The world has an oversupply of data but a massive undersupply of insights- Rajiv from RD&X network and ReBid

From a failed solo entrepreneur to founding a successful digital agency and now starting a new MarTech and AdTech platform, Rajiv Dingra tells us how data in communication can help draw connections to build insights.

Check out his Story:

Transcript(Auto-generated)

0:00 I think the world has an oversupply of data but an undersupply a massive undersupply of insights, right?

0:13 everybody has data.

0:15 The problem is data is distributed data is on disjointed platforms, right?

0:26 Or I would say it’s it’s and it is further you know complicated with you know this disparate platforms on which your data resides as well as the disorientation caused by the complex workflows across these platforms.

0:48 So the way I look at it as distributed, disjointed, desperate all of these cause disorientation for marketers.

1:04 My journey has been from absolute grounds.

1:09 You know my background is that I was just a graduate from j in college in Bombay and I had no business background.

1:19 My father spent 38 years in reserve bank of India.

1:23 My both my parents were bankers.

1:25 We lived in a small one BHK.

1:27 Apartment in Bombay which he put it over those 38 years with his money.

1:31 Right?

1:32 So I had no capital, no business experience, nothing as a background and I was always clear that I I wanted to do business so I probably took up one of the first campus placements right out of college and that was a terrible experience.

1:48 Right?

1:49 So like a true entrepreneur, the first thing I wanted to do is solve what I found as a first problems.

1:54 So I started a I quit that job in 1.5 months and started a job site for pressure which was called jobs pressures dot com which Ran for about a year and a half.

2:04 I was a solo entrepreneur.

2:05 I failed twice to raise funding and this is way back in 2005.

2:09 So you can imagine there was no funding at that point in time.

2:12 And it was, it was a great experience but a terrible, terrible failure.

2:17 Right?

2:17 So post that I started a blog called What blog?

2:21 Which was you know, one of the technology blogs in those times 2006.

2:26 Again, very, very early days from now.

2:30 I mean many people that you meet today, don’t even remember what 2006 or 2007 was like.

2:35 But I remember it like yesterday, right.

2:38 And that blog sort of transformed into a social media agency called what?

2:43 Consult, Right.

2:45 And the journey had its own share of terrible ups and downs to be very honest.

2:49 During the Lehman Brothers crashed during 2000 and eight.

2:52 We almost I went out of money, I had to lay off 15 people.

2:57 I was so angry with myself emotionally distraught that I punched a glass through and through.

3:03 If you can see this scar, there are some six stitches out here.

3:07 Yeah, I was quite dramatic and fill me as they say in India, right?

3:12 But yeah, when the doctor was teaching me up like this and in the hospital saying, why did you do this?

3:17 How stupid are you?

3:18 And I actually felt very stupid, Right?

3:20 And I promised myself that if I can’t control my emotions in business, I have no business being in business, right?

3:28 This was 2008.

3:29 And from there I restarted again, me and a couple of interns in 2090 agency business, which was what and things fell in place.

3:39 I was I learned my hard lessons around finance.

3:43 I truly believe that businesses succeed because of great financial decisions and fail because of poor financial decisions, right?

3:55 Everything else is important but success and failure, one key ingredient is good or bad financial decisions, right?

4:05 And I learned from that and I sort of scaled it up, It started scaling 2009, cut to 2015.

4:12 We were being chased by a very large agencies to get acquired.

4:17 another reason a lot of people ask me, why did you sell your agency?

4:20 You know, because there’s a lot of much larger agencies today, I think at that point in time it was more of a personal entrepreneurship decision.

4:28 I mean, even if I would have sold my dad’s house that he had all my properties, my clothes, all the jewellery, I wouldn’t be able to finance the one quarter’s credit.

4:38 We were financing to work clients.

4:40 The media credit, right?

4:42 Because that’s the amount of media we were buying, right?

4:45 Social media ads that become big by 2015 and we were buying crores and crores of you know millions and millions of a couple of millions of dollars of media buys.

4:56 And if if a quarter Like the Lehman Brothers crash happened or the pandemic would have happened in 2015, nobody has control over these things.

5:05 Right.

5:06 We would have, we would be finished right.

5:08 I wouldn’t be able to sell anything worthwhile, even myself to be able to finance the business.

