Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication (SIMC-PG), Pune hosted its annual Media Management and Marketing & Media Analytics Conclave on August 7, 2016 as a part of its silver jubilee celebrations. The theme, ‘Agency of the Future’ focused on how the media canvas in the Indian context has evolved over the past couple of years.
The speakers constituted a battery of eminent industry stalwarts, who are proficient in their fields and have created a niche for themselves in the industry, namely Kartik Sharma, Managing Director at Maxus; Suresh Balakrishna, CEO India, Middle East and South Asia at Kinetic; Sundeep Nagpal, Founder Director at Stratagem Media Pvt Ltd; Niteen Bhagwat, Executive Director and CEO at Asterii Analytics; Sarang Panchal, CEO at MRSS India; Mubin Khan, Head of Products, Research and Analytics, Senior VP at BARC, India.
The keynote speaker for the Media Management conclave was Kartik Sharma, who spoke on the topic ‘Media Agency of the Future,’ and talking about the trend, he said, “We are becoming a visual world driven by mobiles.” Moreover, he encouraged everyone to closely monitor how technology would change the world. He also spoke about user perception in terms of how an advertisement is viewed differently on different mediums.
Suresh Balakrishna on the other hand, offered a fresh perspective on the concept of ‘Out of Home’ consumption and its dynamics. In his opinion, OOH straddles television, newspaper and the internet. He cited how 80% of mobile consumption is done outside of home. Besides this, he also stressed on how innovations in digital OOH would impact OOH marketing. He opined, “Anything is OOH, and we do all of it.”
Following this, Sundeep Nagpal gave an enlightening speech on the changing investment scenario of media businesses in the digital era. He spoke about the concept of branding and Big Data Analytics, where businesses actually track every movement of their consumers.
The Media Management session of the Conclave culminated with SIMCatalyst, a competition organised by SIMC-PG that required students to come up with a niche channel idea to strengthen television viewership. The winning team, Last Minute Wizards, came up with a channel that mirrored the digital practices of today’s youth and aimed at telecasting innovative concepts, and moving away from the hackneyed mainstream television content. The dignitaries presiding over the judging panel were Kartik Sharma, Suresh Balakrishna and Sundeep Nagpal.
The institute has noticed that, for the past few years, its alumni have been making a move towards the area of research. That, along with the increasing importance of research in the media landscape became a few of the primary reasons to initiate a fourth specialization of Marketing and Media Analytics.
The Marketing and Media Analytics session of the conclave opened with Niteen Bhagwat, who talked about the basics of analytics and the prospects it holds. Emphasizing on why measurement is the core of analytics he opined, “We cannot manage what we cannot measure.” Further, he underlined the amplification of human behaviour by technology and social media, and interestingly pointed out how social media is driven by altruism, homophily, tribalism, narcissism and control.
Following him was Sarang Panchal, who covered the concept of research in the media landscape and further elucidated about the trends in the market research industry and its future, which involved the growth of DIY research, popularization of market research, online communities and predictive analysis.
The last speaker of the event, Mubin Khan began his talk by saying, “What BARC envisaged for the future is happening now.” He elaborated on how market research is no more as simple as it used to be and predicted that the future agencies will not just depend on analytics but on consumer insights as well.
The event concluded with the esteemed group of speakers in a panel discussion with Indrani Sen, an adjunct faculty of SIMC moderating the discussion. They shared their personal experiences in the industry to make the students understand what the companies require of them during recruitment.
The conclave helped dispel the various doubts brewing in the minds of the students regarding Marketing & Media Analytics, the new specialization introduced by SIMC from this year, and also get a better understanding of Media Management. “My biggest takeaway from this conclave was it helped bridge the gap between perception and knowledge. It also elucidated the role of analytics in providing concrete, dependable and unprejudiced data,” says Kaushal BK, a first year student at Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication, Pune.