At the exchange4media conference, Shivam Puri, Chief Executive Officer at Cipla Health Ltd delivered the Keynote Session on 'Understanding Mobile Marketing Landscape in India.' In a frank speech, he spoke about how the experts aren’t always right, why perspective matters, and how the mobile has become so monumental.
“One of the advantages of being a keynote speaker is that you don't actually get a brief. So, you can pretty much decide what you want to talk about,” said Puri, while ruminating on the different points other speakers would raise around how mobiles, and to a greater extent, technology are impacting our lives.
“With all the years of experience, I realize that I can now start to talk about my learnings of the past 20 years to add significant value to you guys on how to approach the future trends shaping up…As I watched the mobile industry shape up, I got a couple of trends wrong as it was difficult to imagine what an exponential growth curve can translate into , 10 years into the future “
Puri then spoke of Alexander Graham Bell, and how while the telephone was his greatest (“best PR”) invention, he had many other creations to his name. And so, we owe our current state of the world to him in some part.
“Sometime in 1985 AT&T hired top consultants at point in time and asked them to project how many mobile phone users there would be in the year 2000. What do you think was a projection? These are guys who really are at the cutting edge of projections, and they said they would be around nine lakh users by 2000. They were off by some 120 times because there ended up being some 109 million.”
Puri then brought up other examples of knowledge messiahs of their time being way off the mark when it came to predicting trends in technology, whether it was DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) saying there was no need for everyone to have a computer at home or Western Union money transfer dismissing the telephone.
“So what I'm trying to tell you here is experts within the communication industry, over the last 100 years have got their projections and assumptions repeatedly wrong on the upside. And you know, this is the point that I wanted to make. There is one message I want to leave you with today is that the human mind just cannot imagine what the future would look like in case of exponential growth,” he said.
Puri then spoke about the power of digital, and how digital is empowered in India by the virtue of it being a mobile-first market. “If you're trying to build a large brand, you cannot make it without digital. If you're working on a media budget of say 20-30 crores on a single brand, you cannot have a media budget without having an adequate digital leg to it. Otherwise, you know, you're really disconnected with your consumers. If you're trying to build a small brand, the best way to start is digital. So digital definitely has become mainstream. 70-75% of digital consumption actually happens through mobile phones. So pretty much the mobile phone is the front right and center of communication today. And all marketers need to take a proper note of the same and implement this in their media planning to ensure they are where their consumers are.
