Mindshare wins big with help of data-driven marketing

Mindshare’s work on the data-driven marketing front has garnered attention at different award shows this year. We find out more...

It’s been an eventful year for Mindshare. They won a Silver and a Bronze Lion at the recently concluded Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and four Media Golds at Goafest 2019. In addition to their award-winning work in India, Mindshare (worldwide) was also awarded Cannes Lions Media Network of the Year 2019. The work that Mindshare won awards for at Cannes this year was done for their client Lifebuoy. Their entry - ‘Infection Alert System’ - was a data-marketing-driven campaign that aimed to create awareness about hand-washing in the areas of UP and Bihar, eventually extending the campaign to six more states.

We had the opportunity to catch up with Premjeet Sodhi and MA Parthasarathy at their office in Mumbai. Sodhi has recently been elevated to senior VP of Mindshare Fulcrum and MA Parthasarathy moved up to CEO of Mindshare South Asia. We asked Sodhi about some of the campaign’s challenges and he pointed out that the biggest was operationalising the data. “In terms of getting the data, managing it, converting the paper data into a usable format, doing the analytics... A lot of firsts happened,” he said.

Infection Alert System

Sodhi explained that pertaining to this particular campaign, the data journey was critical and aligning the data journey was critical for the agency to execute the campaign correctly. “How to communicate to a certain geography without spill-over to other mediums is challenging. Understanding the right messaging to put forth using the right medium became critical for us. What geography to target in what season using what messaging, at what frequency, was challenging. The challenges are more in these three areas relating to management and deployment of data,” Sodhi shares.

He went over the smaller details of the campaign and helped us understand how they brought it all together. The agency used past data as a reference point to project future trends and predict in which region diseases are more likely to occur. The campaign was mainly carried out using mobile as a medium and the team used feature phones and audio calls to create awareness to tell the consumer more about the predicted diseases and how to prevent them.

We asked the duo about attention spans in the digital age and how to cut through the clutter and stand out. Parthasarathy or Maps, as he’s popularly called, told us that with social media, storytelling cuts across platforms and formats. “The beauty with data is that it helps inform us at what time of the day, what consumer, what story is most likely to be consumed. Depending on the time of the day and the location that you’re at, you may not be able to afford to spend more than one second on a story. In a more laid-back context, you’d be willing to look at longer stories. As long as the story is personalised and relevant, I think data helps us address that – I think people will take an interest in our stories,” he explained.

Maps also mentioned that personalisation using data is a trend that is going to continue in the advertising world in the coming year. “As long as we’re using data to make it more relevant, in the right format, I genuinely don’t think attention spans are an issue,” he signs off.