5:13 So the only reason to sell majority state, two reasons one was this, to make sure that the business that I spent so hard after failing, surviving, shutting down, starting up learning, and I started when I was 21 years old, 2006, I was 21.

5:32 Right.

5:33 So, so I was, I wanted it to have some longevity, right?

5:39 And Dentsu came along, it looked like a great place Ashish who was the leader of Dentsu at that point in time.

5:46 The Ceo of Dentsu India, he seemed like a great guy to work with, seemed like a person I could work with and I ended up exiting my business, I only sold majority state.

5:56 I held on to minority for the next four years, which I finally exited in december 2019.

6:03 Right?

6:04 And I scaled up that agency from 150 people to 450 people within the ecosystem water pulled or you know the bottom line when five or six times the revenue meant six or seven times.

6:19 So it’s fairly successful stint during that journey.

6:23 I learned how large networks work.

6:26 So it was a great, great experience.

6:28 And yeah, I mean the people that and I work with are still there.

6:31 They’ve scaled up across at the Dentsu level, extremely proud of the team that I work with.

6:36 I think entrepreneurs take too much credit for too little work a lot of times.

6:42 Their biggest achievement is assembling a great team and I would like to believe that that was my greatest achievement as well.

6:55 I, in 2020 started our Dnx Network, that’s the holding company’s name.

7:00 But the platform we run is called ReBid dot co and we essentially aggregate all data across media, which is your ads.

7:08 So all your ad platforms, google, facebook, twitter linkedin, programmatic, the data management platforms, the mobile measurement platforms, everything that you need to create, run manage your ads globally can be done on ReBid

7:22 And we started building this platform in 2020.

7:25 We went to the market earlier this year and we’ve of course now have clients across every actually, we have clients across every region in the world.

7:33 A pack Amia and us now, which is which is actually unheard of given that we are indian well India indian company in the context that most of our employees are in India.

7:48 Right?

7:49 And it’s an India out model.

7:50 So that has been It looked successful now it wasn’t so over the two years, I think that every quarter there was a moment where we thought we’d just either crazy or going to die.

8:03 So I think it’s it’s been a very massive roller coaster over the last two years it had I think what has helped is my earlier experience of last 14 years where I’ve kept calm even when things didn’t seem to have a light at the end of the tunnel.

8:22 The good part is that unlike the last time where I had zero capital and I bootstrapped services business which is easier to do without capital.

8:32 Right?

8:34 This time it’s a product business.

8:35 I have some of my capital at my disposal And which I have used hopefully judiciously you only know when it and it works out right?

8:45 But hopefully judiciously to actually be four I.P.

8:49 As a product platform.

8:51 And when you talk about data coming to your question right.

8:54 I think the world has an oversupply of data but an undersupply a massive undersupply of insights thread.

9:07 Everybody has data.

9:09 The problem is data is distributed.

9:15 data is on disjointed platforms.

9:19 Right?

9:20 Or I would say it’s it is further you know complicated with you know disparate platforms on which your data resides as well as the disorientation caused by the complex workflows across these platforms.

9:42 So the way I look at it as distributed disjointed, desperate all of these Cause disorientation from Africa’s or Markham professionals because you you want to what do you want to see?

9:56 You want to see who which clients are interested if you’re a B2B player, which clients are interested in you or if you’re a B2C player, which customers are, knowing about your brand, engaging with, you know, activating it or participating or then converting and then you want to be able to use this data of converted customers to bring in more similar customers so that you can escape.

10:25 This is the journey for B2B and four B2C place.

10:28 Right.

10:29 Even for them, it’s about while there is branding at the end of the day there Looking at point of sale and today 90% of point of sale is online as well.

10:39 There is a digital transaction journey for every kind of product out that given what pandemic has done over the last two years.

10:48 Right.

10:49 Omni channel is not just a nice buzz words, it’s the reality, right?

10:54 and, so I think all of these different touch points are in all databases that were built over the last 30 years.

11:05 Right?

11:06 So you have a retail client who has this offline DWS is somewhere else then he just on boarded as crm, which is in the cloud then he’s, you know using act platforms that are all separate.

11:19 Right?

11:19 If you look at even your communication or pr industry, which where you come from, it is so much of, it is, data is offline distributed, disconnected, you know, not not talking to each other.

11:35 And I think that’s a huge problem right?

11:38 Till we are not able to build systems, processes, platforms, technology that helps data talk to data and deliver actionable insights.

