Mindshare's Anita Kotwani on balancing data and instincts for creative campaigns

Mindshare's Anita Kotwani on balancing data and instincts for creative campaigns

She believes that instincts should be backed by data.

Anita Kotwani

MUMBAI: The marketing world is currently standing at the intersection between data and creativity, mulling on the road to traverse to prepare better communication strategies in this world of technological advancements and smarter consumers.

However, Mindshare senior vice president new business Anita Kotwani is of the view that a fine balance between the two is the way to go ahead as data only improves the functionality of any creative. In an exclusive chat with Indiantelevision.com at the recently concluded Zee Melt 2019, she shared that the involvement of data in marketing is nothing new and the real-time information that a marketer has access to these days can help in getting better ROI.

Kotwani noted, “We have always relied on data but now you have more real-time data. Every time, even 20 years back, when we did a TV plan, we had a diary system that we would use to evaluate data. The recommendations then were always backed by some amount of data and research work. What has really changed in this space is the fluidity of data. Today, there’s more fluidity and more velocity in data. There is a lot of variety, which wasn’t there before.”  

She added that this enormity of data is now helping people to work better and efficiently. “The only advantage that this data is today giving me is letting me do real-time planning. I can course correct and optimise better. I am able to have a much better ROI than I used to have erstwhile.”

On being asked if a marketer should always rely on data or is it advisable to act on instinct sometimes, Kotwani highlighted that one should try to back those intuitions with concrete data since that is what the client seeks.

She said, “You always have a hypothesis that you start with. Then you try to negate that hypothesis by looking at the data. It tells you if the data backs your story or not. It is also a comfort that the client seeks. If you want to go by intuition, back up it with concrete numbers so it becomes more comfortable to digest for the client-side too. I think you should strike a balance between the two so you and the client are both mentally at peace.”

Despite emphasising much on the need for technology in driving successful communication, Kotwani is of the belief that human intervention from the marketing business can’t be taken away. “How much ever is the machine will learn to give inputs, it will still need the human mind to make sense out of it. I don’t see machine thinking of ideas.”

She concluded by adding, “There’s a lot of talk around ML, AI, etc., which will show us the patterns of data and where it wants us to lead. But you will need the human brain to decide what we need to do with those patterns and the data and how do we land those ideas. I still feel that machines will never be able to attain the creativity that is required in our industry for that.”