e Magus

It was a delayed flight—a rather ordinary event in the course of an ordinary day—that gave me the time to reflect. The sight around me was typical of any airport lobby: faces buried in screens, couple of overworked executives busy on their laptops, a few weary heads nodding off, and snatches of conversations filling the air. Among these was a father’s gentle voice explaining to his son that life is like a journey, much like the flight we were about to take. The comparison was simple, even obvious, but it stuck with me. Why do we so often think of life as a journey? This metaphor, at first glance, is instinctive. Life starts at birth and ends at death—one long stretch, seemingly linear, from point A to point B. We speak of careers as journeys, with "journeyman" once being a common term for someone still learning their craft, moving from one stage to another. Life has lot of adjective icons: roadmaps , milestones , break-ups, crossroads , and destinations . But is life really t...

  Quite sometime back I had posted on LinkedIn an update mentioning, in the future, agencies will be offered value based compensation by clients. Few days back I met one of my ex-colleague and he gave his own POV and also asked me to elaborate on my thoughts. Albeit the delay, this long post is just that. Alright, so picture this: the ad agency game, a whirlwind of creativity and strategy. But here's the plot twist – the traditional billing method is feeling a bit outdated. For more than 50 years, everything in the agency has changed, except the retainer fee. It is like watching multiple seasons of a TV serial but with that one character who has not changed - in looks or in personality.   Having a retainer based fee is fine. I’ve nothing against it. It’s like trying to watch a blockbuster movie on a black-and-white TV. Sure, it works, but it's not quite cutting it anymore. The problem? The usual time-based billing doesn't always sync up with what clients really want – measu...

  A Roadmap for Real-Time Personalization Campaigns Driven by AI and Data In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing and advertising, the convergence of technology, data, and AI is reshaping the industry. A paradigm shift towards personalization and real-time experiences has become the new norm. In a recent McKinsey report on personalization at scale ( https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/a-technology-blueprint-for-personalization-at-scale ), four key pillars were identified: Data, Decisioning, Design, and Delivery. While Data, Decisioning, and Delivery have seen significant advancements where big technology and consulting players - Adobe, Salesforce, Google, to name a few, are making great strides, the Design aspect remains a manual and resource-intensive process. This presents a unique opportunity for creative advertising agencies to revolutionize the industry. The untapped opportunity lies in addressing the Design pillar of person...

Few days back, thanks to surprisingly less traffic, I checked in early at the airport. Since I had time to kill and the domestic Delhi airport has nothing great to offer in terms of shopping / killing time, I too indulged in the favorite pastime of the nation, or maybe the world, I dare say - Mobile internet (social and search) What caught my attention was the OTA (Online Travel website) banner ad that kept following me. I knew it was because, I had searched for the flight details and fare on their website a few days back, and the cookies were re-targeting me, etc. Couple of thoughts crossed my mind Why were the OTA digital marketing team wasting their ad budget following a 'dead' prospect. I mean, they do not know that I've purchased the ticket from some other place (in my case, directly from the airline website). I had put my date of travel on their website, why didn't the re-targeting ads stop a day before my date of travel. From my ...

It is been a while that I wanted to write about digital marketing. Having attended various workshops and seminars on digital marketing, I realize that people were talking the same thing, using different words. The gist being that everyone was talking about digital marketing from a campaign perspective - Earned, Owned, Paid, Social Media. But Digital Marketing is much more than branding or campaign led... It is how we use the existing and emerging technology to create a positive impact on our business. My thoughts and trying to decode digital marketing The Digital Marketing overview is all about creating a seamless and effective Digital Experience (DX) for clients. The DX would address the business objectives through strategic initiatives that will address: - Speed/drive marketing objectives - Create positive impact on business objectives - Interact with the customers in a meaningful and insightful way - Future-proofing The 3 pillars that will drive DX are Cu...

Generally, I blog then tweet about it. Some instances are exception. Couple of days back, I put out a tweet  giving 5 building blocks for digital strategy.  5 building blocks for your #digitalstrategy : devices, channels, data, enterprise applications, & content — Zentosh (@zentosh) March 20, 2016 Many had DM’d me asking for the details of it. So I decided to give an explanation on why I considered them as key filters for digital strategy Every digital strategy starts with the customers: - Who they are? What they want? What they are expecting? How is technology impacting their behaviour? What interactions they are having with competitors, category, etc. How you want them to interact or experience with your brand…..and by customers, i mean not just consumers, they are also your employees, partners (suppliers, vendors, sellers, etc) Once the customer need-behaviour-experience is identified, then it needs to be looked through these 5 aspects: De...

Recently, I saw a query in a LinkedIn group asking “what are 2 powerful marketing phrases/words that sell?”. What made me curious was not the answers but the nature of the question, the keyword being “what”.  Internet happens to be the default place where people go for information gathering. The age old principle of information gathering is asking the Five Ws and one H - Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Getting the most popular response - Wisdom of crowd, or Conformity to existing belief is the solution (information) that we subconsciously look for is what we ultimately click on as part of search results. Did a quick search on the popular Ws on Google trends for the past decade, and something interesting but on expected lines turned out. Below is the image of the same: Looking at the popularity of search by ‘what’ clearly indicates that a lot of things are unknown to lot of people. It also indicates that most people are superficial in terms of what they sea...

This is a Pulse post that I've written earlier in the day Maggi, the 2 minute wonder, from Nestle, has got its 15 minutes of fame...though for wrong reasons. I trust Nestle, as a company, and have faith that if the product did have toxic substance beyond permissible limits, it was by pure mischance.  This post is not in support of Maggi (or Nestle) nor it is to slander them for what happened. There are many more who are more competent than me to talk about it. In fact, as I write this post, Maggi is going for a huge PR exercise to minimise the damage and improve its image.  Being a digital marketer, I generally look at various opportunities and events from the prism of technology and marketing. Is there a value or customer need that the product can satisfy? Is there a marketing opportunity here? Can technology play a role in the same?, etc are few questions, I try to answer. This post is about a marketing idea that came out from watching th...