Tag: thought leadership

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Digi Tech

I’m Linda

Written by Linda Wells on Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership)

I am not a tech geek. I am not an academic professor at your local university. I’m just me! and all I want to do is show people what they are eating/drink/consuming and the harm it does and nudge them to pivot to healthy food and drinks, plus increasing their physical activity.

Before the global pandemic happened, I had a small business that did just that – face to face workshops and speaking gigs at conferences, workshops and meetings – all within a few kilometres of where I lived (well, maybe up to 500kms).

Now … My clients are global, some of them 16,500kms away. Why? Because of technology and the digital revolution, we are currently in.

Whilst I ran live workshops on my topic of healthy food, drinks and exercise and I always dreamed of creating online content, making some online courses on a digital platform. The truth is, I didn’t think I was smart enough to do that!!

I am smart in my thought leadership sector (for example I know what artificial numbers 950 and 951 mean and what harm they do to our body … check the closest drink you have on your desk while reading this and see if it includes those), but tech guru: NO. I know how to achieve the goal of 10,000 steps a day, but how to understand the digital world: NO.

When the pandemic hit, I had just moved to another State with no friends, no business contacts, not a member of any business forums or groups and had no work opportunities at all. So, guess what I did?

I decided to put my content online. I searched digital platforms, chose a few to test and ended up subscribing to Thinkific and put my courses online. I made video content. I learnt how to edit the content, how to add to YouTube, how to create the captions etc. I created resources and pdfs for students to download as well.

I used to use all the MS(Microsoft) things, MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel and had used these for many, many years (I’m not telling you how many as I don’t want to disclosure how old I actually am – haha).

Now I use Google Drive, Google Docs, I use Zoom (doesn’t everyone), I use MS Teams, I create content in Canva, I’ve do email video messages via Loom, I use Mailchimp for my newsletters – I have learnt so much from my digital and technology journey since 2020 – all the while teaching people how to understand what is in discretionary, ultra-processed food and drinks.

I’m Linda from e-RAW.

e-RAW is a digital learning company that helps people transform their lives from consuming ultra-processed food/drinks and risks to their health to the best version of themselves they have ever been. Bonus: they get to pass it on to their family and friends – at home and in the workplace.

In fact, the word ‘discretionary’ wasn’t in my narrative, until I asked a group of smarter people than me on an online Retail Food Environment course from Monash University with me, what word I should use instead of ‘crap food’ to be a little bit kinder. This was on a digital Zoom weekly course roundup and guest speaker gig. So, I learned from my fellow students the word ‘discretionary’ on a tech video helping us with our online course we were studying from our home offices or workplace offices. See how important tech has been, even when it is just in the background!

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HR Tech

Working reset to “REMOTE FIRST”

Written by JJ Chai on Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership)

Technology and virtual ways of working have made “REMOTE FIRST” way of working possible. The biggest proof being, almost the entire global economy has been able to survive because of this reset.

This new way of working requires some basic rules which every organisation, especially a start-up should follow to keep this sustainable and continuous.

Digital fluency

This may seem obvious, and to some extent, already a requirement for any knowledge industry job today. However, in a “REMOTE FIRST” environment, especially in a start-up, there’s no IT department helpdesk to call to fix up laptop or your microphone. Team members who can figure out how to troubleshoot, reboot or do basic configuration of their technology are much more productive than those who are typically reliant on an ‘IT person’ to fix things.

We see the ability to quickly learn the tech tools, whether collaborative cloud documents (no save to laptop and email please…), chat software or video calls as an important indicator of a successful remote-first employee. These are foundational skills, in some ways more important than even English language fluency.

High empathy

As a team with over 16 different nationalities, with different styles of communication in both written and spoken forms, we need team members who have high levels of empathy. It’s far too easy to misinterpret the tone and intent of messages or annoy others by setting up meetings at odd times of day due to time zone differences. 

We find that people who have a strong sense of empathy (e.g. as a simple indicator, they would indicate both parties’ time zone when scheduling meetings), to be much better adept to dealing with communication challenges and being effective team members in a remote-first environment. Some indicators, like experience with working across time zones, or having been well travelled (with a strong traveller’s point of view, vs a tourist point of view), are good signs in this respect.

