Guest Lecture - Digital Marketing And Measurement By Mr. Vishal Kamath, Director-Digital, Marketing Effectiveness, Nielsen At VGSoM

The Vinod Gupta School of Management had the privilege of hosting Mr. Vishal Kamath Director-Digital, Marketing Effectiveness at Nielsen under its Guest Lecture Series, Vaarta. Mr. Kamath has over 10 years of industry experience and is highly skilled in the field of Digital advertising, Business Development, PNL leadership to name a few.

Mr. Kamath started the lecture by defining digital marketing and stating its importance in today’s world. He also shed light on the how digital content is getting more popular than linear TV and that eventually advertising digitally will become more expensive and sought for than traditional mediums. Mr. Kamath talked about a research that said that the time spent on Live TV is dropping but the time available for a marketer to reach out to its potential customer has gone up by 18% which clearly shows that world is going digital at a very fast rate and traditional advertising techniques like Print and TV would soon become obsolete.

To give a better idea about the rate of growth of the digital world, Mr.Kamath gave the example of Angry Birds and said that it took angry birds only 35 days to reach 50 million users whereas it took years for radio, television, and desktop to achieve the same milestone. Be it video streaming or online shopping, consumers have started spending a lot of time on the internet. In India, the major reason for this increase is Jio which was responsible for making data available to everyone and increasing the internet penetration in India.

Mr. Kamath then went on to talk about the different components of digital marketing like search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, mobile marketing and affiliate marketing. He explained in detail the importance of each of them and the key metrics like Impressions, CTR, Conversion and the like that are used to analyze the effectiveness and reach of digital ads. The different pricing methodologies, ways of targeting digital ads and the details of the AdTech ecosystem were also discussed in the lecture. Post which, Mr. Kamath discussed the Measurement tools and techniques like A/B Testing, Passive Measurement which are used to measure the efficiency of the ads. The 3R framework for advertising which consists of Reach, Resonance, and Reaction was also touched upon by Mr. Kamath in the session.

It was a highly interactive session and the lecture was followed by questions from the students and various topics like Ad Frauds, Brand Safety, ways to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning in marketing and Nielsen’s role in reviving SMEs were brought up by the students. The session was very interesting and enriching and will definitely help the budding managers to stand out in the corporate world. We look forward to having more of such interactions.