Mumbai: MMA India annual conference kicked off in Mumbai with a bang. The theme was - Winning Marketing Organisations 2.0 - RETHINK RELEARN REBUILD. The summit started with a welcome address by Moneka Khurana and MMA India board & chairman of L' Oreal India Amit Jain.
On the sidelines of the event, Indiantelevision.com caught up with MMA Global India country head & board member Moneka Khurana, to talk about the role of MMA in a brands journey in today's world of technology and generative AI.
Edited excerpts
On the role of MMA in the future of marketing
MMA's narrative globally, is to enable and empower the marketing community with best in class practices, to adopt modern marketing at scale, and to help shape the future. So if it's not us, then whom? We will always continue being at the forefront of helping marketers build future proof marketing strategies. Therefore, for us to be able to not only bring to them technical expertise in terms of what are the new media touch points, how do you measure them? What should you do in terms of brand safety? How does your data strategy work? How should your data strategy framework look, beyond which it's also important that we believe in being more immersive, where it is the mindset and the culture is in sync with what can bring success to marketers, only then all of these pieces really begin to make sense and one can join the dots.
Atzp MMA, we believe that as a narrative, we not only drive the technical side of it, but we also drive a progressive mindset, a growth mindset, where culture, structure and your agility become very important.
On MMA educating brands and on the regulatory framework
There are two parts to how we plan to evangelise and empower the marketing community when it comes to generative AI. One is to help the marketer discover more and more use cases, when it comes to generative AI, to be able to better leverage what the platform has to offer, like, for example, the survey in the annual report, it actually mentions that how, by using AI to personalise you can improve your retention by 20 per cent. Well, marketers have reported 20 per cent improvement in retention, and 25 per cent increase in business growth. So clearly there is enough data which validates the power it has and what it can do for businesses. So one can discover more and more such use cases which can help them with business growth. Second, is to continuously work towards building a checklist of sorts, It's too early to talk governance and sign off on a framework because just the way marketers knowledge is evolving, so is the medium itself and AI as a platform itself is evolving. There are surprises coming from those who are building it on what it can do. So, in the interim, what's important is to work on a very collaborative, rich checklist, which not only has the do's but also the don'ts. In context of what you would do and how you should do it? What can it eventually offer and don'ts in context of what we heard good versus scary, and what should not be done.
Just the way we've been concerned about brand safety for the longest time. Now, we are living in a time where we really have to think about brand safety in the context of AI. So what should one be really looking out for? How should one be more cautious because at the end of the day, you don't want a brand to build success on the back of anything fake, like if you have an avatar being the face to you, which is generated by AI and has no real human touch to it. That's not a sustainable way to work. So primarily, it's about how, where to stop, and what to really watch out for. So those are the areas which at this stage we're working on, along with the fact that globally, we have a consortium which is actively testing use cases when it comes to personalization using AI. That's an area where we have also taken the lead because we believe that somebody in the session mentioned that 45 per cent of your brand success comes from your creativity. So how do you make sure that you have that? You know that winning is creative, and how AI will help you make that winning creative. How do you ensure that you're able to personalise effectively with AI? That's a consortium that we've built, and which we take into various markets.
On MMA working with marketing brands
So, we actually work very deeply. So primarily, we represent the ecosystem. Our philosophy is that for us to be able to enable and empower the marketer with the right toolkits, know-how and frameworks, we need to work actively with the ecosystem to drive it. It is not something one should be doing in a silo. So therefore, we bring together marketers, agencies, publishers, and tech enablers under one roof, to work in a very collaborative way. For example, if you see any of our toolkits, or any of the frameworks we build, they're very collective in nature, like the data toolkit, you will witness or the annual report you will see it has contributions perspectives, which are from across the ecosystem, right, just so that it really gives a very comprehensive view. So one is we believe that we need to work with the ecosystem for the marketer. Second is, we believe that our ultimate aim is to be able to help drive more and more adoption. There's enough content, which we want to keep creating, but how does one make it a lot more impact driven? So MMA is trying to enable ways which can help marketers measure impact from all of what they see or use and also of the narratives that MMA enables.
