'The world’s most successful brands today, have been using AI for several years and are reaping the rewards': IPM's Deepa Mohan

A series to end the decade - part twenty three

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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 Deepa Mohan, marketing director, IPM India, had to say:

One piece of work in the last decade that you wished you had created/worked on. Why?

Google: Year in Search -2017.

I personally find this quite powerful and real, for a moment you forget it’s an advertisement. It’s fascinating to see how the brand has so creatively leveraged the most common Google searches, over the previous 12 months, and adapted it to a short video film. These stories elicit a variety of emotions, ultimately uniting in a tug of heart for everyone - no matter what the Google product preference might be, delivered through an uplifting message of how our usage of the brand, reflects the best in all of us.

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

Investing in digital transformation, both personally and professionally. From a professional lens, in particular, leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technology as an integral part of our marketing strategy, would’ve been beneficial.

Some of the world’s most successful brands today, have been using AI for several years and are reaping the rewards in terms of profits, brand reputation, and visibility. Amazon, Starbucks, Alibaba, Nike, BMW to name a few. For example, residential addresses in India are often only best guestimates of location, which makes delivery a challenge. It is fascinating to see how Amazon is using machine learning and AI to bring better precision to delivery, including a 0-to-100 confidence score for an address in India.

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

Understanding big data analytics in deriving the right insights for marketing. It is a skill that is increasingly being used by marketers to plan their campaigns. I personally have always been someone who believes in data driven decision making over intuition or experience.

Furthermore, big data allows organisations to spot trends and find patterns that can be used for future readiness. It is easy to see that organisations that ‘know’ more, will outperform their peers in the long run.

So, learning the nuances of big data and data analysis will be a rewarding and enriching investment of my time. This domain is full of unsolved puzzles! I see it enhancing my method skills and reasoning – a recorded aid to being solution oriented, at the back of roadblocks.