MELT 2015: Experts decode the ways to navigate the digital world

Day one of the festival was a packed one with sessions by Facebook's Fergus O'Hare, Razorfish's Christian Behrendt and Happy Finish's Simon Gosling, along with HT Osmosis and Zee MindSpace

Aanchal Kohli | Mumbai | May 22, 2015

MELT 2015, the advertising and media festival created by Kyoorius in partnership with Zee, GroupM and D&AD, got underway at Nehru Centre in Mumbai on May 21 with halls packed with delegates and media representatives. The various sessions feature the biggest names in advertising and marketing communications.

Advertising today is a constellation, combining ideas, skills and technologies. Whether it is the medium or the message, the method of delivery or how companies understand and interact with consumers – rules are being broken every day. The Hindustan Times Osmosis conference offered insights into advertising as it exists today and a glimpse into what it could be in the future.

The event also saw the launch of Zee MindSpace, which is aimed at providing an intellectually stimulating platform for industry leaders to discuss, debate and reflect on issues and challenges facing the field of marketing.

The seminars on day one revolved around listen and learn from experts on topics ranging from filmmaking and animation to mobile, technology, analytics, and more. Moreover, there were over 15 workshops to choose from.

Fergus O'Hare

Under the connecting future citizens sessions, Fergus O'Hare, Creative Strategist at Facebook, spoke about how the social network platform gave an opportunity to optimise the 'three seconds' that a consumer spent on digital. He said, “Today, we have 3 billion videos on Facebook that are viewed every day. With the advent of digital, the time span of consumers has increased, enabling approximately 1.44 billion people at the same time for three seconds. Brands get a huge opportunity to capture the attention of a huge audience at the same time.”

Speaking about how Facebook also provides a personalisation marketing opportunity, O'Hare said, “We have done a lot of work for brands like Burberry, Fast and Furious, Veet, Etihad Airways, Durex, Knorr and many more. Facebook gives an opportunity to club science and art while creating marketing strategies.”

He also noted that today advertising was not about seconds only, but about storytelling. “Digital gives an immense opportunity to brands to leverage their core essence through an engaging story. At the same time, brands need to be very careful and innovative while creating a message for their users through digital media,” he added.

O'Hare further said that better creativity led to better business results.

In another session, Christian Behrendt, Executive Creative Director at Razorfish Australia, spoke about how digital today has become a priority for brands in their marketing strategies. Words like real-time conversations and real-time engagement have become top priority for brands and agencies. Social, big data, programmatic and native are the buzz words in the digital marketing space. “Today, the focus has shifted from 'award winning' to a world changing creativity,” he noted.

Behrendt feels that technology is inspiring creativity at every stage. Citing an example, he said, “We have transformed businesses and models for brands like eBay, which helped them grab the attention of consumers.”

Meanwhile, Happy Finish's Simon Gosling in his session on 'Future Citizens' took the audience through how virtual and augmented reality can create a difference in the advertising world. He said, “Virtual and augmented reality are the future of advertising world as they bridge the gap between brands and consumers, thus engaging them in a totally difference experience.” He peppered his presentation with several examples of work done by Happy Finish for different brands which marked a niche in the industry.

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