The Advertising Club held D-Code, its annual digital review event, in which it asks its speakers to list one best-of-class work from their organisation’s stable, one from outside of their organisation, and three tips to win in digital.
Kickstarting the evening was Amit Wadhwa, CEO, Dentsu Creative.
His best of class work from the Dentsu stable was:
He explained, “This piece of work had a strong idea. Digital was at the core and had a purpose. It’s important for anything and everything to have a purpose, even on digital.”
Best of class work from outside Dentsu
“A team from Ukraine presented this idea at the Cannes Lions this year. It was topical. It hits you where it matters and has a strong purpose and the whole campaign was very digital,” he said.
Mantras to win on digital
While stating that he was by no means a digital genius, he shared what he thought were the keys to winning on digital.
“Timing is the key. Don’t try too hard to integrate digital within the campaign and it has organic integration. Everything is possible on the medium, you need to figure out how. At the end of the day, no matter what technology comes, digital is still about people because they’re needed to use it and generate the ideas,” he said.
Mansha Tandon
The head of YouTube’s consumer marketing for India stated that while the words media, creative and technology are linked to digital usually, culture and trends are important too.
“I didn’t want to show creative, video ad sequencing or all that sexy stuff, I want to talk to you about the people behind digital and the people without whom digital would not be as it is today,” she said.
She picked YouTube’s #JavRun created with Neeraj Chopra as the brand’s showcase work from last year.
“It wasn’t enough for us to just make a film about Neeraj’s story and how he used digital and YouTube to transform his life. We wanted to connect the dots and so we onboarded him as a YouTube creator. It wasn’t just that. We had to connect the dots with YouTube Shorts. We created a challenge for the Shots users called #JavRun,” she said.
Tandon’s winning moment for the campaign was when Kaun Banega Crorepati ran a question about the campaign on a recent episode.
“I never imagined that Amitabh Bachchan would be organically taking the name of my brand. I think it’s a good example of a digital culture seeping through pop culture,” she said.
When it came to work from other brands that inspired her, she listed Nike’s NFT Sneakers and Amazon.
“Yes, Amazon is Google’s competitor, but they’ve done something exciting with Alexa. Voice assistants are so mechanical. You don’t think of them being human and conversational. What Amazon did is that they inserted Alexa into a YouTube talk show among humans to show the conversational side of it. It’s a stunning example of a product benefit brought to life in an investment-light way,” she said.
Three tips and tricks to crack the digital code:
• Lean into multi-format
• Capitalise on community creativity
• Represent regional creativity in your work
.jpg&h=334&w=500&q=100&v=20250320&c=1)
.jpg&h=334&w=500&q=100&v=20250320&c=1)
.jpg&h=334&w=500&q=100&v=20250320&c=1)
.jpg&h=268&w=401&q=100&v=20250320&c=1)
