Scatter is covering the 13^th edition of IAMAI’s India Digital Summit held at the LaLit. This is the fourth of the reports that will be flowing in. Watch this space for more.

13^th India Digital Summit

18^th January; Day 2

Hall 3: Future of Marketing

Session 1: Welcome to the Age of MAdTech

A confluence of marketing, advertising, and technology, MAdTech is a newly emergent concept that offers to turn the digital landscape into an area of smarter functioning.

But for every concept that is still nascent, we require a conceptual breakdown. And that is what this session aimed to achieve.

Moderated by Anurag Gupta, CEO of SVG Media, the panel hosted Prasanjeet Dutta Baruah, Vertical Business Head for Facebook; Nidhi Hola, Director of Partner Marketing at Microsoft; Avadhoot Revankar, Chief Growth Hacker and Product Evangelist at Netcore; Vakul Agarwal, the Head of Digital Media & Product Marketing at Grofers; and Balaji Vishwanath, VP Digital Acquisition at American Express.

Here are the relevant takeaways, structured according to the questions they answered:

What is MAdTech?

• MAdTech is an amalgamation of marketing and advertising technologies. It can be utilised to step up your customer engagement strategy through hyper-engagement and personalisation of the target audience.
• AdTech and MarTech are the new ‘marketer’s gut’. In a hyper-connected and anticipating world, they can help deliver consumer value at a higher pace and organise the marketing ecosystem.
• The basics of marketing aren’t at a threat from MAdTech. This ecosystem will enable marketers to make data-driven decisions instead of going by educated guesswork.
• The perspective of MAdTech doesn’t fundamentally change from a B2B lens to a B2C lens. The focus remains on humanising technology from a customer’s point of view.

Why hasn’t MAdTech caught up significantly in the Indian market?

• MAdTech has had difficulties coming up due to the structural problems of the tech and product teams.
• A lack of agility practised by platforms providing this service is also a contributing factor.
• Moreover, the currently niche use-cases that MAdTech serves affects its presence in the market.
• Lastly, transparency of use becomes a major factor that holds back this phenomenon from settling in India.

Where does MAdTech fit within the marketing funnel?

• MAdTech is stitching it all together. Therefore, it has to be understood as being all-pervasive. It can’t be effective if seen within a silo. The idea is not to limit digital marketing to a specific level of the funnel, but power its entirety by tech.
• Moreover, to make audience engagement efficient, consumer conversations shouldn’t be begun again from scratch but resumed from where they broke off. Because the former leads to the disruption of communication. And the latter is made possible by MAdTech.
• However, it can’t be denied that MAdTech certainly displays the highest impact at the bottom of the funnel. This is because one already understands the user well by this point.

What are some areas that MAdTech needs to focus on?

• Mobile web and app attribution
• Web analytics and attribution
• Creation of consumer journeys that are linked with digital campaigns
• Event aggregation (creating ease in switching between different partners)

How does one choose between different products that promise MAdTech based services?

• A platform that promises top-to-bottom acquisition may not help achieve the depth of messaging desired since expertise in all domains is tough to achieve. Hence, this factor must be kept in mind when making your selection.
• Each platform adopted should be API-able.
• The service chosen should be able to implement AI and ML with agility. There’s no point if the adoption takes months at a stretch – by the time it’s implemented, the needs of the market may have changed.

Did you happen to catch the session on the changing marketing landscape? If not, click here to get all the meaty bits.