Above & Beyond: A round-up of season one’s insights

All the 10 episodes in the series are available on The Economic Times – Brand Equity. Catch all the episodes here.

2020 and 2021 have been challenging years for consumers and businesses alike, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Marketers, especially, have had to unlearn and relearn all that they’ve known about reaching their customers.

 The lockdown also fuelled massive growth in content consumption. As a result, OTT grew to become a must-have pillar in every marketer’s campaign plan.

To help marketers navigate through the ‘new normal’, Disney+ Hotstar launched the Above & Beyond series last year. Each episode helped young marketers gain insights from CXOs across sectors such as automobile, BFSI, e-commerce, e-sports, fashion, F&B, and audio streaming, among others.

Eminent industry leaders – Maruti Suzuki’s Shashank Srivastava, HDFC Bank’s Ravi Santhanam, Spotify India’s Neha Ahuja, iD Fresh Foods’ Rahul Gandhi, JSW Group’s Parth Jindal, Acko General Insurance’s Ashish Mishra, CarDekho’s Gaurav Mehta, My11Circle’s Bhavin Pandya, Games24x7’s Sumanta Sengupta, and Max Fashion’s Jiten Mahendra – featured across episodes with insights into their experience of collaborating with Disney+ Hotstar, and how the OTT space has evolved over the last two years.

Maruti Suzuki associated with Disney+ Hotstar to engage with its online audience in a more meaningful way during the IPL and festive season. The platform worked with Maruti Suzuki to create innovative, industry-first solutions during this period. Shrivastava, the brand’s Executive Director shares that innovations helped Maruti Suzuki break the clutter and capture their customers’ attention, resulting in an 18-23% increase in purchase intent and a 1.6x increase in website visits.

Ravi Santhanam, CMO, HDFC Bank, said that the bank used Disney+ Hotstar for first-party targeting. Further, the OTT platform proved to be a boon for brand-safe storytelling and contextual advertising to the bank’s customers; it also tapped into a new customer base. Santhanam listed factors such as audience targeting, measurement metrics, premium viewers, custom geographical and interest-based targeting as the prominent reasons why OTT has become an important channel for advertisers, and especially so for HDFC Bank.

Acko General Insurance wanted to narrow the focus and create awareness in key markets while ensuring minimum spillage. After running campaigns such as ‘Spot the Logo’ and ‘Car Insurance Ke Tedhe Games’ on Disney+ Hotstar, the insurance player reached out to 47 million unique users, shared Ashish Mishra, EVP – marketing. Acko also observed an increase in ad recall by a significant 70%, along with a 24% increase in brand awareness.

With the VIVO IPL 2020  scheduled just before the festive season, CarDekho wanted to reach out to the car-buying audience. Along with reach, the brand also wanted to be contextually relevant, looking for its communication to mimic consumer behaviour. Gaurav Mehta, chief marketing and content officer, Cardekho, said that the brand understood how a new car buyer wants to get the best deal on cars. Further, consumers also sell an old car before buying a new one. Disney+ Hotstar allowed for both scenarios through sequential ads that played right after existing auto ads, highlighting that buyers can get the best deals on new and used cars on Cardekho and Gaadi stores.

In the episode featuring Games24x7, Bhavin Pandya, co-founder and CEO outlined the brand’s business challenge: to become the platform of choice for fantasy gamers. It collaborated with Disney+ Hotstar to increase its user count and engagement by 100% for My11Circle. He said that the collaboration with the platform was divided into two parts – the first one was pre-IPL where it spread the word about My11Circle as the destination to be for fantasy cricket. The second stage was about building brand recall which it did so during the first two to three weeks of the tournament.

JSW Group used the IPL on Disney+ Hotstar to amplify its reach. Parth Jindal, MD, JSW Paints and Cements, recalled that Disney+ Hotstar gave the company the ability to select the market in which they wanted to advertise. The geo-targeting campaign increased brand awareness by 15% and helped JSW reach out to 50 million subscribers in high-priority markets.

Gameskraft’s mission to become India’s most lovable gaming brand was aided by Disney+ Hotstar. Sumanta Sengupta, VP – marketing, Gameskraft, stated that the association with Disney+ Hotstar was to build its brand and also make users aware of how they wanted to take gaming into the future. The association worked for them as their top-of-the-head recall increased by more than 50%. Sengupta also stated how Disney+ Hotstar’s content offering across languages helped them penetrate the regional market in the quickest possible time.

Max Fashion Group wanted to democratise and get international fashion into a country at a great price. Jiten Mahendra, SVP – Marketing, Max Fashion, explained how Disney+ Hotstar allowed the brand to draw a much bigger pool of audiences in a curated manner. The brand’s Diwali campaign used programmatic to target certain genres, which helped them achieve a 95% view-through rate, thereby resulting in a 9% increase in brand recall.  

According to Rahul Gandhi, CMO, iD Fresh Foods, for any brand wanting to talk to millennials, Disney+ Hotstar is the obvious choice. The brand leveraged Disney+ Hotstar’s uninterrupted ad formats to reach 10-15 million impressions (for each campaign). Gandhi believes that the platform’s ability to target custom audience segments helped them amass 10-15 million impressions for each campaign.

While assessing the right fit for a marketing platform, Spotify India, looks for three things – width, depth and time. According to the brand’s head of marketing in India, Neha Ahuja, Disney+ Hotstar scored high on each of these parameters, and so the brand collaborated with the OTT platform throughout the year. After multiple campaigns on the medium, Spotify’s brand awareness increased by 7% and purchase intent increased by 9%.

The series has been produced by Hotstar Brand Lab and is available on The Economic Times – Brand Equity. Catch all the episodes here.

Stay tuned for season 2!