Doing Mobile Video Right with Rajesh Pantina, InMobi
Rajesh Pantina, Head of Marketing, the Asia Pacific at InMobi discusses how InMobi provides not just media buying, but also value-added services and deep insights into audience behavior. We discuss the latest trends in the digital space including the importance of leveraging mobile video, the rise of a programmatic, and growing focus on ad quality and brand safety. He shares his views on the post-pandemic scenario for marketers, and how brands should respond as digital becomes top of mind for advertisers and brands.
Research NXT: We would like to start with your journey as a marketer, current role at InMobi, and what all you have experienced from a marketing standpoint in your career in terms of how things have changed over a period of time.
Rajesh: Thanks for having me with this particular interview series. I currently handle marketing for the Asia Pacific at InMobi and that’s the entirety of b2b marketing, and I look at the regions of Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia, and ANZ.
My tryst with marketing started right out of B-school. I am a graduate of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and right out of B-school I joined InMobi. I was initially part of the digital marketing team, working on marketing intelligence, infrastructure, paid marketing, etc. so looking at all of that.
And from there I immediately transitioned into what I really love and what I really wanted to do, which was Product Marketing. I used to look at marketing for performance and monetization solutions and did that for a good two years across markets, including North America, even China for a while.
Then I moved into this regional role in India where I focused on how companies can grow with marketing as a growth lever. So that is one of the big transition phases as well. After that, I picked up the mantle for Asia Pacific marketing in April last year.
Research NXT: Could you also give a brief about the InMobi business. You now have Glance which is a consumer-facing product, so please tell us what do you provide to marketers on the b2b side and the b2c side of the business?
Rajesh: InMobi started off about 11 years ago as an in-app advertising platform. What we were trying to do was just help advertisers who wanted to showcase their ads to consumers, buy quality inventory on apps where consumers are spending time.
Today, we are InMobi Group which has three companies. One of them being the InMobi Marketing Cloud which is our traditional in-app advertising platform, and we’ve added a new product in its portfolio, which is our mobile market research platform, called InMobi Pulse. What it does is it makes it the most unified marketing cloud for advertisers. Where people can, not just target or deliver ads, but they can also get insights including the voice of the consumer and use a lot of second-party data to gather insights about consumers today. So that kind of completes the cycle of understanding and then offering media for the client in our mobile marketing cloud.
The second company is Trufactor. Trufactor is our data business, which was created after the acquisition of Sprint’s Pinsight Media in North America, the mobile data and advertising company. With that we are focused only on North America largely as a market, where we are trying to provide anonymous data to say government bodies, or planning bodies looking at constructing infrastructure or even telecom networks trying to understand how to introduce 5G infrastructure. So it goes beyond advertising as a use case where data can play a huge role.
The third company is Glance, our first B2C offering. It’s basically called LockFeed – in the sense that it’s a newsfeed on your lock screen, wherein consumers need not go into any app specifically, but can immediately get the latest videos, news etc. And all of this is personalized based on interests they have and the kind of engagement they’re showing on the platform on a day to day basis.
So that’s the InMobi group.
The biggest learning that we have had is that 10-15 seconds is the most optimum duration of video ads that anybody should be creating on mobile.
Research NXT: We recently published a study on content marketing best practices in India, launched at NASSCOM last year. One of the key observations was the usage of Video. Video-based content strategies are the most popular content strategies that marketers opt for, and we see Video is being consumed a lot. So how is InMobi helping marketers with video-based content strategy? Do you have any products around that?
Rajesh: Before I go into precisely what InMobi does when it comes to video advertisers, let me give just a bit of context in terms of the evolution of media advertising. We all know that video has been there for a while, and the science of video advertising is well understood. Because, with the advent of TV, video has been preferred over print and audio, and it’s been attractive to advertisers for a long time.
Video is always something that combines the visual and auditory elements to provide multiple cues to trigger consumer responses. However, what is important to understand is the changing preference and behaviors when it comes to video on digital media. And that I think has been a big revelation for advertisers today, because digital has taken time actually to become popular. So, within that, trying to understand how video influences and impacts consumers, has been something that has required a bit of evangelization.
Building up to that, there have been a few macro factors that have influenced consumer behavior with the 4G adoption and smartphone accessibility, which has made the availability of video that much better. So, these macro factors have played a huge role in not just popularizing video per se, and making consumers think it’s something that I can clearly afford. It has therefore also brought a lot of consumers from TV on to the new medium of digital.
Given that we are now connected, so the question is how is the digital consumer behaving, right? The age of information overload has basically inculcated a behavior of either discovery or search. People are continuously sifting through the content overload and therefore there is a resultant decrease in attention spans. Microsoft research had shown that there was a decrease in attention span from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, just between 2000 to 2017.
So, how video content consumption is different on digital – is exactly what every advertiser is trying to understand and use to their advantage. Facebook moved from a text or image-based feed completely to a video feed and introduced a new video section. Videos mean huge dwell times for advertisers.
