Karandeep Singh, Managing Director, Sapient India
As managing director of Sapient’s India operations, Karandeep Singh is responsible for leading the company’s day-to-day operations, finance and business efforts. Singh joined Sapient in 2007 as finance director, prior to which he spent over 15 years in finance and operations at large companies like Dell International Services, Moser Bear, Ariba and Yum Brands in West Asia and Asia Pacific. Singh started his career with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). In this online interaction with Correspondent Shilpi Ganguly, he shares his company’s plans and vision. Edited excerpts:
Sapient Interactive has been servicing global companies through its India operations for some time now. What took you so long to actively enter the digital marketing services space in the domestic market?
Sapient has a decade of experience in India. As we saw demand for our global clients here go up, we decided to extend our services to them from here.
Our global footprint offers the advantage to our existing client base of ensuring utilisation of knowledge and expertise garnered while working with them in North America and Europe. Our customers have global operations, including significant market presence here and hence they represent a key market opportunity for us. That apart, we also bring in global practices to India so that Indian companies adopting digital marketing/commerce can benefit from it.
How large is the domestic digital marketing space here and is it big enough for Sapient to capitalise on?
We see an addressable interactive market of around $150 million, which is growing at around 50 percent per annum here. We see that players are showing an increasing upswing in investments as far as their digital/ mobile marketing capabilities are concerned. Moreover, this market is growing and getting the attention of global advertisers now. Over 40,000 advertisers are targeting online Indians. This presents a huge opportunity for us.
Given the rising consumerism and the increasing broadband and mobile penetration, brands, both Indian and global, have an increasing realisation that digital marketing can have a lasting impact. As marketers continue to shift their advertising monies online, they are seeking partners who can not only deliver at the brand level but also help them take advantage of the opportunities that the digital media can offer them.
We are organised to deliver true multi-channel marketing and commerce—leveraging a 20-year unparalleled track record in technology. Sapient Interactive is the largest independent interactive agency in the world and the only firm that can support clients through their entire brand experience—from ideation, creative, business and brand strategy, to cross-channel delivery analytics and commerce. Thus, we see a compelling opportunity to engage with Indian marketers to help create brand experiences that drive unparalleled level of customer loyalty and more so with more sustainable and measureable business results.
Has the slowdown played a part in this go-digital move here?
Rising competition and pressure on margins are forcing marketers to perform better today, leading CMOs to redraw the priorities. The digital medium allows more effective engagements with customers. In addition, it also enables clients to measure RoI more effectively. This has led to increasing affinity towards digital marketing.
What is the contribution of online media in the overall advertising business in the domestic market?
The Internet penetration continues to rise and see greater adoption among the youth. It is expected to reach 6.7 percent by 2012 from 4.3 percent in 2009. Online display advertising market was expected to grow by 49 percent to reach Rs 3,500 million in 2008-09
Social media has emerged as a significant activity especially among youth, with 44 percent of Internet users go online just for social networking. Social networking audience increased by 51 percent in December 2008.
The mobile market is witnessing high growth and it is expected that by 2013, nearly 63 percent of the population will have access to mobile services.
With technology continuously making deeper inroads into our lives, it’s inevitable that the digital media takes a larger slice of the marketing pie. Our interactions with leading CMOs here also reflect the fact that they are increasingly thinking digital.
Could you share some of the global campaigns that Sapient has worked on in the recent past?
We have worked on several award- winning campaigns for our global clients in the recent past. For instance, we’ve done some really interesting job for Coke.
We developed a special application on Facebook for ‘Burn’—a popular energy drink of Coca-Cola in Europe—under the tagline of Burn Alter Ego. In its first month live, the application named ‘Burn Alter Ego’ experienced an organic growth of 80 percent of its user base each week. It cut across the clutter and crossed 15,000 installs since its inception with over 85,000 users active on a monthly basis.
The brand Burn promises to extend one’s night, allowing one to push back the dawn and party to one’s heart’s content. To extend the brand promise into the social media space, we developed the Burn Alter Ego application on Facebook, which allows the users to create photo realistic alter egos/virtual avatars of themselves and then go out either with friends’ alter egos, or the alter egos of someone else using the application globally. The next day users can check their avatars’ blogs to see what went down the night before, and view the images that showed both avatars hanging out. Using this application, the users could receive a story and share an experience with a friend the next morning. Each night’s adventure was guaranteed to be far more interesting than our daily lives.
The application won the Best Social Media Campaign of the Year at the OMMA Awards.
uVend is another interesting innovation we did for Coke by creating an interactive interface for the Coke vending machines, ‘uVend’. With 6 million machines in over 200 countries, vending today is an important point of consumer contact for Coca-Cola. Sapient helped Coke develop sleek machines that add interactive experiences through sight, sound and motion, enabling consumers not only purchase beverages, but also engage in online and mobile functions like play games, buy ringtones, get free promo items or view ads with a motion-sensitive, touch-screen interface. We won several awards at Cannes 2009 for this.
Yet another innovation is the ‘Happiness Factory’ spot for Coke, which since its launch in 2006 has gone on to become the highest rated global spot Coca-Cola has ever tested. In fact we created only the third version of the Happiness Factory (hf3.coca-cola.com), launched in April 2009. It tells the story of what really happens behind the scenes when you buy a Coke from a vending machine. It allows users to step into the shoes of the most common member of the factory, the indispensable worker. When they visit the site, users have the option to view Happiness Factory videos, or try their hands at a worker’s tasks. Each task is at separate levels, and players advance through them in order, completing all the steps necessary to ensure that every Coke bottle will come out perfect.
Which is your first client here?
We intend to work with our global customers who have significant presence here which include some leading companies in the FMCG, telecom and financial services sectors. At a recent CMO roundtable we shared our global best practices and released a whitepaper which confirms that Indian CMOs are increasingly shifting to the digital medium and are keen to have interactive conversations with their customers. This positions us well to help both multinational and national companies to exploit the digital channel and make multi-channel marketing much more effective.
What do your services consist of, and what are the different channels you plan to tap to increase your reach and offerings?
We provide holistic solutions, ranging from the front-end customer-facing brand experiences, to the back-end technologies that make those experiences possible. This unique approach gets us increased sales and fosters consumer- brand affinity.
With the recent acquisition of the Nitro Group, a leading ATL agency, Sapient will provide end-to-end marketing solutions encompassing digital and traditional marketing.
Our services currently involve multi-channel marketing and commerce, display advertising, social media, e-mail marketing, mobile marketing, search marketing, and design studios.
With the Nitro buyout, will your focus be shifting towards providing ATL marketing services?
Clients are increasingly demanding a fully-integrated, strategically-led and digitally-enabled agency. We acquired Nitro to expand our reach from the existing digital, to the traditional marketing space, and thus enabling us to integrate and add value to our overall proposition.
We are the only digital agency to acquire a traditional firm thus changing the paradigm. Together, Sapient and Nitro will leverage their combined capabilities in integrated advertising, digital commerce, marketing technologies and social media to help our clients create cross-channel brand experiences.
What’s the growth potential for Sapient Interactive India? How much do you think India operations can contribute to your global business in the next couple of years?
With the acquisition of DCG last year and Nitro recently, our Asia footprint is complete with offices in Australia, China, Singapore and India. India is one of the fastest growing markets and with improved infrastructure, delivery of interactive media across digital channels like the Internet and mobiles and integrating them with digital commerce position Sapient Interactive for exponential growth.
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