‘Content needs to be compelling’

At every event that promotes the digital medium, there are enough and more success stories that are cited about brands using the digital medium to their advantage. Invariably, all of these examples are of the large brands. In an interview with cat.a.lyst , Simon Kahn, CMO of Google Asia-Pacific, speaks about the democratisation of marketing through online content and how Google is reaching consumers across the pop-strata with newer technologies

If digital media was the great level playing field, then why don’t we hear enough about smaller brands who used the digital media to their advantage?

Actually, I would not think that’s the case. There are many examples of smaller brands which were able to harness digital media, particularly video, to demonstrate their product and the brand ethos. You could be a small shop down the street. But if you put together something that’s compelling, and it’s targeted well at the consumers you want to tap, the results can be incredibly effective.

Historically, one of the big challenges that even medium-sized brands have had is in developing the right online assets. What we are seeing now is that the ecosystem is starting to develop.

The technology is getting better where you can create that content at a lower cost as well.

In digital marketing, is targeting the right audience more difficult than creating compelling content? In that scenario, could the amplification of content take a sizeable share of the budget, thus giving an advantage to the larger companies?

I think both can be achieved. Creating compelling content requires great insight, understanding of customers and an ability to translate that into something that really resonates with consumers. Now you might be working for a large company or a small brand, but there have been cases of both creating compelling content. In targeting the content, there is a lot of data involved in reaching the right set of customers. Both large and small companies can achieve it if they do it methodically.

The first thing that a small or medium brand would want is to be recognised by their target group. Once your brand is known, then you can build attributes that convey the products and services that you want to sell. Before you even worry about creating compelling content, you should pay attention to the basics — like a website that’s mobile-friendly. Increasingly what’s becoming important is to create a relationship and conversation with customers. That’s why, it’s not about advertising but about creating interesting videos or other online content that helps customers and gives them a reason to come back and engage with your brand. That’s something you could classify as compelling content but you cannot call it an amazing ad. However, it can create a large impact as it helps the customer.

When ideas are completely out-of-the-box, doesn’t amplification help in the target audience identifying with the idea, like the case of a tea brand using transgenders?

Amplification certainly helps. You can put a lot of money into amplification, but again, if you pick the wrong channel, nothing will be effective.

When we often hear that long-format videos work well on digital media like YouTube, why is the channel looking at bring down the duration of the commercial to six seconds with YouTube Go. Isn’t that the opposite of creating long-form advertising content? Will it impact revenues?

Actually, the good thing about YouTube is that long form works wonderfully and super-short works wonderfully. The ones in the middle have historically not done as well. if we look at Asia-Pacific, the average duration of the best ads is four minutes.

If you look at American insurance company Geiko, it has done these amazing 15-second ads that really draw you in to see what really happened. I think super-short can be quite effective.

It’s really the first four-five seconds where you have to create impact and grab the customer’s attention.

With the six-second ad, virtually every ad on YouTube Go becomes a paid ad, unlike the earlier version where advertisers did not pay for ads that were skipped?

With YouTube Go, the True View is not an ad format that makes sense. We still need to monetise the platform. We still need to pay YouTube creators. Most importantly, we believe that it’s great for consumers, as it’s a product that really works well for them.

The war seems to be on bringing down data costs for customers. Whatever Reliance Jio promises to do with 4G, Google seems to be attempting even with a 2G network. Is the vision to deliver data faster and better despite the bottlenecks in the network?

I think that what we want to do is what resonates and works best with consumers.

We have a variety of consumers — some have big data plans, are less price-sensitive, have access to better networks and are fine with heavy data consumption products.

We have products that work for them. One of the things we have done in the last couple of years is to also look at the needs of consumers who are cost-conscious, have access to slower networks.