'Should have invested time and effort towards machine learning and focussed on code-writing': Mindshare's Rituparna Dasgupta

A series to end the decade - part ten

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Campaign India's countdown to the end of the decade will feature leading names from the marketing and communications fraternity. We ask senior executives from the advertising, marketing and media fraternity about the last 10 years and the year to come.

Here's what Rituparna Dasgupta, principal partner strategy, Mindshare, had to say:

One piece of work created by a competitor in the last decade that you wish you had created/worked on?

Leveraging one of the most impactful components of social media data, i.e., Hashtags, McCann Lima’s Cannes winning campaign 'Hashtags for Life' in 2016 appealed a lot to me. I wish I was a part of this brilliant campaign that made the best use of data, very obvious consumer behavior on social media; in limited budget yet effective and powerfully driving a cause or purpose. This data-driven strategy was to get the Peruvian Red Cross to increase the database of voluntary blood donors.

What touched my heart was the direct impact on society because it’s this data that will eventually save lives.

If hindsight is 20/20, what is the one thing that you could have done differently in the last decade?

Machine learning as a science is not new. However, it is the one that has gained fresh momentum in the last decade. And to the extent that eventually all industries will depend on self-learning models which are able to independently adapt to data with minimum human intervention. Be it personalised recommendations on e-commerce platforms or something fascinating as a driverless self-driving car!

While I have worn the consumer’s hat in this light, I should have invested significant time and structured effort towards learning the nitty-gritties of machine learning and dirtied my hands with actual code-writing from the creator’s lens as well.

One skill that you would want to pick up in 2020 and why?

I am bad in languages! Despite living in Mumbai for the past 15 years now, I am unable to converse in Marathi. What’s worse, despite married in a Tamil speaking household, my vocabulary is limited to 'vanakkam', 'aamaa' and 'ille'! I hope to pick up conversational Marathi and Tamil in 2020 because vernacular is the exploding trend!