What InMobi does is actually helps advertisers’ leverage mobile video to the fullest, by actually designing mobile-first creatives. The same commercial used on TV on a mobile platform definitely will not work – 15-30 seconds works well on mobile. The biggest learning that we have had is that 10-15 seconds is the most optimum duration of video ads that anybody should be creating on mobile. We’ve been actively trying to evangelize this for the past 2-3 years, with our Doing Mobile Video Right campaign.
MoreGetting these kinds of insights without AI is definitely not possible. And I feel that AI can basically summarize a lot of these things beautifully and give you direct action items in a very short span of time.
Research NXT: That’s really insightful. You mentioned how you’re helping marketers with vertical video. Is there a video production option with InMobi or you’re giving them guidelines in terms of the right size, format, etc. of video, that they need to create as an ad?
Rajesh: Great question. Where InMobi is different is the value-added service.
If you look at something like a Facebook Ads Manager. What it does is it basically gives you a certain template. It asks you to input 6-7 images and ends up creating an automated video. While it does help a lot of the smaller advertisers and is definitely very useful for kick-starting campaigns, I think for the big spender, they need some hand-holding, to help them bridge the gap between conventional advertising and digital. And so, what we provide is the value-added service of our creative service teams.
So these teams sit with the brands right from the time of the creative brief to say, this is the larger concept and this is why you should think, or how you should think about it when it comes to mobile as a medium. And how can you better engage people or derive ROI from this particular medium.
One of the examples is with L’Oréal which was an award-winning case study we have done. L’Oréal was looking at one of the biggest problem statements, which is how do you drive consumer engagement at scale. Looking at the problem statement from the audience standpoint, we wanted to see how you can reach millions of people, and also get them to try something at the same time.
What we did was we created a video that played showcasing how Deepika Padukone, it’s brand ambassador, is endorsing it and immediately after we would have an AR augmented reality unit within the ad. This AR unit would capture the contours of the consumer’s face. And there would be a catalog of lipsticks at the bottom and people could try different shades of lipstick, exactly fitted to the contours of the lips. That had a phenomenal engagement for L’Oréal. So, these services are a huge value add I feel, and it really opens up the eyes of advertisers.
Research NXT: As someone at the forefront providing solutions and also observing how markets are responding, what sort of AI implementation have you seen as far as the use of marketing is concerned. And what kind of solutions do you have in that space?
Rajesh: If you look at the role of AI, I feel it is to enhance experiences for clients and help them build personalization at scale. So that is the biggest role that AI can drive, and as a result of this, every marketer will be affected by the basic formula – profit = revenue – costs. Trying to make sure that they increase revenue as much as possible, reduce costs as much as possible. AI by building a great experience, drives revenue up, but also by driving personalization at scale keeps costs low.
What we’ve been trying to do especially on the creative front is we’ll look at a few experiments over the course of last year where we analyze millions of ad events. Because we serve millions of ads on a daily basis across the globe, we can put that data to work on the creative itself. To see how AI could basically provide a guide to advertisers, or recommendations to advertisers when it comes to their creative.
MoreSo, what has happened is purposeful brand communication has become front and center.
Research NXT: Do you have any observations on how marketers are optimizing or changing strategies in the current Pandemic scenario?
Rajesh: Definitely. I think it has been one of the key things that we should be at least working on, is to enable advertisers as quickly as possible with insights, given that we sit on data from across the globe. We’ve been trying to deep dive into second-party data as well as consumer surveys. We need to understand consumer sentiment and also app usage trends so that advertisers can get the messaging right, but also get the distribution right.
A couple of thoughts that came from the insights is that we feel brands should not stop advertising. If we look at consumer sentiment, we think that brands should not stop advertising. Brands should help people in their daily lives, or at least communicate and let customers know what they are doing to ensure business continuity, or help the community at large.
When it comes to app usage, we saw it skyrocket for a majority of apps. News, of course, is huge – with people checking the news on a day to day basis. Gaming has increased in a big fashion, especially in India it has shot up because our average age is 65% under 35, so there are a lot of mobile-savvy people. Mobile is their primary screen and, in fact, the first screen that they go to. Huge spikes in gaming, but also in addition to that, we see OTT, image, and video apps, and also the new wave of social apps such as TikTok gain a lot of popularity.
We are working with a lot of agencies and advertisers alike, to drive a lot of purpose-led brand communication, because nobody wants brands to seem insensitive or creepy at these times.
So, what has happened is purposeful brand communication has become front and center.
But also, there are two categories of brands. Brands that are relevant and not relevant to consumers. By relevant, I mean, these guys are to be a part of the daily lives of consumers. And, and within relevance, there are two types – one is the very essentials – cooking or food, ready to eat, disinfectants, sanitizers, etc. which are essential. The second category is the relevant, but not essentials. Relevant in terms of helping you with your productivity, collaboration, or your daily stress-relief, which is video or OTT brands.
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