ET – Insights

The advertising industry has gone through a dramatic evolution of measurement metrics over the years.It started with Impressions – was followed by Reach – count of the number of people reached within a planned frequency. As digital marketing evolved, so did the metrics, with a generation that focused on CTR (Click-Through Rate), VTR (View-Through Rate), and Dwell Time – how long a user spends on an ad. Then, we advanced into Viewability, emphasizing the importance of ads actually being seen. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC) define a viewable impression as: • Ads: 50% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window for a continuous 1 second • Larger ads: 30% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window • In-stream video ads: 50% of the ad’s pixels must be visible in the browserwindow for a continuous 2 seconds While these metrics remain relevant, the industry soon shifted towards Brand Lift Studies, a more advanced approach using machine learning to split target groups into exposed and controlled segments, measuring the relative lift in brand perception and awareness. Now, we’ve entered the age of Attention Metrics, with a growing focus on how much time users spend on an ad and, more importantly, whether that time translates into meaningful engagement. As digital complexity increases in terms of fragmented ad tech, fragmented /distracted audience, and content clutter – the metrics became more granular, concerning personal attention. Today, marketers are pulling out all the stops, from innovative media strategies to compelling content, to capture user attention. But what exactly is attention? Is it simply measured by the seconds spent on an ad, or is it the emotional connection a consumer feels with the brand? There is no universal acknowledged definition of Attention ! Capturing attention requires a mix of frequency, targeting, and innovation, all of which emerge from careful planning. In today’s cluttered landscape, every brand is fighting for the same thing: attention. This competition has pushed marketers to be more creative, introducing clutter-breaking ideas and moving beyond traditional norms where media was the hero. Start Strong -Target high-intention inventory from the start Scale Smart – Expand your reach to high value-prospects Maximize net conversions – Optimize campaign for conversions. Learn & optimize- Customise to contextual insights and learn from what’s working Less is more.Most folks don’t get that !Most folks don’t get that at all !!

To focus on customer facing processes without building inherent excellence is not strategy To control every consumer interface and imagine it builds consumer love is not strategy To fuss about the the minutiae of everyday business with elaborate trackers is not strategy To mistake mere consistency for brand excellence is not strategy To mistake the customer to be a nameless , faceless cutout with exact same needs and wants as any other in the segment is not strategy To care more about objects than ideas  is not strategy To conclude vision- mission type texts over a day’s discussions is not strategy A light bulb was not invented by inspecting the candle endlessly. It came from a love of light.

We’re thrilled to announce that Shubhranshu Singh, Chief Marketing Officer at TATA Motors, will be our keynote speaker at the 2nd Edition of the Marketing Mavericks Summit 2024! 🌟 Join us on 27th September 2024 at the Taj Santacruz, Mumbai, as Shubhranshu Singh explores “THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN THE AGE OF AI”. This is a unique chance to dive deep into how human creativity and empathy remain central to impactful marketing in our tech-driven world. Date: 27th September 2024 Venue: Taj Santacruz, Mumbai Time: 10:00 AM onwards For more details, reach out to us at: DNB_India-Lrnslns@DNB.com #MarketingMavericks2024 #MarketingExcellence #Innovation #AIinMarketing #Networking #MarketingEvents #DunAndBradstreet

The End of the Beginning: In a chat with Storyboard18’s editor Delshad Irani, Shubhranshu Singh, Chief Marketing Officer, Tata Motors CVBU, and Rohan C., Chief Digital Officer at Havas Media India, talk about how AI is changing social media and the impact on consumers and brands.  Watch Media Dialogues With Storyboard18 on CNBC-TV18 on Sunday @10:30pm

Content is king, but distribution is kingdom, states Shubhranshu Singh, chief marketing officer, CVBU, Tata Motors, in a conversation with Delshad Irani. #MediaDialogues #media #marketing #socialmedia #advertising

Delighted to be on the apex jury for the very prestigious Campaign Asia-Pacific ‘40 Under 40’ awards , 2024! The Campaign 40 Under 40 awards are esteemed for their wide selection, meticulous process adherance and rigour.  Visit https://lnkd.in/gj4H_AQN to learn more and submit nominations.  The deadline is July 31, 2024. #40Under40 #CampaignAsia #APAC

