Digital ad spend will overtake TV in two years, says Prashant Puri of AdLift

With an exponential growth in the time spent on digital, the medium is poised to get bigger than TV in terms of ad spend in the next two years, believes Prashant Puri, the Co-founder and CEO of the leading digital marketing agency AdLift.

“Today, on an average globally, people spend 7-8 hours on social media or digital channels, and consume content way more than they spend on TV. The overall digital marketing spends of brands have grown from 5% three years ago to 25-30% today. In the next two years, digital will overtake TV,” he said.

In a conversation with BestMediaInfo.com, Puri said voice search will grow exponentially at 55% in the next two years. The content marketing landscape will see a growth of more than 15% over the annual growth of digital marketing in India. "We estimate influencer marketing to be 10-15% more than digital marketing spends in FY20,” Puri.

He said agencies that keep their prices too low just to gain businesses don't actually perform. “Performance for the client is paramount. Agencies that price themselves too low cannot give a good performance,” he said.

According to Puri, content marketing is gradually becoming more significant in the media plan of companies. “Content marketing is the hub of all things today in digital marketing. It feeds into social media, organic search and develops brands," he said.

AdLift on the growth trajectory

The agency has grown at a pace of 110% annually in the last three years and currently has a revenue of Rs 155 core.

“A lot of this is significantly related to the internet population that has changed drastically in the last two years, thanks to the Jio effect. Our growth is completely attributed to the increased number of internet users and the way we operate. We believe in growing clients and accounts we have. A lot of businesses happened by word of mouth,” said Puri.        

Speaking on the agency’s performance, Puri said, “Our DNA has always been performance marketing and ROI-driven focus on marketing. The key differentiating factor is the way our team looks and decides on data. We have always been performance-driven since AdLift’s inception. Our overall idea has always been to grow organically.”

AdLift has a content marketing division called Content Lift, which specialises in digital content marketing of the brand. According to Puri, content lift has grown 10x in the past two years and 90% of its business comes from content marketing.

Highlighting the content marketing strategy of the company and how it delivers results for clients by using data and insights, he said, “Content marketing is the hub of all things today in digital marketing. It feeds into social media, organic search and develops a brand. When we create video from our content-led platform, we leverage platforms like Facebook to further qualify the right consumers. We make 30-second to one-minute video ads on Facebook and then dive into data to see how many people crossed the 30-second mark and mark ads to those who interacted with our video,” he added.

To cater to the growing influential marketing business, AdLift runs ‘Yral’, in a joint venture with YouWeCan ventures of Yuvraj Singh.

"Influential marketing segment is very important for any agency. We are experiencing phenomenal growth in this segment," Puri said.

Speaking on the challenges, Puri said, “Operationally, we don’t see any challenges when we are pitching the brand. There is a lot of arbitrage of pricing in the Indian market. We can’t really reduce this challenge but can be best with our work, which will attract more brands towards us.”

All the agencies try to be unique through their digital marketing efforts, but some similarities in the idea are bound to happen due to the TG they want to target and their likeliness. In this scenario, how can an agency’s marketing efforts stand and fetch the maximum ROI to the brands’ digital marketing efforts?

Answering this, Puri said, "It’s not a one-size-fits-all model for brands. When we work with brands of the same category that targets the same TG, we leverage learning. Two brands might be playing in the same space with the same TG but their offerings will be very different. One could be cost-conscious and the other quality-conscious. We tailor marketing and ad copy focusing on the core offering of the brand."

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