In a special address at the e4m TV First conference, Ajay Dang, President, Head - Marketing, Ultratech Cement delved deep into the topic 'Theory of Advertising and TV.'“Post 2006, across the world, advertisement effectiveness seems to have gone down,” he said as he kickstarted the session. “I think there is some fairly interesting and fundamental work that has happened in terms of understanding who we deal with, how human beings behave and also how we make decisions. As marketers, our key job is not around clicks, reach or frequency but is about making some change happen and making some decisions and actions happen at the other end of the pipeline,” Dang continued.

Quoting famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Dang said, “Medium is the message.” He feels that these words are profound and hold a true meaning.

Dang delved deeper, pointing out how marketers and business people are extremely passionate. “And maybe that is where the problem lies. We often forget that our TG is not us or our friends, so the amount of involvement that we have with our brands, we have with our categories, don’t exist with other people,” he said.

He shared insights from Howard Luck Gossage, who had said, “Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad.” Dang added, “This brings us to a basic insight, which is that we are not dealing with consumers, we are not dealing with containers, we are dealing with human beings. We need to truly understand how these people make decisions and process information.”

Speaking of the increased amount of media clutter, Dang says that the clutter has always existed in consumers’ minds. “Ads or no ads, consumers have a million more things to do. Within that, I think it is us who need to find our slots and our way,” he added.

He also shared the way out of this loop. Dang said, “If we truly understand the ‘being’ that we are talking to and align our goals with our consumers, that’s when we have some headway to make.”

"Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman once said ‘Thinking is to humans, as swimming is to cats’. We can do it, but we don’t like to do it. Then what is the core purpose of the brain? The core purpose of the brain is not thinking, it is to keep us alive,” Dang explained.

He further highlighted that marketers’ task is not to provide more and more information. “The bad promise that digital advertising has made is that we can never simultaneously attract or identify the exact moment when somebody is thinking of the jobs to be done and provide information right at that moment,” Dang said. He feels that the task at hand is not to just be messengers of information but to build great memories which can be recalled.

“Marketers are builders of memories, therefore we are far closer to storytellers rather than delivery people,” he said. Dang also mentioned that it is not the loyalists or heavy customers that dictate most of the volumes that are built, but are typically the non-consumers and light consumers who need to be reached out to.

Speaking of the Indian market, Dang pointed out how most of the categories here have extremely low penetration. “So your growth doesn’t lie in the 5-6% that are already consuming you, because they already have a memory structure built for you. Your job requires you to reach out to people who have not thought of your category, but are potential non-buyers or light buyers of your category,” he explained.

Boiling the entire concept down to three key tasks, Dang mentioned that attention, emotion and fame are extremely crucial. “We are not in the business of media, but in the business of harvesting attention. In 3 or 3 and a half hours of TV viewing, as an average consumer does, the attention that someone gives to advertising is less than 10 minutes. That also tremendously varies based on the medium that we go to,” he pointed out.

Coming to the aspect of emotion, Dang believes that media are varied in terms of their ability to deliver emotions. “Digital advertising is not prone to delivering emotion. A lot of investors & business people are very clear that at times you need advertising not for consumers but to build distribution,” he said. This is required to build mental availability with consumers and mental availability with retail, so that finally both mental and physical availability can happen simultaneously.

Having said that, Dang also mentioned that all mediums are not great at building attention, emotion and fame. “The more you are in an active search, active participation with the medium mode, the lesser your attention is, specially to the advertising and the stuff that you are not focused on. So the more the scroll speed, the less the attention. In this scenario, if you translate it to ‘cost per attention’, I think TV trumps everything else,” he mentioned.

For memory to be lodged in the human brain, the minimum seconds needed is 2.5 seconds. According to Dang, most digital mediums and digital advertising does not cross that threshold. “Therefore, it is no surprise that since 2006, the effectiveness of advertising has been going down,” he said.

He also mentioned that it is the biggest misnomer to exist in the industry that 50% of advertising works and 50% doesn’t. “Advertising works 50-90% in the long run. And if you are not able to establish memory in people’s heads, you have lost the large plot of advertising,” he said.

Speaking more about TV, he said that it doesn’t just have higher attention to start with, but it also retains the attention for a longer time. “If you had to evaluate the viewership of advertising and viewership of content on TV, that falls only by less than 20%. That means attention doesn’t go down, it holds attention for far longer as a medium versus something which is a lean in medium aka digital.”

The biggest search engine, according to Dang, is not Google or Amazon, but is the mind, and that is the most precious estate for an advertiser. “Digital does the harvesting job very well, but you cannot harvest without sowing. That is the real reason why it can’t do brand building. But when both mediums come together, you are doing a good balance of sowing and harvesting to have a good crop,” Dang explained.

He took up the example of IPL and posed the question - “Can you imagine IPL being built without Television? It provided a communal viewing experience not only to the 20-30 thousand people in the stadium, but the entire country viewing it together. There is a value to fame, of all this happening simultaneously. 3 consumers watching it once together, versus 1 consumer watching it 3 times is not the same.”

There is a large value in aggregation and delivering a large sense of communal experience together, he shared.

Concluding his session, Dang mentioned that when dealing with human beings, the crucial piece is not the message but the trust. “Because of its scale, TV builds trust. It talks of great levels of financial strength and about high quality,” he said.