Clarity of communication

This is true for any regular organisation but is made even more important in “REMOTE FIRST” organisations. With less opportunities to re-clarify at the water cooler or other interactions in the office, the ability to communicate well in writing and verbally are more important than ever. We appreciate structured communication and concise verbal communication.

The challenge to assess these three characteristics, and also other signals are also made tougher in a video-meeting set up. I do miss the days when I could do the coffee cup interview test. In-person at the office, I’d go with the candidate to the pantry, help get them a cup of beverage, bring them along to the interview room, and observe whether they later offered to help take it back to the pantry or assume ‘someone else would do it’!

We founded Rainforest in the midst of the Covid pandemic in early 2021. As an e-commerce aggregator that buys and builds e-commerce brands, growing the brands globally, we saw an opportunity to make the most of the pandemic situation by going “REMOTE FIRST”, i.e. we predominantly worked remotely, outside of a fixed office environment. As we grew, we took this further, and now have no office at all in any location. Our employees can work from anywhere.

We learnt that while most candidates that applied to us say they are comfortable to be part of a “REMOTE FIRST” team, the above characteristics stood out to be better indicators than others of being a successful “REMOTE FIRST” team member at Rainforest. We continue to look for these three traits to ensure they would thrive in our organisation.

Categories
Mar Tech

Marketers in the “Marketing 5.0” era

Written by Clare Wong on Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership)

Convergence of Marketing 5.0 and T-Shaped Marketing

Here we are, on the precipice of a post-covid world, yet another one is brewing…(It’s not the emergence of Omicron if you are reading this in early 2022).

Ever-present Marketing 5.0

You might have heard of Industry 4.0, but I recently came to know of Marketing 5.0 by Philip Kotler – which essentially is the backbone of Industry 4.0. Marketing 2.0 to 4.0 was “Mad Men meets The Social Network with a sprinkle of Suits”, but Marketing 5.0 is “Black Mirror meets Love, Death and Robots” (but there are the good bits, like iOS 14 with their privacy move). Since 2019, Covid got us embracing a kaleidoscope of Digitization, Digitalization, and Digital Transformation. Industry 4.0 effects of Automation, Next Tech and Accelerated Digitalisation, in tandem, Marketing 5.0’s Hyper-Personalisation, Responsible Innovation and Smart-Connectivity. This inevitably caused considerable transformations within societies and market disruptions. Naturally, marketers had to react to this change.

Industry 4.0’s impact on many facets of human lives and societies (Image Source: The Marketing Journal)

Convergence of New Customer Experience and “Next Tech” (Image Source: The Marketing Journal)

Customer Empathy first, Technology second

So, how do marketers fit into this ‘next tech’ vision?

As the book’s name suggests “Technology for humanity”, humans are central to successful applications and marketers are still at the core of Marketing 5.0.

It is not about replacing the human with computer intelligence but rather finding ways in which “machines and people might fit and deliver the most value across the customer journey.” 

Mercè C. (Co-founder, Lead Consultant & Chartered Marketer)

In today’s connected and on-demand economy, relevance is the most important currency. This harkens back to the drivers of marketing evolutions, which are marketing technology and consumer needs. To stay relevant, marketers must adopt a customer-centric approach.

The 5 components of Marketing 5.0 (Image Source: Think Beyond)

Next Technologies’ main purpose is to amplify the capabilities of marketers to create and deliver value. With the rapidly-changing consumer behaviours due to the pandemic, marketers can create solutions that are more relevant than those created by the current-state AI.

Kolter touches on how Technology is adding value to marketing through the above five components with society and sustainability in mind.

Stepping into Marketing 5.0, T-shaped marketers would see the expansion and deepening of various domains (e.g. Behavioural Psychology, Digital Analytics, AR/VR, Service & UX Design).

Am I ready for Marketing 5.0?

The biggest challenge marketers face is the journey from strategy to execution!
Let alone being ready for Marketing 5.0.

In my career journey, I am neither on track with Jack Ma’s career advice nor ready to take on the entrepreneurship path. ​​I believe there is no rush to setting deadlines to attain your career goals (something that Jack Ma begs to differ).

My current goal is to advance from being a T-Shaped to a V-Shaped Marketer by broadening my business acumen, technical know-how while strengthening interpersonal skills. Individuals are rarely capable of achieving a true, deep “V” shape in their skill sets, but a collective unit can. I am blessed to have the opportunity to learn alongside similarly-minded, differentiated knowledge-experts within Google.

