NEW DELHI: The lockdown saw a double whammy – people stuck at home with an appetite for content and the inability to venture out and satiate that demand. While content creators tried to produce new and interactive content, this also gave an opportunity for brands to engage with online audiences by working with content creators. Pocket Aces VP sales and brand solution Vishwanath Shetty spoke to Indiantelevision.com on the new trends and shifts being observed in brand engagements in the pandemic and the change in consumption patterns among viewers.
As everything went into lockdown, shooting from home emerged as a new trend. According to Shetty, “Working remotely has been a great learning experience for all of us as we experimented with different methods of production and created content that was lockdown-friendly. During this phase, we have been able to maintain a steady flow of operations over the last four months. Our first piece of content produced remotely along with a popular whiskey brand saw a phenomenal response. We garnered over four million views on Filter Copy and around 215,000 conversations, as well as an engagement ratio of about 5.78 per cent, which motivated us to know that we are on the right track.”
There has been a different set of advertisers showing interest as well. “The lockdown has created a unique opportunity for brands to reach out to users through innovative ways and introduce new products specially catered to the needs of the hour. Ready to eat foods, dating apps, edutainment and ed-tech dominated this list. Fitness portals and health brands are actively promoting across channels. The new ‘big thing’ in the market today is Covid2019 insurance, a new offering from insurance brands, which is being widely advertised,” he shares.
“A lot of other large companies are also moving budgets internally, to promote relevant products, while staying sensitive to the situation at hand. Food delivery aggregators and services have also increased their marketing and advertising activities. While on a less grand scale, festive sales will still take place, which will, of course, be boosted across channels. So, advertising spends while reduced in some areas, have gone up in others,” he adds.
Shetty asserts that it would be wrong to say that there has been absolutely no impact of the pandemic on the advertising industry. “Across the board, we have seen spends on OOH, TV, and others significantly drop. As brands and channel partners, we need to relook at our strategies and create value propositions that are mutually beneficial. Essential services and technology-powered brands will be drivers of the economy this year and will be the ones to invest in advertising. Brands are now focusing more on performance marketing, which is the need of the hour and this will continue to drive conversations and spends during the festive season and the rest of 2020.”
He shares that the second season of Firsts was entirely shot at the actors’ homes, and they saw 30 per cent more views than the first season. “As a result of the success, brands saw this as a good opportunity to engage with their target audiences and in this manner, we continue to produce short format shows. The more such content we uploaded, the higher our engagement rates went, even touching over 13 per cent.”
The brand's content channels have seen an overall 20 per cent rise in figures. Shetty shares, “The increase in views can also be attributed to curiosity, as audiences were exposed to new formats, which piqued their interest, and contributed to the success of our lockdown content.”
Pocket aces eSports platform Loco has seen a huge uptake when it comes to the amount of content being streamed. Partnerships with influencers too brought in new users, and today it has 24 million registered users with an average time of 30 minutes spent on the app.
