“Cutting noise out of data is the biggest challenge today”: Gaurav Jeet Singh, Unilever

The breadwinner of an Indian family that washes clothes with Wheel and uses Lifebuoy to shower, travels to and from work by the local metro. Five years ago, the commuter killed time on the long and boring journey by reading newspapers; today he is glued to the mobile screen. Does he notice the billboards enroute? Or listen to the radio any longer?

That is just a small example of the enormous change in media terms that has swept India in cities, small towns and villages. And what does that mean to Hindustan Unilever (HUL) (turnover: nearly Rs 40,000 crore), which needs to communicate with virtually all Indians for its long list of brands, including Brooke Bond, Fair & Lovely, Kissan, Kwality Wall’s, Lipton and Pond’s, among others?

This challenge of media planning lies squarely in the court of Gaurav Jeet Singh. He has spent more than a decade in the company. After joining as the regional sales and customer manager in 2008, he became a branch sales manager before taking over as marketing manager for Pureit, the water purifier. In 2014, he was moved to the media function and is now the general manager - media for Unilever’s entire South Asia market.

Before joining Unilever, Singh had his own logistics business, which he had started after a brief stint at L’Oréal in 1998.

At the recently concluded Mobile Marketing Association’s convention, Impact - 2019, Singh spoke on ‘Leveraging data for precision marketing’. On the sidelines of that event, Singh gave an exclusive interview to afaqs! Reporter. Edited excerpts:

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Editor's Note:

"There is an English expression, ‘Too much of a good thing.’ If you want a great place in which to use that turn of phrase, consider data.

Marketers, publishers and pretty much everybody else is inundated with data. Because technology allows us to capture it, data must be stored. And because it is stored it must be analysed, often to death. And that’s where the fun begins.

You will find this fortnight’s cover story interview with Gaurav Jeet Singh, Unilever’s boss man for media for all of South Asia, insightful. He talks candidly of the paradox of having far too much data in digital vs just enough of it in traditional media like TV and print. How to cut the noise out of the data is his big concern.

And mind you, this is HUL, with all the resources as its command and experience that spans the world. Even it struggles with extracting the insights from the mountains of data. How do lesser companies manage? The answer: poorly.

The first issue is finding insight in the noise. The second is that information within a company is normally assembled in silos and integrating it all usefully can be difficult.

It is also surprising how much of the data companies maintain so lovingly is plain wrong. (The commonest is that the contact details of clients or customers are outdated) Three, changes in technology mean that the way in which data is organised has to be updated constantly. And, lastly, companies have quite a job getting data analysts good enough to interpret the information and make business sense.

To end with another old English expression: if you can’t come to grips with data, you could end up missing the woods for the trees!"

Sreekant Khandekar

Editor