If you are just starting your digital marketing journey or at the cusp of a career-pivot, don’t fret – here are some readings that will help you get up to speed with the MarTech Universe (not the Marvel Universe!) and pivot to becoming a T-shaped marketer.

Good Reads and Frameworks:  Marketing 5.0’s Marketer

Have an Awesome 2022, Everyone!

Categories
Mar Tech

WALLED GARDENS AND AD-FRAUD

Written by Aditya Satheesh for Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership)

Low data prices has increased Internet users in India (mobile first Internet market) while propelling the growth/reach of social media giants as well as video content watch time over the last 5 years; but digital media still isn’t the preferred vehicle of marketing for most clients and only accounts for 25-30% of the industry spends, although it is growing YOY.

The adoption of digital media has been hindered by the fragmented digital ecosystem, doubts over ad fraud and effectiveness of the medium, questions over viewability of ads, traditional mindset of brand managers and their lack of understanding of the digital ecosystem. Even until recently, I have been asked to run campaigns targeting the brands HQ or been provided with custom audience lists of senior executives in the company, to be targeted with the brand campaign so as to satisfy and address the question a lot of brand managers ask – I am not able to see my ad; as they compare it to traditional media where ads are shown in an appointment-viewing manner.

The ever-changing pandemic situation has definitely forced a digital pivot, with print and outdoor media taking a hit. Brand managers are forced to consider digital due to its targeting capabilities ensuring low spillage and cost efficiencies. And like learning the ABCs of the alphabets, all brands jump on the bandwagon of Facebook and Google with over 80% budget going to these 2 platforms. The platform scale/reach, along with cost efficiencies as well as brand credibility is definitely unbeatable in the space and hence becomes a no brainer for brands. But as the adoption of the duopoly increases, the strength and power of the walled gardens grow and so do their prices.

As marketers spend more on these platforms, they understand less about their customers as walled garden campaigns and interactions can’t be tied back to the brand’s CRM database. Brands receive a consolidated view of how their campaigns performed rather than an individualized view. There’s no way to verify impression/reach data or understand affinity target selections that work, you simply have to take it on faith. Yet marketers continue to spend more and get less.

A more equitable value exchange needs to be more about standardizing taxonomy and identifiers across all of these platforms to see and understand the customer journey. Today, even having unified unique reach in a digital campaign is next to impossible due to the fragmented ecosystem as well as walled gardens.

With the increased spends on digital, reports indicate that ad fraud rates gone up by 40% in these COVID times. Today ad verification in India is in its nascent stages and only around 10-15% invest on third party verification tools.  The path for safer and more secure digital advertising effectiveness lies in third party ad verification, which ensures that brands are investing in quality media. Third party verification would ensure 4 things mainly

  • Brand Safety/Brand suitability – identify inflammatory/negative content and protect brand image/reputation
  • Ad Fraud – identifying Invalid Traffic to help evaluate efficacy of platform and calculate brands return on media investment
  • Viewability – helps measure effectiveness of ad delivery
  • In Geo – ensure ads served within intended demographics

Advertisers need to understand these underlying challenges as the adoption of digital increases at a rapid pace. Investing in third party verification tools will not only improve trust and transparency in the ecosystem, while also holding publishers accountable and thus help decreasing fraudulent traffic and increasing overall return on investment.

Categories
Digi Tech

OWN YOUR BRAND ON SOCIAL MEDIA TO SUCCEED

Written by Lourd Vijay – Digilah (Thought Leadership)

Founder of LVDS (Lourd Vijay’s Dance Studio)

Hear here if you are not upto reading!

https://open.spotify.com/embed/show/6ukAttNgIccm87g1oHMcWe?utm_source=generator

Social media has very drastically altered the world of business. Every entrepreneur or company has to constantly reinvent themselves to stay afloat; making it a challenge to comprehend the present trends, the ever-changing algorithms, the indecipherable analytics and the sudden upspring of agencies and social media marketers.

For small enterprises like ours that offer niche services like teaching dance, choreographies and performances, and predominantly catering to the hobby-classes market, social media has worked to be both a boon and a bane.

