“The world doesn’t need another media agency” is what Mukesh Agrawal, Co-Founder of The Media Ant and his team discussed when they started the company in 2012. What this basically meant was that if The Media Ant did the same work as what media agencies have been doing, it would not be adding much of a value to the ecosystem. Agrawal added, “We have never thought of ourselves as a media agency. We have always thought of ourselves as a tech led platform that makes life easier for advertisers.”

He engaged in an in-depth chat with exchange4media, to further highlight how the media planning landscape has evolved over time and how The Media Ant adapted itself to cater to the constantly changing challenges that marketers face on a day to day basis.

Edited excerpts:

The media planning and buying space was way different a decade ago, the digital revolution hadn’t really kicked in at its full force. How were things back then, when you were a newly launched platform?

When we started The Media Ant in 2012, one of the problems marketers faced and largely SMB marketeers, was that any marketing decisions they would take in terms of media selection, media planning, it would be suboptimal in nature. The biggest reason for that was the lack of information, lack of transparency in the information which was available.

For example, let’s say there is a small or mid sized brand which wanted to invest around ten to 20 lakhs and had identified that radio was the right medium for it. Now, because of lack of information, the brand didn’t know which radio station it should pick. Meeting all the radio stations would get the brand even more confused, and the reason is each radio station would say that it was number one on some or the other factor.

We thought that it's a problem in the market and that's where we came into picture with The Media Ant. Today, a brand can make informed decisions, select the right media vehicle, which helps them in reaching out to their TG in the most efficient manner.

Is it only the SMBs now that are your core clients, or are other big players coming into the picture too?

When we started The Media Ant, the larger intent was to solve SMB problems. We always believed and thought that larger players have bigger agencies who are helping them with their marketing requirements. In due course of time, which is the last twelve years, we realised that yes, SMB is the core audience for us, but there are also larger players who need our services.

With that learning, last year we changed our tagline from ‘media buying made easy’ to ‘empowering all to advertise’, which means we are there to serve anyone who wants to advertise. Whether big, medium or small, it doesn't matter. However, SMB still contributes almost 60% to 70% of business to us and it helps us in diversifying ourselves.

We work with a long tail of customers.Today I can safely say that we are the number one company in terms of handling a large number of accounts. I don’t think anyone in the country is able to serve the number of accounts we have done. For instance, last year, which is the 2023 calendar year, we worked with 850 brands. I don’t think anyone in the agency ecosystem would have done that.

In that case, how do you strike a balance between your overall business strategy and at the same time maintain the growth for SMBs too?

Ultimately we are in the business where we will grow if our client grows. If SMBs grow, they would continue to invest more money into advertising. There have been an enormous number of instances wherein we have said no to an SMB that they should not advertise.

So, what’s the advice you give to startup founders when they approach you?

We've worked with many startups and we know a lot of founders in the ecosystem who come to us and say that they are starting a business and want to invest, let's say 15 lakhs, 50 lakhs or even one crore. We tell them ‘don't even advertise right now’. The reason being, if they put the money right now and the product is not ready, the overall logistics is not ready, the overall value chain is not ready, they will be burning the money.

So we give them the right advice to go slow if needed, maybe control the social media channels, maybe control whatever the lowest hanging fruit is.

For example, if the startup is largely into the offline ecosystem, we will tell them that maybe they should do some of the BTL work. If the startup is around an online ecosystem, we would tell them that they should use Instagram or maybe Snapchat or maybe any relevant platform to get their initial level of growth.

Our DNA is not to collect monies and just spend for them. We want to give them the right advice which makes them grow. And eventually as they grow, we keep growing with them.

What about the recently concluded IPL season or the ongoing T20 World Cup season, how are you helping brands leverage these mega events to their maximum?

IPL has been quite successful for us, we worked with almost 15-20 brands this season. For example, there’s a brand called ‘Beyond Snacks’, which is a multi channel snack brand. They utilised the IPL in a very effective way.

They picked up a couple of key matches and they were there in select cities while the matches were going on and they did see a spike in their overall business. That was a decent success.

Around sports, there has been a myth that unless you're spending let’s say north of 20 crore, it doesn't make any sense. This is an old school thought. What happened earlier was that because it was only on television and a lot of brands who have grown have used IPL or maybe other sporting events in the earlier era, which was around five, six years back. And that school of thought says that if you don't invest 20 crores and above, you don't get a share of voice.

But with digital today, with the sharpened targeting, with the cutting edge technology which Hotstar and JioCinema both have, a small brand, like one in Bhubaneshwar who we are working with (a real estate player), they've been able to invest something in the range of 50 lakhs to one crore and they have got good amount of leads.

What are the tools that you essentially deploy to ensure effectiveness of the ad budgets going in?

As I mentioned to you earlier, the world doesn't need another agency. And since the time we have started, our intent has been very, very clear: how do we add value to the ecosystem? When I say ecosystem, I mean everyone – brands, media publishers, media owners or anyone else who's in this ecosystem.

So we've used technology to bring efficiency, we've used technology to solve problems for brands, and we've used technology to help a lot of publishers or media owners in generating incremental business.

Typically what happens in agencies is when somebody starts a new agency, they poach clients. Same client who was spending Rs 100 somewhere, starts spending Rs 100 elsewhere. That is not an incremental business generation. That's where we have come into the picture of generating incremental value.

Some of the technologies and tools we have created which enables us to do this is we built a software which is backed by thousands of data points using ten plus tools available in the marketplace. And it provides you with a holistic media plan in not days, but in a few hours.

We have done thousands of campaigns and we've created another proprietary tool through which by clicking a few buttons, the person would get to know, in a market like Bangalore for say the healthcare category, these are some of the top level media options which thousands of advertisers have used in the past. So it makes their life much easier.

Another tool which we have created to bring more efficiency into our businesses, is AI led. Let's say we are running a campaign of auto branding, so the team member can put up thousands of pictures, The tool with an AI ability can clean the data and create a nice PPT with relevant pictures, removing the duplications, removing some of the bad images, providing a nice PPT and excel which then can be shared with clients and reducing from three to four man days to maybe an hour.

With over 850 clients on board, how are you ensuring a seamless customer experience for them?

For everything we do, we use technology to bring more efficiency to provide the right customer value. If a customer comes to us, we ensure that first they are provided with the right solution.

We provide them with dashboard access, wherein they can see what campaign they have done, which month, what creative they used, and the proof of execution as well which makes their life much simpler. Because of our overall servicing quality, they continue to work with us repeatedly.

What are the trends that you are foreseeing, going forward in this space?

Overall, the media consumption of consumers is changing. People who were on TV earlier or print earlier or any newspaper are now on mobile phones or are watching content on CTV etc. Now in the digital ecosystem, the three key platforms are social media, news platforms and OTTs. In addition to that, you also today have a huge amount of digital sports advertising and influencer marketing.

So from, from the way I'm looking at it, in the next two to three years, these things put together would largely have almost 50% to 60% of market share in terms of total adex and which would also include maybe digital OOH.

A huge shift is underway, and a lot of myths are set to be broken. Brands will have to be agile to tweak their media strategies as and when required.

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