Marketing ShOTTs with Gaurav Sinha, Head – Marketing and PR at Audi India
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, Gaurav Sinha, Head – Marketing and PR at Audi India, talks about how the brand’s association with Disney+ Hotstar’s Koffee With Karan season after season has led to successive impacts. Also throws light on integrations that enabled the brand to further strengthen affinity and likeability amongst its core target audience of affluent, premium, digital-first individuals.
What is your marketing strategy for Indian markets?
India is a crucial market for us, and we plan to develop this market by bringing in more products. Our strategy is to stay relevant in this VUCA world by creating consistent engagement with the customers. Today the accessibility of information and content consumption is so heightened that you cannot not be present where your audiences are. The challenge for a brand like ours would be to break the clutter and create engagement. And that is what we do! We have created direct communication with the consumer and made them our influencers to drive the brand’s message. We have noticed a growing appetite for personalised and customised experiences and are catering to these needs by leveraging digitalisation.
With an aim to reach premium, affluent audiences, what has been your approach?
Digitisation is our existing and onward approach as it’s going to change the future of the automobile industry. The coming years will see fully integrated cars with Cloud and AI technologies to offer customers multiple solutions to simplify and ease their lives. We are making the most of this digital-first ecosystem by ensuring a seamless, consumer-centric experience during the full journey from pre-purchase to post-purchase. We are focused on connecting with customers digitally. We are consistently present on all digital channels, especially social media platforms and OTT, since they clock in consumers’ extensive watch time, attention, and interest. To connect with our audience better, we are leveraging the medium to help them access all the details about the purchase and experience of the car digitally.
OTT is an integral part of your media mix. What makes it an effective platform?
To create digital experiences for consumers, at the start of 2019, we started aggressively focusing on and pushing digital narratives. We even dabbled with AR and VR solutions to give consumers a feel of owning an Audi and launched our app to have direct connect programs with the consumers. While these digital initiatives were happening, to strengthen the ongoing efforts we took on being present where our audiences were – OTT. It’s so often that consumers are surfing OTT platforms for leisure viewing and convenience. The comfort of viewing this content on the go makes it preferential for consumers. Additionally, you can do very specific targetting on OTT. Like is the case with Disney+ Hotstar; it enables advertisers to leverage deep integrations that go beyond vanilla advertising and targets your relevant audience. It facilitates audience segmentation based on interests, geography, behavioural patterns, and even spending patterns, thus ensuring the advertisers showcase the right ad to the right target audience at the right time when the audience’s interest is piqued.
What was your brand’s approach on Disney+ Hotstar?
We partnered with Koffee With Karan for two consecutive seasons. This year with the show becoming a Disney+ Hotstar exclusive, we saw a great opportunity in associating as the show’s official driving partner. Through this association, we wanted to leverage the show’s popularity amongst young, premium, affluent, 30+ aged urban audiences to showcase our newly launched Audi A8 L. The Bollywood industry is aspirational, and as a brand that is preferred by many achievers from this industry, Koffee With Karan is the perfect show for us to strengthen brand affinity amongst our core audiences as well as within Bollywood itself. In the show’s opening montage, the host – Karan Johar – arrives on the red carpet in an Audi. This sets in a desire for viewers to own an Audi and arrive like a star. The premium, super-luxurious look of the car, makes the owner feel a sense of pride
You have been associated with Koffee With Karan for two consecutive seasons. What makes it preferential?
We identified that consistent presence enables us to build affinity and recall, as well as results in incremental uplifts in key metrics. Koffee With Karan is a much-loved show that holds aspirational value. Viewers get inspired by celebrities and are interested in knowing them on a more personal level – their values, the products they use, what they are wearing, and the car they drive. Mentions in content fuel desires and influence purchase decisions. When one sees their favourite celebrity using a product, they browse through product information and aspire to make similar purchases. It is this aspirational value of the show that makes it preferential. We want the premium, affluent, 30-55 aged audiences to get a top-of-the-line, striking impression of our car. So, when at the opening montage of the show, its host Karan Johar is seen driving in an Audi and stepping out on the red carpet in style, it makes a statement!
How would you evaluate the success of your partnership with Disney+ Hotstar?
Audi enjoys a strong association with Bollywood. Some of the opinion leaders and trendsetters of our luxury range and SUVs are Bollywood celebrities. And since we are constantly partnering with young-minded achievers from this industry, our association with Koffee with Karan enabled us to further strengthen the affinity and likeability of the brand. Through our association with Koffee with Karan, we witnessed successive impacts over the two seasons we partnered on. This season being a Disney+ Hotstar exclusive, enabled us to unlock innovations to reach our target audience at scale. The results speak for themselves! We saw an average view-through-rate of 95% for Audi ads played during the show breaks. Additionally, we were able to reach 50% of our core audience on the platform through this campaign. We saw a double-digit increase in brand awareness with a +13% uplift and a good +9% uplift in brand favorability, which is ~2X higher than the platform benchmark.