Tata Motors announced its demerger in March 2024, splitting into two separate entities–the commercial vehicles business and another for passenger vehicles, including electric vehicles and its prized Jaguar Land Rover. Now, Tata Motors Commercial Vehicles is gearing to go public in FY 2026.  Revving up for this milestone, it will witness several transformations over the next 12 months as the company shifts its gears to focus on functionality. Chief marketing officer Shubhranshu Singh thinks this an opportunity for him to grow and keep communication with creativity at the core of his leadership. “Creativity is not a choice, it’s a must-have,” he tells Campaign India, while emphasising his company’s focus to engage the creator economy and build genuine, believable human stories that celebrate not only its offerings but also the stakeholders at large. Contrary to the notion of data insights holding creativity back, Singh opines that numbers play a massive role in determining the course of creative leads. He believes that insight-building plays a significant role in enriching a brand’s creative journey while the inherent conflict between insights over the most effective communication leads to fascinating decision-making. What makes it even more interesting for Singh is that there’s no absolute target group for the brand. “Commercial vehicles cover the entire spectrum of the economic activities in the nation. There’s no one consumer, but various consumer realities for us.” From tapping into the steep online growth to keeping curiosity at the helm of affairs, Singh delves into the company’s entry into different language markets, its commitment to the creator economy, why macro and nano influencers are more engaging for the brand and how he is working to cut down dependency on external partners while building the creative ideation funnel in-house. Source: Campaign India

This is not his first foray into AI since he co-founded Openai, then left after a rupture with Sam Altman. In his view, Tesla is an AI company not an automobile maker. Nvidia announced a booming revenue report a few days ago and now looks set to become the most valued enterprise on earth. Meanwhile, Elon Musk pulled in $ 6 billion and some change for his venture and his claim is that human-level artificial intelligence is coming next year. Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has completed this striking fundraising achievement at an impressive $24 billion valuation. Backed by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, xAI is poised to potentially vie with AI giant OpenAI for industry dominance. This is not his first foray into AI since he co-founded Openai, then left after a rupture with Sam Altman. In his view, Tesla is an AI company not an automobile maker. Big tech can’t seem to mouth enough Al-powered hope statements. Everywhere confidence trumps competence. The more the hype the more the eventual harm. It sure seems like the ‘Al hype transcontinental flight’ has taken off the long runway whereas in fact it may be already preparing for its eventual descent. We need only focus on what AI can do, how well can it do these things and productivity will boost returns? AI ventures must generate returns for stakeholders over the medium term. Several glitchy introductions touted as improvements /innovations are revealing that the rate of improvement for Als is slowing. It naturally makes new ,hitherto unimagined, applications rarer still. Building and running AI on scale is a capital guzzler. What is more , competing Al models are coming into the market continuously whereas the earlier ones are not turning any profits. On the one hand base AI is getting commoditized but on the other hand staying ahead required spending. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini-need more data than any steam engine burnt coal. It has to be fed every moment. Having trained on more or less the entire internet, there isn’t much left. The free, open-source models, like those from Meta and Mistral, are nearly as good as the current leaders. If the game shifts from innovative add ons to base cost management, it will need scale of subscription to remain afloat. Read more: Go Google or Google Gone? Fate of search business in judge’s hands Al startups have already started to go belly up or selling out to the leaders of the pack. The Wall Street Journal reported on the exit of the Inflection AI’s team to Microsoft whereas the CEO of Stability AI cut away in March. A report in the Wall Street Journal quoted Sequoia’s estimate of $50 billion dollar having been spent on chips from Nvidia to train Al in 2023. But the revenue for all players is only $3 billion in revenues. Google, now offering AI-generated summaries across billions of search results, will eat into its margins since redirection and programmatic advertising is its main source of revenue. Clay Shirley said “Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors”. I think it applies to this case a well. How many corporations have put Al at work in their mainstream functions? How many license and pay for Al tools for their workforce at large? Being intrigued by Al and bearing a cost to use it and add value are two very different things. Read more: Excel – That is the powerpoint of it: Read Shubhranshu Singh’s take on how Excel forever changed business and marketing Financial Times reported in December that OpenAI’s revenue was at least $2 billion, and would double by 2025. But OpenAI has nearly $90 billion market valuation and at some stage the multiples will look hyper optimistic. This is the case for Anthropic having raised 8 billion dollars and being valued at 18 billion. Is Al a tool or master? Is it an enhancer of productivity or -in certain classes of jobs- entirely a substitute for human effort? Training people and building habits /workflows remain barriers to the swift adoption of Al. Al may well be radically disruptive . It may well transform jobs and human lives. But at its current pace, it is likely to take more fuel and cover less distance. Hence, its viability is a question. A great tool is that which has the least variance of performance. I would say it’s hype over hope for now. Shubhranshu Singh is VP and CMO, Tata Motors CVBU. He writes Simply Speaking, a special column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

