Shree Cement’s Sushrut Pant: CTV has high potential but is underutilised

For Sushrut Pant, head of marketing, Shree Cement, television has the highest reach among their target audience, which is their home building industry.

In a conversation with Storyboard18, Pant said, “Television becomes an important medium, but it is by no means the only medium. We have a highly intense multimedia strategy where we target the consumer through television. But we also retarget them through digital and also through print. As the consumer gets aware of purchase, we also have a strong on-ground medium where we have extensive outdoor hoardings and a very extensive retail branding program.”

Edited Excerpts:

This is the season of IPL and elections. What are your expectations as an advertiser in order to strike a chord among your target audience and who are they?

Our target audience is primarily the individual home builders (IHBs). They are typically males between the age group of 25 to 55.

The other audience is the home building professionals who help the home builders like engineers, contractors, etc. For them, news is actually the topmost genre of interest in media. So, that is expected to really amp up during elections.

News and movies are the top two interest areas followed by cricket of our target audience. Now, with both elections and IPL happening, which will be followed by a World Cup and with so much other news happening around the international area as well, we expect news to really pick up. That is also part of our strategy.

How has the target audience evolved over a period?

The home building industry has been evolving very rapidly. Today, people see their homes not just as a place to live but also as an investment in the future.

For us, a lot of our past growth has been in tandem with the industry. So, we have very close relationships with the contractors and the dealers of cement. What we are doing through our recent brand revamp initiatives is to also develop a deeper relationship with the individual homebuilders, the IHBs as we call them. There are a lot of people in India who build their own houses. And this is a group that we are now targeting very consciously.

Could you chart out your media spends during this peak advertising period?

Our media spend follows the consumer. So, what is the consumer doing? The top two media genre interests for our consumers are news and movies. And these two are featuring very prominently, in not just our current campaign, which is about ‘Vote Solid. Desh Solid’ but these were also important in our previous brand revamp campaign.

The second part is digital, which has been expanding in terms of reach. It is also getting deeper into the tier-II towns, which is where a lot of our market lies. So we are also working very closely with Google. We executed one very successful campaign on Google, which sort of went way beyond all the past benchmarks. That was our first campaign.

Now, with the election campaign, ‘Vote Solid. Desh Solid’ campaign, we also have a presence in digital. That's the other place. The third place where we have really amped up is in terms of social media. The purpose of social media is to get more direct engagement with our consumers.

In our existing current campaign, where we encourage people to go and vote, we also have a ‘Vote ka Vachan’. It's almost like a pledge booth on our website where people can come and take the ‘Vote ka Vachan’. For every ‘Vachan’ we get, we will donate one kg of cement for social welfare and we also see a lot of traction happen on this front as well.

Overall, I can say over the last three or four months, since we've undergone a brand revamp, our social media engagement rate has gone up by 10 times. Like I said, follow the consumer in television, news and movies. It also ties in very closely with our content which is very sort of newsworthy.

We also have a brand ambassador in Bollywood actor Sunny Deol, who's a big icon. So we create perfect synergies between our creative and our media, which is news plus movie strategy. And then go to consumers via digital through Google, and YouTube, and then engage with them through social media for our call to action initiative.

Which is your creative and media agency?

Our creative agency is McCann and our media agency is Publicity Parlour.

How lucrative is television as a medium for marketing Shree Cement?

We find television has the highest reach among our target audience, upward of 90 percent to 95 percent.

Hence, that is a lead medium. So, it's important because of reach. The second is about impact. Television is the biggest screen that the consumer has in their homes.

Because of these two reasons, television becomes an important medium, but it is by no means the only medium. We have a highly intense multimedia strategy where we target the consumer through television. But we also retarget them through digital and also through print. As the consumer gets aware of purchase, we also have a strong on-ground medium where we have extensive outdoor hoardings and we also have a very extensive retail branding program.

What are the media trends for this year and what will disrupt the media space?

In terms of media trends, I would say there's one trend which started last year and will continue is the year of events, which are either planned or unplanned, desirable or undesirable.

So, the big planned and desirable events are elections. There is going to be the IPL, there is going to be the World Cup. These are the planned and desirable events. But remember, they are also unplanned and undesirable events in terms of conflicts happening in several regions.

