What Rubeena Singh teaches about brand purpose

Unlike you know traditional media where you can just one way speak, you have to build conversations with the customers and you can do it in engaging ways and I think brands are gradually warming up to that and moving to that. Hi Rubina, welcome to the Hindustan Times newsroom. Thank you very much, thanks for having me here. Thank you. Starting with the first question, so the internet was supposed to be the marketer's dream, right? Rich interactive content, new way to let the brand express itself and there are so many

ways to do that on the internet with video, with rich media formats, etc. Yet most plans end up as excel sheets and I mean tiny banner ads on mobile, I mean not very interactive in the way that many of us would like. Is that a fair critique or how do you think, what are the pressures on the marketer? Why are they not able to experiment enough? I think there are two ways to look at it. You know, in my experience, you know, if you really look at it, I think the whole engagement

piece, you know, we understand that digital allows you a two-way interaction with the customer. I think it has been overused and if I dare may say abused by a lot of marketers to create, you know, kind of formats which are very intrusive and which customers don't engage with. So, there is one side of that, right? It's not just banner ads but they do a lot of rich media ads and you must have seen in the early days you saw the mouse hovers and the animations coming in and all that which were quite intrusive for the user to be there.

From there on, I think there was a whole drive on education and driving awareness to marketers saying that, okay, be more subtle and, you know, try and be a part of the whole journey in a more native way. That's when customers will interact with your brand's partner. To better ad experience. Better ad experience. That's when customers will, you know, interact with you there. So, that led to the other extreme where they said, okay, fine, let's just follow this format. I think where we are treading right now is somewhere, you know, in the next phase where

we're saying that, you know, while yes, you have to build conversations with customers. Unlike, you know, traditional media where you can just one-way speak, you have to build conversations with the customers and you can do it in engaging ways. Are we achieving some sort of a maturity in the market to be able to do that? Because I think it's also part of the curve where you are in order to have a standardized measure where people agree on some metrics and saying, okay, this is fine. Everybody follows that. Are we there yet?

I think we're long away from that and it's going to be a long way because for brands, I think the problem is that the two large platforms that they work with are walled gardens, right? And there is no unifying, but the way brands and us think about the whole marketing pieces, we keep the customer in the center and then we're trying to, you know, engage with the customer, get the customer to transact with the brand or the service and then retain the customer, right?

That's how we're thinking about it. But it is really complex today in the world where there are, you know, walled gardens. And as I see further in the industry, whether it's the other OTT platforms, also, they're also leaning into words, making their own platforms, you know, as walled gardens. So it's becoming increasingly hard. But I think as the market matures, it's still early, you know, I think for my view is we're somewhere in the middle of digital maturity as a country.

Another three to four years, we will be like the US, the UK with high levels of digital maturity. That's when things will start perhaps start converging and we'll have better, you know, ways to measure outcomes. So a follow up on the question, we were discussing metrics, right? So do we over measure or not measure enough in terms of your experience working on across projects and have you really cracked that balance? I mean… To be really candid, I think we get lost in measurement and sometimes we lose the forest for the trees, right?

Or the original objective sort of gets diluted, right? Yes, because I think what happens is, well, in my experience and I'm speaking very candidly, is that when you talk to senior marketers, they all agree on the overall business objectives, but it comes down to the execution teams. I think we get so much, you know, involved in the day-to-day execution and therefore the day-to-day metrics that we lose the larger picture. So while digital does allow the measurability, I think the way to use measurability in digital

is more like a compass, which tells you which way you're going and what is working and what is not working. So creative and media are two sides of the same coin and increasingly connected, deeply, especially in the digital sort of media. Are we seeing more convergence going forward? I think there has to be convergence, right? And the way I look at it, while there are sophisticated media optimization, you know, techniques which are available and platforms have done a lot of work

on that side. But the first interaction that the consumer makes with the brand is on the messaging. I think that's where there has to be a lot of work that needs to be put. And I spoke about personalization earlier. And today the customer is also savvy, right? What has happened with the mobile coming in the customer's hand? And at one level, while marketers get a lot of insight into how consumers are consuming content and how they are interacting with their brands, on the other

side, the customers also become more demanding. They just don't want to know new brands that are coming or the price advantage that a brand has to be loyal or be relevant to a customer. They want to see personalized experiences. You have to appeal to a lot more. It's harder to stand out in the clutter, right? It is harder. So brands definitely have to make that shift towards focusing on the creative messaging as well because they work hand in hand. How important is technology in the mix? How does an

agency keep up with that? I think technology and digital go hand in hand. You know, all we have great marketing ideas, but we need technology to be able to enable them. And that's how an agency like that we think this through when like I talked earlier, we keep the customer in the center. But at the same point in time, we say we are data driven and technology enabled. You know, at iProspect, we have a company called, for instance, last year we set up solution labs, which, you know, we brought in

technology talent, people who've had experience of a decade or two decades and just building products, not typically worked in agencies, to be able to bring to life the ideas that the marketers have in a simple fashion. So, you know, we all have to adopt technology and digital. I think that's what gives you the edge. But at the same point in time, sometimes what happens is that people get overly, you know, apprehensive about dealing with technology because it can be complex and it's ever changing. Right?

So, what we try to do is kind of simplify it and just bring the solution to the client without getting them bothered about how we deliver it at the back end. Right, right, right. So, what we try to do is we try to do is we try to do it. Right, right.