Facebook India hosts its inaugural 'Building Brands Summit'

On December 17, Facebook India held its inaugural ‘Building Brands Summit’ in Gurugram to bring industry leaders from more than 60 brands together on the same platform to explore and unravel the new tenets of brand building. One of the key highlights of the summit was the unveiling of the Playbook for brand building in 2020 and beyond by Facebook.

The summit was attended by leading brands from FMCG, e-commerce, financial services, telecommunications, auto, travel, and other key verticals, and saw marketing stalwarts throw light on the emerging trends in a world where mobile phones are fast becoming the primary screen. It also saw leading agencies, GroupM, Ogilvy, IPG Media Brands, and Performics in attendance.

The summit opened with a fireside chat between Vipul Prakash, Chief Operating Officer, MakeMyTrip and Facebook’s Sandeep Bhushan.

Sandeep Bhushan, Director and Head Global Marketing Solutions (GMS), India, said, “With 400 million Indians on our family of apps, we offer unparalleled reach across the country. We are now embarking on 2020 in partnership with industry leaders on what the agreed standards of digital measurement, mobile video creativity, and effective media planning for brand building are. The opportunity now is to drive impact of mobile as a medium even harder and enable business results all the way from influencer marketing to shopping, and every marketing objective in between."

Facebook’s Brand Playbook for 2020 offers comprehensive solutions across three crucial pillars. 

The first pillar is that of ‘Reach’, and implies building media plans in a manner that enables brands to reach the desired audience and drive cost efficiencies. Digital is no longer just a support medium for brand campaigns — it is the core medium, and it needs to occupy a central role in media plans. Cross Media studies done by Kantar Millward Brown have shown that Facebook and TV work better together than TV alone in delivering brand results. Another advantage of Facebook is that it offers personalisation at scale by enabling brands to hyper-personalise their campaigns by location, life-stage, and time of the day. 

The second pillar is that of driving brand impact by reinventing mobile video storytelling in line with prevailing consumer trends. Facebook Thumbstoppers is building the ecosystem for short-form mobile video creativity in partnership with leading creative agencies and brands of the country. Right from its launch earlier in the year, it has inspired the advertising and marketing community to create short-form mobile video ads that are built for the medium rather than adapted from other formats.

Kavita Nair

Kavita Nair, Chief Brand and Digital Transformation Officer, Vodafone Idea Ltd., said, “The ubiquitous reach of mobile phone makes it a very powerful tool for marketers. It gives brands more options to engage with the customers, hence, making mobile marketing a medium that the brands can no longer afford to ignore. Vodafone has long realised this need and has been innovative in its approach while telling stories which has helped create a bond with the customers. Thumbstoppers is bridging a key gap in the industry by inspiring creative talent and brands to rethink storytelling for mobile. We are thrilled that Vodafone is the first brand to embrace Thumbstoppers at scale.”

The third pillar is that of having reliable metrics and standards on digital to measure the impact of campaigns. This year Nielsen India launched Custom Mix Modeling (CMM), which is a traditional-trade heavy market. Facebook helped pilot this model, which will help FMCG advertisers measure sales ROIs of individual digital publishers using the same method as for TV and print. Mondelez was the first brand to deploy CMM successfully.

Anil Viswanathan

Anil Viswanathan, Marketing Director (Chocolate), Mondelez India, said, “CMM will not only solve for the long-standing challenge regarding sales ROI measurement for digital on offline retail brands but will also prove to be a key input into an industry-wide discourse on the standardisation of effectiveness measurement.”

Apart from the Brand Playbook for 2020, the summit also threw light on interactive ad formats across the family of apps that enable instant two-way communication that gets people involved, which is a natural fit for how people, especially the youth, engages on mobile phones. The summit concluded with a panel on consumer passions that delved into how Instagram can be leveraged to build the brand story.

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