How is TECHNOLOGY changing ADVERTISING? | Kishore Dharmarajan | TBCY
Welcome to another episode of The Brand Called You. A vodcast and podcast show that brings you leadership lessons, knowledge, experience and wisdom from thousands of successful individuals from around the world. I'm your host, Ashutosh Garg and today I'm delighted to welcome a very, very senior marketing guru, and a Metaverse expert from Dubai, Mr. Kishore Dharmarajan. Kishore, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me on the
show and very excited to share some information with you. Thank you. Kishore is the CEO of Seo Souq FZ LLC. He is a Metaverse expert. And he's earlier worked with companies like Saatchi, Eureka, WSI, and HSBC. So, let's start talking about Seo. So I hope that I have the pronunciation correct?
Yes. Tell me about this venture, and what was your motivation to start it? Sure, I used to work in the corporate world, like many of our listeners, and in 2016, when LinkedIn opened up its content platform for people to make posts, I made a post on LinkedIn, in those times, it was an article. And I got a call from a prospect which led to a meeting and a contract all within 24 hours. Wow. And so I realized that just sitting on my laptop and putting some words together, can get your clients without cold calling without emailing, not doing anything.
So that motivated me to start my own business. And because I assume that once you start posting on LinkedIn, you can get as many clients as you wish. And that was the trigger, starting Seo Souq in 2016. Wow. And the rest, as they say, is history. So let me move on and ask you, I'm much older than you. But I remember in the early 80s, when I was in ITC, and talk about branding and launching, they're very different agencies. Today, they have transformed very substantially. Tell me, how are you seeing technology changing the way advertising functions? Yeah, you're absolutely right. Technology has changed all aspects of business. And it has kind
of thrown the advertising industry at the bus. And many people have been squashed by it. But the real good news is that technology is not moving fast. We are all under the assumption that technology is moving fast. It's only the young generation that can figure it out. Because things are buzzing by, we really can't grab what's happening on, all of that is actually a myth. The reality is that technology is moving along very slowly, it's dragging its feet. And anyone can
figure out technology, if you try to come out of this fog, and this myth created, which is that technology is moving very fast. So that's the good news for all of our listeners. Wonderful. And then there is this whole new position of digital marketing and I know you focus a lot on digital marketing, what are some of the challenges companies are facing? That's a very interesting question. And the reality is that most digital marketing campaigns tend to fail. And one of the reasons why they tend to fail is that it's dominated as you know,
by large search engines by a few large social media platforms. And so, they are between you and the end customer who will actually make the final purchase. So, they have made it virtually impossible to to get a customer for the right acquisition cost.
So which means you will have to pay more to get a customer than the net margins you will make per transaction. Which means most campaigns will actually bleed money at the end of the day. Okay. And from a customer perspective, and when I say customer, I'm talking about the brand manager. How have their expectations changed from an advertising agency? Yes, so from their expectation, most brands have experimented with in house agencies, in the hope that they will have more control over the platforms when they have people sitting the office and controlling the platforms. But that again is another myth. Because none of us control the media. The media is been controlled by a few search engines, a few social media platforms.
And they are the people in between you and the end customer. And they have put in various layers of complexity so that you don't reach the customer easily. Now, that is the negative side. The positive side is, once you are smart enough to figure out what exactly the customer wants, and you have a great marketing message. And your marketing message has a viral coefficient,
which means if you're paying for one click, and you're getting 10 clicks out of that, because people are sharing your content and your ads, then these search engines and these social media platforms are very happy to give you as much sales and as much traffic as you wish. So they're not all negative. They're just trying to weed out most of the people who don't take the time to figure it out. And they are very partial to people who are smart enough to figure out how their system works. And they're ready to give you as much sales as you wish. And again, if you look at the last 30-40 years, from big billboards to full page ads, to cinema advertising, now the whole thing is changed very significantly, and almost entire communication is taking place on your mobile phone. What are the challenges of so many different types of digital formats that marketers have to use? In reality, that is not a big challenge, if you ask me. This is a myth that people have, it's kind of fog, where people are losing their way of different technological formats, and how do we take control of the changes, which is happening in technology and all of that.
But at the end of the day, if you can figure out what exactly is going through the consumers mind, what are the problems they face? What are the aspirations that they have? And you have a message which resonates with that, and you find the right creative, which can deliver that message to the right person at the right time. Number one, you'll start getting sales. And number two, you will start seeing that the same people, they refer, they share these creatives among their network, and then you have the viral coefficient, working in your favor. And that's when the sales starts to double. And the third thing that happens is because these search engines and these social media platforms have access to a lot of data. They kind of know who your customers are,
after your conversion starts. And they're happy to introduce you to other customers out there who are similar to the person who made a purchase. So you can actually tap into these three layers of sales, which is hidden out there on these platforms, and you can see an exponential growth in sales. Amazing. So Kishore, a lot of our viewers and listeners are startup entrepreneurs, and one of the challenges they all seem to have is how do they start formulating their own marketing strategy? And with so many different social media platforms, which one should they go to? I'd love to get your perspective. Yeah, sure. So we are looking at two different things here. One is which platform to choose. And more importantly, what message to convey. I would advise everyone who's starting off to actually concentrate on your customer.
