With quirky campaigns, memes and moment marketing, timed with the ongoing World Cup and particularly the India-Pakistan matches, Dabur India has got considerable consumer attention for its popular brands – Red Paste, Cool King Hair Oil, Chyawanprash, Dabur Vita and the recently launched Bae Fresh Gel toothpaste.

The 140-year-old company is going big on key sporting events, World Television Premiere (WTP) movies and reality shows. It is now gearing up to become the title sponsor of popular talent show ‘Indian Idol’ on Sony TV for the first time, shared Rajiv Dubey, who leads the media strategy at Dabur.

This shift in Dabur’s marketing strategy marks a departure from its previous preferences for daily soaps and other General Entertainment Channel programmes that cater to the masses.

In an exclusive interview with e4m, Dubey explains the company’s media strategy, his plans to renegotiate ad rates with TV channels, and experiments with AI tools for effective media planning.

Excerpts:

On ICC World Cup

With Rs 11,500 crore in revenue in FY23, the company spends close to Rs 700 crore annually on advertising and promotion. About 40 per cent of these spends are meant for TV media, largely general entertainment channels, as per the company’s financial report.

“If you consistently advertise on the same programmes and the same TV channels for four to five years, your reach remains limited to a specific audience. It doesn't allow you to connect with viewers who do not regularly watch television. Sports programming, on the other hand, provides a unique opportunity to engage with an entirely different and broader audience segment,” Dubey points out.

Elaborating on the shift in marketing strategy, Dubey emphasises, "Our objective is to expand our outreach to fresh, younger, and less TV-centric demographics. This approach enables us to engage with a diverse audience, some of whom may not be heavy consumers of television content. Consequently, it broadens our scope for business generation."

Sports consistently gets good rates, in terms of viewership (IPL 2023 was rated about 5 TVR), Dubey added. “We are expecting that the India matches of the ICC World Cup will rate pretty well. The last World Cup India matches rated over 9 TVRs and one is hoping that the viewership is close to that number. India-Pakistan matches are supposed to be rated even more than 9,” he said.

“These are big bets and are giving us a good return on investments. Our visibility across TV is going up,” he shared. “Hopefully, we will end up doing a good job in the business generation for our company.”

“Barring some reality shows, most Hindi GEC programs are rated 2 or even less than that. Moreover, their ratings are inconsistent,” Dubey noted, who now seeks to initiate a pricing discussion with the entertainment channels due to a drop in their ratings.

“We need to get down to the table and renegotiate the ad pricing of Hindi channels because it is not giving us as much ROI as it used to earlier. In contrast, the South, programming is doing phenomenally well with ratings of 8-10. The West, the East and even Punjabi channels are serving good content with high viewership. So, we have no issues investing our money in those programmes.”

“Hindi GECs are failing because of content fatigue. Fragmentation is also very high. Then there is a lot of volatility in terms of ratings,” Dubey said.

Dubey further noted, “Thankfully, Hindi channels are in the consolidation phase, for instance, the Zee-Sony merger and probably Reliance-Disney. We are investing in Sony programmes after a long time mainly for two reasons: it delivers unique programming like ‘Jhalak Dikhla Jaa’, ‘KBC’, ‘Indian Idol,’ and ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’. Besides, there are very different sets of viewers who watch those programmes.”

On association with WTP Movies

India is the third-biggest cinema market globally. The cinema industry is expected to clock 38 per cent growth in the next three years, as per PwC’s latest global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2022-26.

Dubey explains, “The World Television Premiere of Bollywood and Hollywood movies offer a good opportunity to reach out to people who will come and sample that movie only and then go out. Most of them are young.”

“Movies are rated very well in terms of viewership. ‘Pathaan’ and ‘Brahmastra’ were rated very well. ‘Oppenheimer’, ‘Barbie’, Gadar 2 and ‘Jawan’ also did well,” Dubey said, adding that Dabur plans to invest more in TV premiers of films.

On digital spends

Dabur was among the first FMCG firms to embrace digital platforms. About one-fourth of its ad spend is currently dedicated to digital advertising.

“If you take the entire digital ecosystem, which is display, video, social and e-commerce put together, it is roughly anywhere between 25-33% depending on the quarter and the year,” says Dubey when asked about the share of digital ad spends.

“Out of the Rs 40,000 crore digital ad spend in India, only about Rs 5,000 crore is going to display and video, a digital expert told me. The rest of the ad money is going into performance-led marketing, which gives you better ROI”, Dubey pointed out. “Hence, we are spending money on the eCommerce/performance led ecosystem in a big way. Our focus in digital is more performance-based, followed by video, content, influencers and then social media.”

Apart from using Generative AI for making ads, Dubey is also experimenting with AI tools to optimise marketing spends. Do ad agencies have a reason to worry?

On Reality Shows

Dabur has been associated with Bigg Boss Hindi for seven seasons and with Bigg Boss Telugu on Star Maa as well.

“We have made significant investments in key properties in sports, films and impact TV programmes like Bigg Boss and Saregama. We are investing in ‘Saregama’ for the first time this year. All these efforts are to reach out to different sets of audiences.”

Dabur was one of the sponsors for the Star Parivar awards as well. “Star Parivaar award rated over 2.1 TVRs this time, probably the highest rated event show of this year,” says Dubey. Further capitalizing on its presence in talent shows, Dabur will soon announce its title sponsorship of “Indian Idol” on Sony TV, its first-ever association with the singing talent show, which is running for about two decades.