The biggest tech antitrust trial – against Google’s dominance in search – is coming to a close. A ruling against it would limit Google’s search empire and possibly result in the breaking up of the company, writes Shubhranshu Singh in his Storyboard18 column Simply Speaking. One of the most important antitrust cases in history is being considered in a federal court in the US. The Department of Justice has alleged that Google is a monopoly that abuses its power over the internet by striking anticompetitive deals for prime placement of its search engine, while Google contends its dominant market share is the result of a superior product. It’s the biggest tech antitrust trial ever and comes as its multiplicative impact could go far beyond Google. The fate of Google’s search business is now in the hands of Judge Amit Mehta, as closing arguments concluded in the landmark trial. It will also lead to a direct impact on the app economy. Google has grown continuously in the past 25 years from its founding. In terms of revenue, valuation and most importantly, active engagement with consumers, it has come to define big. Google’s problems are bigger than just the antitrust case in discovering its next era as a corporate leader. Googlers have always prided themselves on solving the toughest problems in computer science. The money was more a consequence than the target. Dominating the internet The Google brand is its most precious asset. Its many businesses all feed back to the brand. Its culture is deeply identified with the brand. Therefore, if the big idea would be for Google to become a data fiduciary like a bank is with our money, no amount of encryption will help if the brand is rendered weaker. It has the clout to aspire thus. Daily, billions of people around the world query on Google Search, email with Gmail or use Google Maps to get to their destination. The tech giant dominates the internet economy. It has consistently spent more than almost any other group or company on lobbying. Its business expansion has been fuelled also by buying hundreds of firms. In 2023, it generated $307 billion in revenue, larger than the GDP of Finland, Qatar, and Peru. Its revenue taken as equivalent to GDP would place it on rank 45 in the list of nations. A ruling against it would limit Google’s search empire. The modus operandi of paying billions to secure prime placement for its search bar on Apple’s iPhones or other web browsers would become a thing of the past. Potentially, it would be forced to sell off the Chrome browser and open up competition to other search engines. The fundamental question is whether Google stifled competition and hence harmed consumer interest by becoming the default search engine through deals with phone makers and internet browsers. The Justice Department case has a reputational impact that Google did not keep its monopoly via great innovation and search, but through dealmaking that effectively made it difficult for any competition search engine to thrive. Two extenuating circumstances may come to Google’s aid – one that the definition of search itself is broad: it happens on Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok. Secondly, it claims that the literal contracts with Apple, Firefox or Samsung are not actually exclusive, but still render it as a default. If the ruling is that Google isn’t a monopoly, it will demolish the arguments of the state and many others who say Big Tech has grown too powerful. That will apply in mutant versions to all including Amazon and Apple. In any case, there is likely to be some injunctive relief in case the ruling restricts itself to the nature of the contracts, and that, going forward, such contracts cannot be entered into. However, when the state went after Microsoft in an anti-trust investigation, it had tried to break it up. So, potentially the government could ask Google to stop certain practices, direct it to divest businesses, or order its break up into separate entities. Google competitors have accused it of branding its power to suppress competition links to travel, maps, and reviews, among others. Let’s understand the Google world. Google has nine products with more than a billion users each. 1. Google search — 4.9 billion users Google is the world’s most important search engine, and it truly dominates the space, controlling 92 percent of the market, which equates to 4.9 billion people (data from StatCounter and the International Telecommunications Union). This is the business at the core of the government’s allegations. Microsoft’s Bing comes in second with a paltry 3 percent. Google is the world’s No. 1 site, with more than 86 billion visits a month, according to internet data provider Similarweb. Now Google has begun putting AI-generated answer summaries, which are trained on content scraped from the web, at the top of search results for more of its users. That could squeeze publishers who rely on traffic from Google for their survival. 2. Chrome — With 3.4 billion users Chrome is the world’s most popular web browser. The vast majority of desktop computers and a huge portion of mobile phones have Chrome as the default browser. This is how Google gets the ability to keep its search engine front and centre, but also allows it to track people all over the internet, giving it incredible amounts of granular data on online behaviour, especially when it comes to advertising and e-commerce. This edged out Microsoft Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox. Microsoft’s new browser, Edge, is built off a version of Chrome. 3. Android More than 3 billion people use smartphones running Google’s Android operating system, the company said in 2021. That is around 70 percent of all the smartphones in the world. Apple’s iOS is a distant second at 28.5 percent. Android has become the default operating system for most of the world’s phones, hence Google can put its other services, including Search, Maps, YouTube and its app store, in front of billions