So have the 10 dream clients that you wish to work with, plotted on a piece of paper. And you would look at what are the kinds of challenges those industries are going through. And then you will also look at the decision makers in those companies. And you can do that with LinkedIn, look at the kinds of posts that are being made. And you figure out what are the challenges that these decision makers in these companies are facing. And if you create a marketing message, which is answering all of those problems. So that is your marketing message, number one.
And number two, when you want to figure out which channel to use, that obviously comes from where your decision makers are hanging out. So if they are on Instagram, you should be on Instagram. If they are on LinkedIn, you should be on LinkedIn. But a word of advice is it's better to concentrate with one message and one channel rather than 10 messages and being all over the place because we all have limited energies. And it's better to focus all of that on one channel and go deep. Rather than spreading ourselves thin and making posts on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and Instagram and TikTok and not doing a good job. So it's better to go deep down. Spend some time really figuring out the problems being faced in the industry and coming up with solutions, which would be useful for the end user.
The other thing that often comes up as a challenge is that now with these different kinds of formats, communication needs to be done in 5 seconds, 7 seconds, 10 seconds. How does one give a message about your brand in such a short period of time? I'm glad you asked that question. And this is again, another myth that we all tend to believe that people have very low attention spans and your message has to be very quick, can you need to deliver your message within seconds. So this is again, one myth we
all believe. So how do you break this myth? Just look at your own consumer behavior, you will spend three hours watching a series on Netflix without blinking your eyes. So how did you spend 180 minutes watching that series or that movie? Because it was interesting. And the same
thing conveys to your marketing message. Can I say something which is interesting to the audience? If you can answer some of the questions buzzing around in the target audience brain, they would definitely wake up and they would look at you or they would go through the message, they would read, they would consume, and more importantly, they will think about it. And when they think about it, they're giving you mind space and mind space is one media that no one can actually purchase. So once you enter mind space, most of your work is done, because your brand is embedded forever in their brains. And that will give you a great advantage over your competition. Fantastic. So Kishore, let me now move to your other area of expertise, which is the metaverse.
For our very young audience and for a lot of older on, let's start by asking you what is the metaverse? Yeah, sure. That's a very interesting question. And this actually comes from the first myth, which we broke, which is technology is moving fast. So the metaverse has been around for 20 years. And no one really realized it was around us.
So there was a site called Second Life, which started in 2003. So they were kind of round, before Facebook and before Instagram and most of the large brand names that we are exposed to. So Second Life is very good creating avatar and you could roam about in a virtual world. And you could enjoy life, you could have a fight and things like that. Now suddenly, because large
brands like Facebook have rebranded into meta, and they are creating an immersive experience. Metaverse has suddenly become very popular and everyone is moving into that. So Metaverse definitely is experience based. It's giving you a virtual world where you can play games, you can coexist with others, you can have chats, and you can have multiple activities, but everything is experienced based. Probably if you have an Oculus Rift, you can have a 3D vision of your virtual environment. But you can also do it using your mobile phones and your laptop. So when any new trend comes along, a few brand players will start dominating and once they dominate, that really can stay forever. So if you look at cola's,
we know that there is only Coca Cola, there is Pepsi, and then there is 7up, taking top of our mind. The same thing, if you look at mobile phones, we have an apple, we have a Samsung. And then we have HUAWEI, for example, as a third brand competing for it. Now the same thing has happened in the metaverse, you have a decentraland, which is very strongly out there, you have the sandbox. And then you have a few small players like x infinity, for example,
taking that space. Now this is where the large players like Facebook and Google are kind of worried that they have been a little slow to the game. And even with the meta verses that we are creating, like horizon world and other platforms, it's not getting as much traction. And
this is because the mind space is taken. And once a mindspace is taken, no matter how big you are, no matter how many billions you have in your bank account, you simply can't buy people's attention and their thoughts. So decentraland is the center of the metaverse right now. And I don't think anyone will be able to challenge that, at least in the near future.
