IAA Knowledge Conclave: ‘In digital marketing, it’s important to scale fast or fail fast: it’s accepted, it’s encouraged’

‘Each medium has a role to play,’ explained Pranay Chulet, CEO, Quikr.com, addressing a query on the online classifieds portal’s aggressive TV advertising and whether all the budgets could be diverted to digital. He was speaking on digital marketing at an IAA Knowledge Conclave in Mumbai on 26 October.

Digital has its advantages and role, Chulet said, pointing out that for the first two to three years of its five-year journey, Quikr.com did not advertise on television. After it gained confidence and ‘reached the limit’ of what could be done online, the brand went mass on TV. He reflected, “At least in the foreseeable future, you can’t be uniquely online – you need other mediums like TV, print and OOH.”

Chulet added that in ‘mass market India’, people attach a lot of credibility to a brand that’s on TV.

Specific to Quikr.com, he said there is a need to populate the supply and demand side of the portal, being an online classifieds site. While the demand side could find its way through online promotions, the supply side requires the mass reach of TV, he noted.

Testing, a game of numbers

Pointing out that ‘consumers don’t care about brands’ status updates on social media’, he also noted that the multi-tasking consumer is fundamentally changing how marketing campaigns are run.

“It’s not about the media mix alone. We need to look at, for instance, using one channel for the benefit of the other,” he said.

Chulet listed some of the characteristics of digital marketing in his talk.

“The good thing about digital marketing is that you can start small. You can test things a lot. At Quikr, we have over 100 tests running at any point in different cities. And on digital, it is important to scale fast or fail fast – it’s accepted, it’s encouraged,” said the Quikr CEO, adding that more of them would fail by nature of being ‘tests’.

On the nature of digital marketing and the new skill sets it demands, Chulet said, “Digital marketing has increasingly become a game of numbers. Half of them working in digital marketing would be number geeks, who look at millions of data points. We need both sides of the brain to work together in digital media.”

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