Cooking with data

Financials, CPGs and telcos weighed in at Re.Con Indonesia in Jakarta on their top data challenges when trying to craft winning recipes for digital-marketing success.

Quality ingredients and explosive tactics

During a panel discussion on breaking down content, media and data silos, a couple of financial marketers noted the difficulties involved in working with data for lead generation. 

“Agencies come to me and say, ‘We can give you leads,’ said Kikie Randini, CMO of FWD Insurance Indonesia. “But what kind of leads? Is the quality good?”

Unlike a CPG product that can appeal to everyone, insurance is a specialized product that not only appeals to very specific consumers, but selling it also involves a fair bit of education, so the digital marketing path to sales conversion is a much more complex one.

“You need [data] that is able to be cooked. You should be able to work with it, cook in other aspects, engage with it. Sometimes we don’t have that in the market, so then we’re back to looking at our data internally,” Randini said.

“We need to acquire targeted customers and we’re not the FMCG that’s relevant to most people but we’re relevant to our segment,” agreed Leo Koesmanto, executive director and head of digital banking at DBS. “It’s like we need a sniper, not a bomb. We need a bomb once to make everyone aware about us. But then we need to select our customers and shoot them so that we are targeting the right segments.”

Koesmanto then went on to describe (in less combative terms) how DBS was building a new platform that will enable it to contextually target customers based on their actions, locations and behaviours.

While Randini says FWD is also trying to learn from their own data with customers continuously, as a young brand it still struggles to find the sweet spot between targeted digital campaigns and traditional awareness campaigns. “We don’t yet really know which media choice is right,” she confided.

How data helped ‘Real Husbands Cook’

Dhiren Amin, head of marketing for Kraft Heinz in Southeast Asia presented a case on how data helped them to make their Kecap ABC soy sauce brand stand out in the Indonesian market.

Their product was doing well in terms of market penetration and sales growth, largely because they were “pushing the sh*t out of it”, Amin explains. 

“But we had a problem. Any brand needs to be different from its competition. But if we looked at our brand equity scores, differentiation was lacking. We were growing because we were pumping in a lot of money and we relevant, but our brand difference wasn’t moving. That was our challenge.”

Amin went on to describe how Kraft Heinz used data to inform, validate and measure their campaign efforts around this challenge.

Inform: By far the largest use of data, Amin says the brand was meticulous in pouring through data to discover opportunities for the brand to distinguish itself. Brand equity scores showed no soy brand enjoyed a real emotional connection with consumers.

Research and consultations with psychologists and healers showed that Indonesian mothers felt unappreciated in the home due to expectations around gender roles a lack of empathy from husbands around household chores, contributing to a rising divorce rate in Indonesia over the past six years.

But more than empathy, the data showed Indonesian mothers wanted equality in sharing the workload but less than 3 of 10 Indonesian husbands helped in the kitchen. “It was not okay for husbands to just say thank you. They had to get off their asses and cook,” Amin said.

What followed was the ‘Real Husbands Cook’ campaign working with VML, including TVCs encouraging men to cook and others depicting lonely divorced husbands who wished they had. 

Validate: The films tested really well with focus groups leading Kraft Heinz to expand the campaign into roadshow event activations teaching husbands how to cook better and resources for recipes to help them learn.

Measure: the film got 4.5 million organic views on YouTube and engagement figures came in incredibly strong as it sparked a debate in Indonesia among husbands, wives. “The content was sticky. We got a lot of people talking,” Amin said.

The brand is now waiting for brand equity and sales data to confirm success or failure. “Sales have to move. Brand equity has to move. If that doesn’t happen – the campaign didn’t work.”

Sending out an SOS on SMS

Kirill Mankovski, chief enterprise officer at XL Axiata spoke at Re.Con not just about his role as a B2B digital marketer, but also about the telco’s growing role as data provider to advertisers. 

“We hold an enormous amount of data,” Mankovski said, requiring five different regional data centres to house all the customer information it keeps. XL Axiata then works with Ada to provide relevant data to marketers for their campaigns.

Mankovski has notices two major data trends in Southeast Asia:

1) SMS data is becoming less valuable. Smartphone penetration at 78% means SMS-based advertisements are still prominent and can yield results. “However, the role of it and efficiency is declining.” The region is moving quickly onto digital platforms that allow many more different content types that can interact with consumer much more efficiently than traditional mobile SMS advertising.

2) AI and voice search data is on the rise. The Internet of Things is providing so much more data not just about customer profiles but about their behaviours through connected device sensors that can monitor household activities, environments and purchase behaviour.

While emerging markets in Southeast Asia may still be catching up to global figures where 30% of search is based on voice, Mankovski maintains “it is coming” and advertisers need to alter both their search and browsing strategies accordingly.

Re.Con Indonesia also heard presentations from:

• Srinivas Gattamneni, CEO, Ada giving top predictions for how media, content and data will shape brand marketing in the future
• Lakish Hatalkar, President Director, One Johnson & Johnson on how J&J drives successful insight-driven campaigns to inspire and increase ROI
• Sachin Prasad, Country Head, Mondelez on ‘Making Kraft GRATE again’, a case study on how Mondelez is using digital to drive brand relevance to wider consumer segments.
• Gautam Kiyawat, Head of Freemium, HOOQ and Cam Walker, Executive Director, Iflix on the future of TV and video-on-demand in Southeast Asia.
• Adrian Burton, Head of adaAcquire on connecting the dots to ensure brands can get the most out their customer data by targeting the right people at the right time with the right content.