TV and digital must be viewed through the same prism: Vikram Sakhuja

Vikram Sakhuja, Partner & Group CEO, Madison Media and OOH, dissected "the logic and nonsense in the media business" at the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2023 launch. 

Sakhuja evaluated some of the media habits that have gotten engrained over the years and provided his perspective, stating that over Rs 1 lakh crore is expected to be spent on AdEx in 2023.

Advertisements nowadays, he observed, were no longer maintaining the brand that they were supposed to establish. "Isn't the aim of advertising to reaffirm the ideals that a brand represents?" he wondered. Using the example of McDonald's advertising over the years, he claimed that advertising works via reinforcement of important attributes that the company has developed by which the consumer can remember you. "With more than 90% of a brand's budget going into media costs and less than 10% going toward advertising development, I think it's a massive waste if you're not embedding these core equities into your brand," he added, addressing advertisers and creative firms.

 Sakhuja also addressed the issue of advertisers failing to tailor their advertisements to the media or platform on which they were distributed. Each medium has its own syntax and must be acknowledged for its abilities: TV/cinema for its passion, drama, and grand picture, radio as a "companion media," whereas OOH commercials must be 'impactful and visual with minimal words, where 'Less is More'.

He also weighed in on the problems of a "pavlovian response of advertising on sales". "It's critical to understand how advertising works and how communication for a specific ad campaign works. According to him, the job for newer companies is simply to raise awareness of the new proposition by increasing reach and frequency. Expectations for older businesses must be moderated because category advertising is not rising rapidly. "It is critical to re-bring and strengthen a mature or established brand's strategic or psychological equities."

Sakhuja stated that media is now much more than a transportation pipe for advertising messages, and that it provides for associative marketing, clutter-breaking impact, building higher order brand values, and so on.

When asked whether advertising is simply about "brand salience" or communication, Sakhuja stated that while he believes in brevity and non-extravagant ACDs (Average Commercial Durations), he is not a fan of "10-second edits" on premium properties like IPL. He suggested that ACDs must be controlled carefully.

He also questioned the logic of designing TV and Digital separately, given that both are video and viewing is seamless. He pointed out that it would be much easier to schedule TV and digital as one similar video plan. They must both be viewed through the same lens. He emphasized that digital video planning must be incorporated using the same measures that have proven successful for TV over the years.

Inquiring about the media TG methods used by marketers and advertisers on digital, he encouraged firms to relax their TG criteria in order to be more relevant to their business target group. He also discussed reconsidering TV planning in relation to the HSM and other regional markets.

Sakhuja summarized his presentation by stating that in today's TV media ecosystem, companies must choose markets with greater granularity, and TG with less granularity in the case of digital media.