These events are definitely going to get the consumer to news at one level. Because news is something which they will watch regularly. Other things like cricket, for example, will sort of peak and trough with marquee events, but news will always remain in the news.

So, that's something which we feel is a trend that will continue. Apart from that, remember we are targeting males between the ages of 25 to 55 years. These are the people who are difficult to find in the media because they don't tend to watch or consume media continuously.

Movies are another interest. And again, we've seen that as big movies release, and as they premiere on television, we find that there is a great spike in viewership. So again, we've seen the movie genre deliver really good efficiency and effectiveness for us.

I would say, these are the trends. Apart from that, digital will continue to grow and become more interactive. The other thing is, in digital content the quality of content really impacts one’s ability to target digitally. Again, taking an example from our previous and our current campaign, where we also had a long format sort of storytelling, like a 50 or a 60-second video, we've seen that the view-through rates were very high compared to the industry benchmark. They were nearly twice. So what that meant is that if people enjoyed watching our ads, and if they enjoyed the content, they rewarded us with watching them for longer and automatically it also drove in a lot of efficiency.

So again, I would say digital, especially full based viewership via digital is another trend which will be on the upward rise.

Who are your competitors?

Anyone who manufactures cement is a competitor for us. There are several cement brands in the country which have different price segments.

In a way, any brand of business in the home building space would also be a competitor because ultimately everyone is trying to give the consumers the best house or the best home. And everyone is trying to differentiate in that space.

What is your take on CTV (connected TV) and how do you view it as a potential marketing tool during this peak advertising period?

CTV is definitely an interesting trend, which has high potential but is underutilised the way it is right now. CTV offers the combination of a big screen but with digital-like sharp targeting.

The scale of CTV is still something which has not yet reached a tipping point. Having said that, since we are omnichannel, we would be reaching CTV, but I think it's definitely a trend to look out for.

Shree Cement has been there around for four decades. Could you touch upon the marketing and media journey of Shree Cement to stand out amongst the competitors?

The way Shree Cement has built its brand and business is quite unique. The whole journey of big media spends and high visibility is something which has been there for the last four to five months. But if you talk about the 40-year-old journey, I think there are two or three interesting aspects to it. One theme I would say is having really sharp product propositions. One of our oldest flagship products is Shree Jung Rodhak cement, which literally means rust prevention.

Now, this is a completely new take on cement because the promise of this product is that it actually protects the steel, which is an important part of home building. It prevents the steel from rusting. And this is a very unique proposition.

Then, we've modernised and premiumised that very recently in another offering called Shree Cement Bangur Magna which offers complete protection from both external and internal threats to structural integrity.

The second aspect of how we've built up the business and the brand is through relationships. Shree Cement has always had a very close and almost family-like network of channel partners and cement professionals: contractors, cement retailers etc.

Shree Cement been known for its speed, flexibility, and responsiveness to feedback. That's some of the other pillars on which it is built. The third aspect of our history, has been built on what we call solving the equation, solving problems in innovative manners.

Shree Cement has pioneered a lot of cement manufacturing processes, which has benefited the industry. The other thing that Shree Cement has done is built and not bought. Almost an entire capacity expansion has been through greenfield projects.

Shree Cement has actually built projects, has built power plants, and infrastructure from scratch.

These are the three trends of sharp product propositions, relationships with the network and this whole idea of building smart has characterised our journey up till now. And now we are taking all of these things and also now adding the whole aspect of brand building, brand proposition and winning the IHBs, or the individual homebuilders, through our brands.

What sets Shree Cement apart in terms of sustainability practices and how do these efforts align with your brand messaging and resonate with your target audience?

Shree Cement has not just been a pioneer but someone who has led sustainability practices in a very big way.

When it comes to the environment, we actually have 55 percent green power consumption, which is way ahead of the Indian industry. It also ranks among the highest globally. And again, this has been done through technological innovation by solving the problem. We are also prototyping the use of electric and CNG vehicles for material and transportation.

In terms of social support, we have a project ‘Project Naman’ which provides free cement to the families of martyrs from services as a token of our gratitude. Each year, we support over 7,000,000 people from local communities around our plans for various educational, health and social initiatives. So these are things that have built a very strong equity through word of mouth and network. We also plan to communicate to a wider public, which are the IHBs.

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