150+ Digital Media Planners/Buyers and Marketers registered their presence at the first ever edition of Panchayat – And, we can’t thank them enough
We couldn’t wait to tell you how super-duper successful the Mumbai edition of Panchayat was but then Diwali was on top of all of our minds and we didn’t want anyone to miss the big news.
A one of its kind networking opportunity, Panchayat, was organized in Mumbai on 2ndNovember 2018, by Agency Reporter with support from Wittyfeed, Times Internet Ltd, AtteroLabs and Buzzoka. With 450 odd registrations to attend, Panchayat was very well received by the A&M industry. Agency Reporter had a tough time shortlisting 190 folks who received a confirmed invite. About 150 ecstatic media planners/buyers and marketers turned up at The Bandra Project in Mumbai. The night kicked off only around 20:45 with a panel discussion on “When will content marketing start giving real value to advertisers?”. Part of the panel were Pratik Gupta, Co-founder of FoxyMoron, Reethika Nair, Lead-Digital Marketing at Kimberly-Clark, Himanshu Agarwal, Senior Marketing Manager at Reliance Mutual Fund, Aninda Gupta, Marketing Manager at Saint Gobain, Shradha Tripathi, National Sales Head at Wittyfeed with Rahul Puri, Co-founder of Agency Reporter as Moderator.
It is an important topic, especially at this point in time because for both brands and agencies, content marketing is becoming another tick mark item. Brands have been spending millions of dollars on different forms of advertising to get a minute of consumer’s attention and to score top of mind recall. Close to 10% of these budgets go to digital and in a typical setup 10-15% of that 10% is allocated to creation & distribution of content. Some brands play heavier on content out of necessity or their strategy. The question is, while almost all avenues of advertising are measurable in some or the other form, their ROI too can be ascertained but content has a unique way of being measured. You can know reach, views, engagement etc. but do you for sure know whether it has actually helped you further your sales numbers. These days, brands are extremely gung-ho on influencer marketing and Augmented Reality, but how are they ascertaining value to the brands? It’s a two-way question – what are brand’s expectations from content and what are major problems publishers and platforms face in delivering enough value to satisfy marketers?
The panel tried to seek answers to questions like
- How agencies make sure that paid content is as interesting as organic content
- Are simple brand plugins enough to address a brand’s problem statement?
- In terms of being a value proposition, is content marketing equivalent by any means to Display, Facebook or Google?
Watch the video below to get brands, agencies and publishers’ perspective on all such questions.
Everyone enjoyed late till 1 AM in the night. Surely, it was a night to remember, and the show-reel here is a proof of an age old belief that Mumbai never lets anyone down.
The next Panchayat is scheduled to be held in Guragon in December. We assure another super-duper edition soon. Till then, here’s wishing everyone a very Happy Diwali and a Prosperous New Year from team Agency Reporter.