Festive season: Big sums may flow into social media | Economic Times

Advertisers and social media platforms are expecting a significant jump in ad spends for the festive season this year amidst Indian users spending a lot more time online and continuing fears of a potential third wave. Arun Srinivas, director and head, global business group at Facebook India said over the last one year, the consumer shift towards digital has become 'structural.' "With shopping primarily happening online, we are seeing a strong and increasing interest from brands in creating virtual celebrations for festivals. This interest from brands has emerged well ahead of Diwali this year and is likely to accelerate over the coming weeks," he added. Srinivas said many brands, especially in the watches and jewelry segment are already building on innovations such as ‘Buy online, pick-up in store’ (BOPIS) for a ‘quick’ shift to online. "Offline brands are working with established e-commerce platforms to build transactions on the internet. We’ve seen an increased adoption of Facebook’s ‘collaborative ads’ that link products retailed through traditional channels to a third-party online retail platform," he added. Karan Bedi, CEO of MX Player said he is expecting this year's festive season to be bigger. MX Player is owned by Times Internet Ltd (TIL), part of the Times of India Group, which publishes The Economic Times. "Over the next few weeks, we are scheduled to go live with large brands like Asian Paints, Angel Broking and several others. We are also developing some very exciting offerings for brands across our live streaming IP’s like ‘The Manch’, which features unique interactive music live streams by 52 of the top musicians in the country," he added.Ashish Bhasin, CEO, APAC, and chairman-India at Dentsu said Covid has accentuated the growth of digital platforms. “Because familiarity with digital has increased rapidly, and we are a very social country, it lays the ground for social media to also be very prominent. Social media is becoming more and more integral for the digital plans of brand marketers and social media influencers are fast becoming mainstream,” he added. Aditya Swamy, director, marketing partnerships at Google India said businesses of all kinds are 'eager' to capture consumer sentiments on YouTube for the festive season this year. "From discovering brands, researching them through demos, and deciding on a purchase, users are coming to YouTube for the full customer experience,” he said and added that besides Hindi, ads in Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and Malyalam have been recording a steady growth. “Brands are now also striking interesting partnerships with top creators including creating unique properties to leverage a variety of popular content for innovative storytelling,” Swamy said. Shashi Sinha, CEO of IPG Mediabrands said with many direct to consumer companies spending heavily on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, social media will see gains. Globally, microblogging platform Twitter saw an increase in advertiser interest and demand with Q2 2021 witnessing 87% year-over-year growth in ad revenues. “In India, we’ve seen a 30% growth in the number of brand partners working with Twitter in 2020 compared to 2019. Conversation on the service peaks during moments and events like festivals,” said a spokesperson and added: “E-commerce, BFSI, automotive and OEM brands encourage users to make the most of the many festive discounts the brands have to offer. Over the past year, we’ve also seen new categories such as edtech and fintech emerge in Twitter conversations.”