Marketing ShOTTs with Abhik Sanyal, SVP & Head – Consumer Marketing at DSP Investment Managers Pvt Ltd
Marketing ShOTTs – a platform for CMOs and industry thought-leaders to gather and share insights, tips, and trends from the world of advertising that fuel marketing strategies for top brands.
In this edition, Abhik Sanyal, SVP & Head – Consumer Marketing at DSP Investment Managers Pvt Ltd, talks about their association with EPL and more.
What is your brand’s vision and mission?
At DSP Mutual Fund, we are obsessed with helping people invest better, and responsibly so. This investor-centric philosophy holds true across everything we do, from our transaction platforms and digital journeys, marketing and education strategies, social media channels, blogs and videos, sales approaches, and fund manager framework communication.
We want investors across India to make sound investment decisions intelligently, thoughtfully, and unemotionally so they earn favourable outcomes not by chance but by design- via responsible financial planning.
Hence, across the entire firm, our collective focus remains on encouraging rational decision-making, helping investors set the right expectations by not just considering the upside as they invest but also the potential risks involved, helping them understand the need for different products, asset allocation and diversification, as well as recognizing the right behaviours that can help improve investment outcomes, and more.
What was your brand’s approach on Disney+ Hotstar?
We have been partnering with Disney+ Hotstar for a long time now, especially on Sports. Our primary focus has been on two of the biggest sporting events that Indians and the entire world enjoy – Cricket and Football.
We have advertised on multiple India-cricket series, including those against Australia, England, South Africa, West Indies, and more. Our presence via Hotstar enabled us to reach a premium, affluent, highly engaged audience.
We were present as a sponsor for the English Premier League last year for some parts of the season. This year, we are running our campaign on live matches that the big teams play and are also visible on the post-game highlight packages for every EPL game of the season.
While our choice of ad formats and strategy helped us optimize our spends and reach, our outlier creative messaging ensured we were noticed by our audience. We believe there are multiple parallels between sports and good investing, especially the values that can lead to good outcomes in both domains. Our association with sports will hopefully bring out some of these in a fun and memorable manner.
Why is EPL an important property for your brand?
Being present on Hotstar for the English Premier League’s entire season gave us the opportunity to reach highly engaged, affluent, premium audiences for 10 months of the year.
Club football viewers tend to be extremely passionate and loyal, which means they keep returning to watch their team no matter what happens across the season, for every single game. There is also a good mix of demographics & psychographics here. The love for football cuts across all ages – we saw a healthy mix of young as well as older audiences. And then, football viewers tend to be quite knowledgeable, do their research, and love getting involved in game-related conversations – a good set of qualities that can make for a great investor too.
At DSP, we often say that a key principle that investors would do well to remember is “Don’t Stop Playing.” This resonates very well with sports in general, and with football specifically, where anything can happen till the last minute and beyond.
How would you evaluate the success of your campaign and partnership with Disney+ Hotstar?
The primary objective behind our sports campaigns with Disney+ Hotstar is top-funnel oriented: to help build visibility, brand recall, and affinity for DSP Mutual Fund. Hence, we simply look at metrics that help us track the same, both via Disney+ Hotstar and third-party measurement solutions.
We also track derivative metrics, such as correlations with search trends, online mentions, web traffic, platform adoption etc. as indications of interest in the brand, as more direct business-related metrics such as actual ‘conversions’ are difficult to attribute to such campaigns directly.
According to you, what is the next big trend in video marketing?
I try not to make predictions about what is going to be the next big thing, especially when it comes to video marketing, as this space is incredibly dynamic.
From the increased use of self-shot video formats, videos that help make sense of the ’right-now,’ live streams, short-form videos, long-form storytelling, user-generated content, augmented reality, shoppable videos, and what not – everything seems like it will grow bigger and better.
The only thing I can say with certainty is that every single brand out there will now be thinking about videos as a key part of their marketing strategy and keep looking for cost-effective, new-age ways of production and distribution of the same.
