Artificial Intelligence (AI), short-form video, and business messaging are disrupting the way agencies operate today, enabling them to drive growth for themselves and the businesses that they work with. The evolving technologies and consumer consumption patterns mean that the skills agencies require today have dramatically shifted, pushing them to urgently upskill and evolve to become future-ready, and build themselves into agencies of the future.
“The agency ecosystem, which is at the heart of India’s digital, brand and advertising growth, is on the cusp of a massive shift. The evolving digital landscape powered by the growth of AI, short-form video formats such as Reels, and Business Messaging has meant that agencies of all sizes need to adopt new skills to grow. Automation enables agencies to scale faster, the rise of short-form and engaging formats is driving the evolution of the creative ecosystem, and messaging has disrupted how people and brands interact. We are partnering with agencies of all sizes to help them meaningfully transform themselves and become future-ready, to grow and tap into new business opportunities.” – Gaurav Jeet Singh, Director, Agency and VC Partnerships for Meta in India
The Meta Marketing Summit Agency Edition was held across Mumbai and Gurgaon saw more than 350 senior agency partners attend as speakers threw light on shaping the agency of the future.
The summit highlighted the key areas of transformation and growth for agencies.
AI Supercharging Growth
More agencies are adopting AI and Generative AI tools to help businesses reach audiences accurately, test and learn quickly, and scale creatives faster. Sokrati India used Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (A+SC) to drive growth for multiple accounts that they manage.
“We have deployed Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and have seen an increase in not just the adoption of A+SC as a product but also a substantial increase in the spends on A+SC. AI and tools such as Advantage+ suite are not only transforming how agencies function but also accelerating growth and conversions for businesses of all sizes across India” – Abhirup Datta, CEO Sokrati and Performance Solutions
Building Next Generation Brands
India tops the charts for Reels creation, with the most produced every week globally, and India is home to the largest community of Instagram creators in the world. This presents a massive opportunity to brands and agencies. Agencies are now evolving from being either media or creative planners for brands to all round consultants for them.
“Reels is a widely adopted product now and a key part of the marketing strategy of almost all brands that we work with. We worked with India Gate Basmati Rice to deploy a mixed-creators strategy, partnering with 20+ regional creators and mega celebrities to showcase its new packaging and reach a broader audience with Partnership Ads. The brand saw a 4.5 points increase in top-of-mind awareness vs 0.9 APAC benchmark.” – Aakriti Sharma, Client Lead – Wavemaker
“As consumer consumption patterns evolve, we’re seeing a significant shift in how brand building happens. We worked with Milton for their Diwali campaign with Meta Moment Maker. The brand achieved 31 million incremental reach utilizing multilingual video assets across formats to enhance brand awareness and engagement. The campaign resulted in Milton seeing a 110% lift in conversations, 84% increase in conversions, and 31% lower cost per reach.” – Sadhvi Dhawan, VP – Blink Digital
Business Messaging
The shift to messaging is truly driving the next chapter of digital transformation. From driving lead optimization for ads that click to message to driving business outcomes that matter with Conversions API for Business Messaging. Today, WhatsApp Cloud API powers 70,000 Indian businesses every month, and the number continues to grow rapidly.
“Performance media takes centre stage with businesses today with outputs increasingly being mapped to business outcomes. In a highly competitive market scenario, for most lower-funnel KPI campaigns, it is critical for advertisers to test, adopt, and scale upcoming technology and formats to maximise ROI. Business Messaging on Meta has proven beneficial in driving KPIs, including high-quality leads at efficient costs and has made its way into our plans as a tried and tested solution delivering business outcomes. Given WhatsApp’s widespread adoption across India, including Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets, it is a seamless platform solution to explore. Click-to-WhatsApp and Messenger Ads bring captive customers from Facebook and Instagram, to WhatsApp, to drive sales and other key business outcomes.” – Iti Kaul, Head of Digital, OMD India
Building Bespoke Tech Solutions
We are also developing bespoke solutions for agencies to turbocharge their growth. We partnered with AdYogi to help them build a product performance management platform for their e-commerce services through profitable catalog ads.
“We partnered with Meta to develop a product performance management platform to scale our e-commerce revenue through profitable catalog ads. BigAtom.ai enhances product feeds with videos and utilizes product-level videos to drive higher ROAS for catalog ads on Meta. Harnessing the power of AI, BigAtom.ai helps brands identify the most profitable products and allocates budgets on Meta, resulting in increased sales and profitability. BigAtom.ai also enhances catalog performance on Meta by automatically removing broken or low-performing products, resulting in 8%-10% ad budget savings” – Anshuk Aggarwal, Co-Founder, AdYogi
