Campaign India's December series where industry leaders talk about a surprising moment from 2018 and an expectation from 2019.
Here's what Rajiv Dingra, founder and CEO, WatConsult, had to say.
Surprising moment of 2018
2018 has been a interesting year! Personally for us here at WATConsult, its been a fabulous year with multiple awards at global stage. The biggest surprise for us came when we won the Grand Prix at the Prague International Awards. For an Indian agency to win at a largely European award that too a Grand Prix was a big surprise.
On a global level and from an advertising standpoint the most surprising thing was the exit of Martin Sorrell, as the leader of the largest advertising network, WPP. I don’t think even Sir Martin Sorrell saw that coming the way it did and hence it left him bitter. That one single event has changed the global dynamics of the advertising Industry and today many feel WPP will find it difficult to hold onto its leadership position globally. Adding to that, the rapid transformation and disruption of the advertising business, you have an Industry witnessing some serious changes.
WPP has made some bold moves to counter this as well, with the merger of VML and Y&R and Wunderman and JWT, but only time will tell if these do workout in the long run.
Prediction for 2019
Here are the top 3 trends that I see growing exponentially.
Programmatic Possibilities - I see a huge surge in the use of programmatic advertising and hopefully we will see the same coming into play beyond just digital advertising.
Voice it out - I see Voice both voice search and use of Voice enabled AI becoming a big discussion point among marketers this year and 2019 could be the year that these discussions actually translate to actions from the marketers end in taking baby steps into creating a voice strategy for their brands.
Video in every campaign - Digital video will become the fastest growing digital media inventory and asset created by agencies. I doubt we will see even 1 large campaign devoid of a video. It will become a norm to have a digital video as part of every campaign.
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