When it comes to delivering great content, dance as an activity and an art form fits perfectly to drive the kind of content that grabs enough attention, likes and follows, but then the big question is “does it bring a brand like ours a measured, tangible outcome?”

We, in the past have had an array of professionals, agencies, freelancers and interns with a social media background who have helped us with our presence but unfortunately the returns and benefits have been dismal. The ad spends have had no valuable outcome as the leads were largely irrelevant and were from a geographical region that wasn’t where we operated within. However, the influx of user-friendly and life-saving tools such as Canva for great creatives, IMovies or Inshot for video edits & Wix for intelligent websites, has lowered our dependence on social media professionals while also empowering us with a better sense of aesthetic. Functional tools such as these are the need of the hour.

My experience has made it very evident that organic growth is the only way forward in an industry like ours. Which means we need to churn out great content every single day. Our quest, hence, is to answer this sole question – “What is great content?”

Over time we have built a better hit-ratio for the kind of content we post. The turnaround time to interact with our followers has also improved drastically and our costs have reduced leading to faster and better ROI(Return on Investment).  This has obviously come at the cost of some preliminary investment in terms of time and resources. The effort seems to have paid off for now, which we hope continues until Metaverse decides to throw us off with new algorithm alterations.

Therefore, my learning’s from building my business through social media has been:

  • Look beyond vanity metrics, clearly stating your KPIs
  • Use reports and analytics to see what is working and what is not on a regular basis
  • Most important own your brand, personality and tone

Being optimistic, we hope to overcome the setbacks Covid has caused and evolve into a national brand and an enterprise that operates across varied geographies. The graduation to being a national brand would enable us to hire the brightest minds from the social media industry who can drive up value from the word ‘go’.

Until then, Canva is the tool for survival.

Categories
Ad Tech

An overview of Location-based Marketing

Written by Christian Geissendoerfer – Digilah (Thought Leadership)

Here we are in today’s world of Marketing 5.0, where technology and digital transformation play a significant part, it is essential that marketers leverage this to address customers’ needs and truly make an impact with their marketing strategies.

Over the past decades, the older approach to marketing at the local level has undergone a paradigm shift. Businesses are all required to adjust and adapt new technologies to keep up with the dramatic shifts in consumer behaviours.

Increasing brand awareness and position in the hearts of consumers has become extremely difficult, particularly in today’s fiercely competitive market.

  • How to increase revenue?
  • How to interact and attract customers to shop?
  • How to optimize marketing activities?

Those are problems that keep every business owner up at night but have yet been solved.

So how do businesses step up their marketing game? By integrating technological tactics to deliver their messages to target customers at a granular and personal level. In this article, we would like to discuss a new marketing strategy that is Location-based Marketing.

How does it work?

Location-based marketing is the technology of using location data that is shared from GPS, online transactions at shopping malls, grocery stores, or photos. Using this data, marketers will be able to reach their desired audiences with more relevant advertising and content. 

Location-based marketing works great for any and all retailers, brick and mortars, restaurants, and small local businesses. It is the best fit with these industries because of customers’ physical footprint, which synchronizes with location data. Based on their actual previous customers, marketers can create an exact set of lookalike audiences for their strategy, thus retargeting and driving those customers to return and increase loyalty.

Let’s take a deep dive into the reasons to use Location-based marketing.

Attract more customers and increase engagement

Location-based marketing can help attract more customers by bringing a business to the users at a time when they are interested in purchasing that business’s product/service. For example, there is a gym and its customers are people who live in that area. What they can do is to create ads on Facebook and limit the range to people in this area, which increases the potential customers for their services.

Build trust relationship between your target audience and your business

When selecting a target in a specific location, you can include in the advertising information about your business for the target based on the specific characteristics they represent in that area. The content should be relevant and help them feel more connected to your business. From there, nurture their beliefs with your business.

Increase profits from Active Marketing

The ultimate goal of the business is to increase sales and profits through marketing activities. Collecting, analysing, and using location data can help businesses entice more people to participate in promotions, helping to optimize marketing.

To conclude marketers love location-based marketing because it allows them to provide the users with relevant and personalized offers and messages. “Factual reports that “84% of marketers currently use location data in their marketing and ad campaigns, and 94% plan to in the future.” Hence like with any technology the key with location-based marketing, is to test, measure and refine. 