Interesting. And my next question to you is that as a marketing and advertising guru, how do you see the metaverse changing communication, marketing of brands? So once the metaverse adoption increases, and definitely, it is on the rise. So you can see behind the scenes that developers, a lot of developers are moving into the metaverse. They are
getting into the 3D environment. They are getting into coding which can support the blockchain and the metaverse. So definitely, the adoption from the younger generation, the millennials, the Gen Z, and all of that is moving towards the metaverse. So there is no doubt in my mind that the future belongs to the metaverse. But at the same time from a marketing perspective, being the metaverse per se is not going to solve all of your marketing challenges. Because the marketing challenge that you have right now, the physical world and social media are the same that you're going to face the metaverse. So if you can't really figure out who your end customer is,
you can't figure out what their problem is. And you can figure out what is the unique selling proposition or the unique offer that you have, which can talk to them, then probably the metaverse is not going to solve that problem. It's just that it's a new media which has come along and people are going to enjoy that immersive experience. But brands will have to be smarter over their marketing message. Because it's only the delivery mechanism which is changing. Very interesting. And yet, Kishore there are multiple meta verses. Every
major company seems to be wanting to create their own. What do you see, as your prediction over the next few years, will there be two or three big players like you said, there are Samsung and Apple and so many others and or will there be multiple multiverses? So, we will see the same marketing principle work out which is you will have couple of large metaverses like Decentraland, you will have the Sandbox and you will have X infinity, for example. But at the same time, as you rightly said, all companies are building their own metaverses. And these metaverses will start talking to each other. Because already these tunnels are being created,
technology is being built up where from one metaverse you can move to the other one, just like you click a link on a website and you go to another website. So Metaverse is going to be a network of small metaverses where you can move from one metaverse to the other. And if you want to reach a broader space, you can just enter Decentraland and after playing games there, you feel a little bored, and you click and you go to Sandbox, and then you enjoy your time there. And then you feel
okay, now I need to do some tech building. So let me go to X infinity, so you can go to X infinity. So it's going to be an infinite world of small metaverses, and they are all interconnected. That's how I see the future building up. Wonderful. So I've got time for one more question. And this question is for the many, many people who will listen to our conversation.
Based on your vast experience in advertising, marketing, and the metaverse. What would you say are three lessons you would want our viewers and listeners to take away from our conversation? That's a very interesting question. And my number one lesson would be to jump into it and move ahead very quickly. Because most people what they do is they tend to wait around and see if it matures,
or it fades away as a trend. And they are always late to the game. This is what happened with social media when Facebook came along, many other players had an opportunity to build their own social media. They all waited and then Facebook's became so big that it was too late for anyone to do any thing. So my advice would be to jump into the metaverse, build your own Metaverse, experiment with things, play around-break things and see how it goes. So even if nothing happens, you will have a very enriched experience from the whole thing that you have created. So do not wait for this thing to become a big trend is my number one advice. Number two would be to look at the marketing angle on
the metaverse per se. And that would come from the marketing angles that you're creating in your social media world, in your search engine world and the real life challenges that you're facing and trying to adopt that messages to the metaverse. So already platforms have come up, wherein you can advertise in one place and it will be seen on all banners on metaverses within Decentraland, for example, the game is happening in Decentraland. And you want to advertise on the virtual billboards you can do that. So the format's are already available. It's the marketing messages that cannot be created. And this is something which you need to be creating
from yourself. Number three is to fund your metaverse experience using your non metaverse world. So if you look at some of the most successful businesses online, it would look like it is e-commerce, but there are aggregator sites like booking.com, which has done SEO and anyone trying to book a hotel will reach booking.com and from booking.com, they divert that to hotels, and when people book a room in a hotel, booking.com gets a commission. Their commissions are in billions. So these are very, very successful companies. And that's all coming from a
non-metaverse world because as you know, there are more than 6 billion searches happening on Google itself. So do your SEO, do your social media, get all this free traffic, convert this traffic into sales and and put a part of that income which is coming from there into building your metaverse. So using a non-metaverse world to build your metaverse world could be a slogan that you could use.
Wonderful. Kishore on that note. Thank you so much for speaking to me. Thank you for your amazing pieces of advice, which is jump in and move ahead now. Look at the marketing angle or the metaverse and use your non-metaverse profits to fund your metaverse. Thank you so
much for speaking to me about advertising, marketing, about branding, the digital world. And thank you for agreeing to talk to me today. Good luck in everything that you're doing. Thank you so much. And if anyone wants no further information, they can reach out to seosouq.com or
they can search for me on LinkedIn, Kishore Dharmarajan and I'm quite active over there. Thank you and have a great day. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to The Brand Called You, videocast and podcast. A platform that brings you knowledge, experience and wisdom of hundreds of successful individuals from around the world.
Do visit our website, www.tbcy.in to watch and listen to the stories of many more individuals. You can also follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Just search for The Brand Called You
2022-07-12 08:43
