon has got it right to a large extent from a consumer interaction perspective, but not all brands are Amazon. Do you see an interplay of human and data driven intelligence somewhere? It will always be there. Always be there. You can't replace humans. Right. Because you will not exist. So it will be a, it will be an equal sort of.

Yeah, but I think a lot more, a lot more tech will sort of come into play. There will be a time I think that even when there will be a tech in TV as well. There are people who are already working on it.