“I believe Excel is the single most transforming element of what has made modern business what it is. It was like a cannon to the ramparts of feudal management. It blew old style marketing and creative industries to bits,” writes Shubhranshu Singh in his Storyboard18 column Simply Speaking. If capitalism had its version of Agitprop, its two main heroes would be PowerPoint and Excel. They would be celebrated as tools that revolutionised and transformed business management. Without a doubt, they have had a massive impact. Whether as carriers of prior information, facilitators of analysis or creators of meta thinking, they established themselves as the ‘always on’ tools especially for those who were set to climb the ladder fast. This impact helped create, sustain and grow the mystique of the business mandarin. In myriad ways, they were invaluable to the ‘behind-the-curtain’ players who formed the establishment glue, the grout in the interdepartmental tiles as also to those who did customer facing razzle dazzle. In terms of packaging and distribution – PowerPoint and Excel came to hold sway. But, are they fit for purpose and has this impact only been positive? PowerPoint is more fundamentally flawed. It is a poor tool and has made both medium and message shrink. Intrinsically, it isn’t suited for what it is meant to accomplish in terms of clear, engaging, sharp communication. Sharp imagery, a few bullet points and a narrative often trumps thorough analysis and case supporting documentation. It is used indiscriminately for big bold ideas as well as the minutiae. It only follows a sequential, linear narrative. Could a general plan battle with PowerPoint inputs? Could an advocate convincingly argue with it in a court of law? Is it telescopic or microscopic in its net effect? When done differently, it often gives rise to another issue, namely over stuffed presentations. But saying “apologies for a busy slide” is all it takes to brush away the illegible density. I have seen multiple slides in one or beastly innovations such as one slide with multiple links that go to other slides only to return to the nominal single slide. The very ephemeral nature of such an arrayed display – boring or bedazzling – as it may be means that each slide appears for a few seconds before a puzzled, distracted or engaged audience. The etiquette of posing questions together at the end means the ‘peak end effect’ inevitably takes hold. Often, all you remember is the high point and the conclusion. The celebration of PowerPoint is however a symptom and not the cause. Reductive, shorthand summarisation has become the preferred mode for collective discussions. There is not much bandwidth for detailing. An impactful image becomes a substitute for a cogent argument rather than a support for it. I am all for visually attractive, clutter breaking and compelling imagery but must the horse ride the man? Truly, does a picture say more than a thousand words? When the need for quantitative substantiation is felt, numbers march into the cramped space and infographics take pride of place. But it’s self-selection of data that happens most of all. People choose to see what they want to see. PowerPoint is a great tool for advocacy but not critical analysis. The recipe has become more important than the dish. There is also the futility of the pre read. PowerPoints are often circulated prior to meetings and distributed far and wide. Hence there is an urge to be armed with additional content to drive specific agendas during meetings. A simple litmus test is whether a presentation is self-explanatory without the presenter. I am not disputing the critical role of the narrative, but every presenter wants attention and that leads to message mutation. The detailing must be to a level of sufficiency. Brevity is the soul of the nitwit. If you make PowerPoint presentation an end rather than the means, you will end up making a puréed mess of your ideas, and you have no choice in the matter. Let me now deal with Excel. I believe Excel is the single most transforming element of what has made modern business what it is. It was like a cannon to the ramparts of feudal management. It blew old style marketing and creative industries to bits. It all started with the advent of the spreadsheet. This came in the early 1980s shortly after the introduction and widespread adoption of the IBM PC: VisiCalc, followed by Lotus 1-2-3, and then, of course, Microsoft Excel as a part of MS Office. Working a spreadsheet made business a malleable reality. It visually gave birth to the bottom line. Change the numbers up and the bottom line changed from red to green. Whereas real business was dealing with frictional ground realities, excel made every scenario a gamed outcome. If it could be on excel, what prevented it from being real on ground? ‘Go to market’ strategy became subservient to excel. Old style business began to look sloppy, wasteful and plain. ‘Excel men’ derived power from mathematical certainty whereas creative business was messy, loud and chaotic in comparison. Power shifted towards formality and reserve. Men became cooler than the air conditioning. You counted only if you could be counted to deliver the numbers in the cells. Financial engineering became the domain of the high-flying manager. Convening rights and allocation of resources got determined via outcomes from the spreadsheet. Excel made effects and countereffects easy to visualise and all fantasies seemed within grasp. A patina of seriousness was acquired by the excel man. He was seen as wise and careful -someone sober, clinical, precise, and forever ready. He held the cards and didn’t need to show his hand. This ex parte advisory had a lugubrious air, implied authority and was blessed with Delphic certainty. It was inherently at conflict with the hopeful, familial charters of old business. Excel created a vehicle for defining value. It made the old corps tetchy. But they had no option but to lump it. Any large