The New Year is here and with it will come a host of new marketing challenges. Every marketer will be busy trying to craft new strategies for a more effective marketing campaign. Given that media is the single largest marketing investment for most brands, here are the questions likely to be uppermost in marketers’ minds:

•What are the key trends in media for next year?

•How will these trends impact and/or alter my marketing plan?

•Can I predict my marketing investments with these changes?

•How does my ‘communicate strategy’ need to change with this changing media landscape?

Not all questions can be answered every December for the following year. Also, this so-called trend is continuous and does not have any yearly pattern or fixed seasonal dates of change. All we can attempt is to try and spot these trends early and at best estimate their impact on our marketing plans for the coming month/s.

New brands, bigger budgets: New-age brands are in a hurry. We will see new brands wanting to score instantly on awareness and consideration. These brands will redefine age-old benchmarks and will capture the imagination of media owners and agencies and consumers. They will disrupt the market with innovative product offerings and media strategy to create the buzz. Media will innovate to keep pace with their demands and metrics. The launch of e-commerce on social media is a case in point of disruptive innovation by media to retain their audiences.

Sporting content will mature: Emerging sports such as hockey, kabaddi, badminton and tennis will continue to flourish. Brands will invest beyond cricket as entry-level costs will be lower and risks, too, lower. With more international sporting channels slated to launch later in the year, sports content will see new formats being beamed into Indian homes. A new category of advertisers will emerge in sports and this will be for the long term. Who knows, the next Olympic Gold is not far away ….

Mass media will offer segmentation (audiences and markets): On the one hand, the high-definition (HD) subscriber base will continue to grow. Given its growth, broadcasters will launch more HD channels. This will offer advertisers a premium audience with mass reach. This could also lead to premium content in English (e.g. Quantico ) or Hindi (like Series 24 ) being produced in India for global audiences. The regional channels, too, will get stronger, led by better content and investments by broadcasters. Segmentation of communication by markets will also be important to engage with the consumers. Local brands will use this to gain market share and dominance locally.

Media metrics will be linked to business results: More and more marketers will evaluate the impact of their media investment on metrics which are led more by their business data rather than media data. The process of conversion enabled by dotcom companies will likely usher in an era of returns on investment led by business metrics rather than media metrics. Both media companies and agencies will have to embrace this era and be more accountable for the business results.

Social media will give early signs: No marketer will be able to ignore brand conversations in the social space. There will be early signs of success or failure or corrective action. It will become critical to aggregate social data. Brands will have to invest in a command centre where they are able to channelise multiple streams of data together to aid decision-making in real time. Responding to your consumers in 24 hours is 22 hours late!

Traditional English print will develop a new and creative relevance in marketing communications: The premium positions will be back in demand on the highly circulated dailies and the premium magazines will help target micro and niche demographics of flexible and frequent disposable incomes. This provides advertisers with an opportunity to effectively establish a new level of brand equity, one that can be targeted extremely precisely but more importantly, to the most vibrant and socially driven demographic.

Traditional regional print will continue to grow, more digital than physical. Players in the space will gear up towards digital transformation and witness growing adoption online with smartphone proliferation in smaller markets.

TV substitute, finally: Lower data costs, higher adoption of smartphones, content investment for mobile audience and live streaming of mass events will lead to a substitute for TV gaining scale and acceptance. This will also pave the way for customised advertising. Micro-targeting will be possible by having access to information on media consumption on digital at an individual level.

Aggregation in OOH & cinema: Unorganised sectors of more than 50,000 vendors will get consolidated. The premium multiplex chains and OOH locations will get organised first. This will lead to all small towns and single screens also coming together, giving brands a seamless window for brand-building.

Multi-screen consumption: The bulk of our media consumption will be in front of a screen. As consumers balance their time between smartphones, tablets, PCs and televisions, they are learning to use these devices together to achieve their goals. Marketers will spend more and more time understanding the impact of these screens on consumer behaviour and devise communication strategies that are linked to each screenRather than investing in a medium, brands will invest in the path to purchase.

These are exciting times in media. The magnitude and the pace of change is unprecedented. We all need to be ready to un-learn and learn for a better 2016!

(Navin Khemka is Managing Partner, Maxus)

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