At YOOSE, we combine cutting edge technology with deep expertise, experience and passion to help global brands and advertisers capture the opportunities of this fast-paced, ever-changing world of mobile advertising. Our location-based marketing solution is tailored to deliver the most impactful campaigns and ensure the best ROI for our customers.

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Fin Tech

Transformation of the Indian Debt Market

Written by Sashi Kumar M C, Investment and Merchant Banker – Digilah (Thought Leadership)

Director at Solargise

The Balance of payment crisis in 1991, brought the liberalization of the Indian economy and with it came reforms of the financial system and capital markets. The thrust of these reforms was to promote a diversified, efficient, and competitive financial system, with the objective of improving the allocation of resources through operational flexibility, improved financial viability, and institutional strengthening.

The contagion effects of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis further lent impetus to strengthen the domestic financial system. Reforms principally focused to: (i) Mitigate risks in the financial system; (ii) Efficiently allocate resources to the real sector; (iii) Make the financial system competitive globally; and (iv) Open the external sector.

India’s capital markets too were injected with reforms, specifically through the creation of various institutions such as the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in 1992, an insurance market regulator (IRDAI) in 1999, and a pension market regulator (PFRDA) in 2003. National Stock Exchange NSE was incorporated in 1992. It was recognised as a stock exchange by SEBI in April 1993 and commenced operations in 1994 with the launch of the wholesale debt market.

These were a fall out of the report by L M Bhole, a professor of Economics at IIT-Bombay, who noted that “There are two major inadequacies which characterize our stock market. First, while the primary market is widespread, i.e., the new issues are distributed nation-wide, the secondary market is narrow, localized, fragmented, and imperfect. The stock exchanges do not have uniform settlement periods and dates; there is no national clearing system, and they are not integrated into a single unified national market system. Second, while a significant part of the primary market is in debentures, almost the whole of secondary market is in equities. In many developed countries, debt securities, especially long-term debt securities, account for a major part of the trading volume on stock exchanges.

Not just that, Indian bond markets had to fight its way into the very quagmire of corruption and kickbacks, Lack of Transparency plagued the market, as did in-efficient price discovery methods. Defaulted Bond holders raised fingers on credit rating agencies and they in turn raised questions on data sanity. One to one negotiations led to unethical means to place the bonds at unjustified premiums that led to a mismatch to traded market yields.

In contrast to equity markets, the bond markets have been held back by the more restrictive regulatory framework. Several reforms were introduced to the government bond market in 1992 when the price of newly introduced bonds was set by auction.

But it was not until 2005—11 years after the equity market—that bond market became an electronic order limit market. Adoption of Technology to achieve the set goals.

Over the past two decades, the Reserve Bank of India has adopted a strategy to create an efficient market infrastructure to enable safe trading, clearing and settlement. State-of-the-art primary issuance process with electronic bidding and straight-through-processing (STP) capabilities. An efficient and completely dematerialized depository system within the central bank. Delivery-versus-Payment (DVP) mode of settlement. Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS). Electronic trading platform (Negotiated Dealing Systems – Order Matching) (NDS-OM) and a separate Central Counter Party (CCP) in the Clearing Corporation of India Ltd (CCIL) for guaranteed settlement.

Today, The Bond market activity has grown rapidly. Government securities market (G-Sec), corporate bond market and derivatives markets have become broad-based in terms of participation. Technology has given the ease and access to transact from anywhere, it has helped broad base not only investors but also products. Thus, driving the overall debt market size to a little over USD 2 Tn.

Government Bonds make majority of the market with sovereign yield curve spanning up to 40 years. Corporate Bonds are expected to double their growth to achieve Rs. 65-70 Lakh crore by 2025. Primary market issuances have increased resulting in large benchmark issuances. The volumes in secondary market have increased. The bid-ask spread of on-the-run securities continues to be low and so are the impact costs.  

With the increase in Fintech activities in this space, bond markets have spread their wings to reach all investors. So much so, that RBI now allows individuals under the Retail Direct Scheme, to buy Government Securities, SDLs, T-bills and Sovereign Gold Bonds.

Amidst all these positives brought about by the adoption of technology and digitalization, the regulators forget a key component – Human Resource.  Since 1992, a generation of Bond Market professionals have served a full cycle and retired.  A huge set of Bond traders and dealers, both in the primary and secondary market today face a different future……?