Our ability of impacting campaign beyond numbers translated into wins at IDMA: Vipul Kedia – exchange4media MAAS Platform

The 12th edition of e4m Indian Digital Marketing Awards (IDMA) 2021 was marked by some momentous wins. A slew of brands managed to shine through the storms with clutter-breaking work in a rather difficult year.

Despite the odds, brands and agencies displayed resilience and stole the show. Recognizing these champions, our interview series will feature chats with the big winners from IDMA 2021. Today we speak to Vipul Kedia, Chief Data & Platforms Officer & Head – MAAS India, on the agency’s spectacular victory at the event, staying on the top of the digital game and more.

What do you attribute the brand’s big win at IDMA to? What according to you made the work clutter-breaking as it managed to fetch the accolade contesting and cutting through reams of entries?

When we partnered with RummyCircle to build their user acquisition campaign, we built a mobile-first strategy that targeted the high-affinity audiences of 25-45 years of age. For us, the campaign was not just about getting paid players to the brand, but making RummyCircle a platform that was approachable to one and all. A unique user discovery campaign around the OEM or native app stores helped us to deliver personalized recommendations using vernacular display and video ads across multiple mobile channels. We were successful in impacting the campaign beyond numbers, creating a high-recall campaign to improve customer engagement. This recipe for success is what translated into big wins at the IDMA for us!

What according to you are the elements that make award-winning, clutter-breaking digital campaigns and what is the right approach to reach out to consumers during these trying times?

Today, performance and brand strategy converge at an interesting point where performance marketing campaigns cannot function without speaking the same language as of the brand’s promise.

High-quality display and video creatives using images and content that are relatable to the target audience helps to reverberate the message of making RummyCircle a platform accessible to all fans of card games. Prioritizing vernacular content also helped us to establish an intimate relationship with the users beyond the metro cities. Marrying the creative strategy with the right AI/ML algorithms, our MAAS platform helped to identify high-affinity audiences with geo, city and pincode-based targeting, and integrate mobile as a key channel for user acquisition. By prioritizing visibility on OEMs, we were able to offer a significant uplift in potential users discovering the app.

In such uncertain and turbulent times, how has the brand ensured that it stays ahead of the game when it comes to the digital marketing space?

For brands, it is essential today to understand that in such unprecedented times they cannot keep all their eggs in one basket. Making smart marketing choices means quickly learning and unlearning to be able to cope with changing context. Working with MAAS, brands like RummyCircle are able to test with multiple channels of supply including multiple direct apps, programmatic supply, OEM placements, social and many other channels. Depending on what channel of supply works for UA, we then double down but are not married to just one channel!

What are the trends in the digital marketing space that you see gaining momentum as we go forward?

Digitally disruptive, highly personalised marketing is the marketing of the future. Creatives have to speak the language of the users whether it is through prioritization of vernacular content, or by understanding user research, motivation and behavioral analytics on why certain personals click on the ads. Contextual targeting is going to only get bigger from here as debates around data privacy become stronger. I also see a lot of focus for user acquisition will be given to a multi-channel approach integrating app + web.

As the competition in the digital space heats up for brands, what would be your advice to brands and agencies when approaching the digital space?

Mobile has become even more central since the pandemic as the usage has picked up among all demographics. This also means the advertising space is only going to get more competitive as more and more brands reach out to users on mobile. As brands continue to get the attention of the new-age users, going beyond metro cities, video formats and vernacular should be placed centrally in the marketing plans. I would also place an equal emphasis on tracking, attribution and optimization by bringing your app marketing efforts under a single unified system rather than having a holistic approach to your user acquisition. With unification, advertisers can really see a bigger picture on where their ad budgets are spent, how their ads are served and how each channel is working to deliver their KPIs on a single dashboard, making it more impactful for them to make optimization decisions.