11:51 We are always going to struggle with inefficiencies and ineffectiveness.

12:03 I believe in overlaying data on top of each other.

12:06 Right?

12:07 So if there is a point A to point B can I get sales data, brand, sentiment data.

12:14 I’m using terminology to work for both pr and marketing and media professionals.

12:20But let’s say could I get also adds data?

12:24Could I get also organic data.

12:26Could I get overlay also my crm data offline touch can overlay all of that on top of each other and draw poor relations and connections between them.

12:38Right.

12:40Makes sense.

12:41Right then I can say then I can actually use human intelligence on top of data intelligence and say let’s try if this then that as an activation workflow that if a customer buys offline, let’s send him this emailer online seven days later.

13:00 Right.

13:01 And then show him this ad 14 days later because this is his pattern or journey.

13:09 These are 10 types of journeys.

13:10 We see your customers can right now this could be B2B.

13:15 This could also be B2C.

13:16 Because now you have e commerce where you know how transactions happen and you have offline even if you’re having retail systems people are going and shopping offline large part of retail players.

13:29 If you’re a clothing player, you have your data.

13:31 If you’re a jewellery player, you have any retail, you have the data right, get it.

13:38 And today with attic being so precise where you can have geolocation targeting, you know, you can know whether a particular you even have geolocation based data, even if you’re FMCG just selling cola, for example.

13:58 Right.

13:59 And I would say you can also look at whether brand engagement that has an impact on sales or brand engagement then has an impact on our o AS return on expense or brand metrics.

14:10 If you overlay them, you can build correlations, correlations, will build insights.

14:16 And then if you have smart enough people, insights will be turned into actionable insights.

14:26 I think the first role is of, product and sales, right?

14:32 You need to have a product that is applicable to each of those countries.

14:38 Step number one, right.

14:39 A lot of people, a lot of people in the product don’t mean you feel you have a great product, but you are us and user experience if it’s not global and applicable to some of the large countries or even the smaller markets that you’re going to.

14:55 Let’s say language values, let’s say you are entering, you know, you don’t have a language translation that could be a problem in entering the country.

15:04 Even you are us.

15:06 Like, for example, if you’re entering US and UK UI UX needs to be far better than what an acceptable UI UX has in the asia because they are used to using platforms far more Right.

15:20 In fact, my my understanding is in different markets behave differently.

15:24 Some markets do not use platforms at all.

15:27 They want a layer of planet services on top of your platform.

15:31 Right?

15:31 So it really you need to pick and choose your market depending upon what your strengths are as a product, what your us says, because it’s possible you are at the stage as a startup where you don’t have that kind of you to us that’s, you know, ready for the global market.

15:46 You may have a decent product.

15:48 Right.

15:49 and a lot of people focus on features.

15:52 I think the first impression for customers and adoption is user experience.

15:57 Each of us could be lesser in my view.

16:01 Right.

16:02 But user experience, that’s not great.

16:05 It has a challenge.

16:06 Right.

16:07 So our playbook is very simple.

16:09 We look at are we attracting interest from there that market through organic outreach or even ads out?

16:17 Because that’s the low hanging fruit.

16:19 Right.

16:19 You can spend $1000 a month.

16:21 Right.

16:22 And just be to test whether you’re getting demos from that market.

16:26 Okay.

16:27 That’s step number step number two.

16:29 Force demos.

16:30 What is the follow up are you getting number two.

16:32 Meeting number three.

16:33 Meeting 10 people are coming on a meeting if it’s an enterprise client.

16:37 If it’s a if it’s a if you’re a self serve saas, let’s say platform, then it’s actually even simpler because then it’s not about the demo, it’s about do are you getting sign ups from that month And four sign up?

16:54 Is that sticking?

16:56 Right.

16:58 So that’s actually a very metric based, very data based approach.

17:01 But we are into enterprise sales.

17:04 So, you know, our approach is slightly goes into the virtual demo mode and then selling that.

17:10 Right?

17:10 So there again, the metrics are are they coming back now?

17:14 All it takes is for you to win one or two clients in the market and then it’s all about then leveraging pr to make a noise about that.

17:23 So pr is not just about Presley’s right, It’s about case studies, used cases, insights, you know, creating enough and more material with that one or two clients that prove that your product works even if it works for a specific industry.

17:40 That’s all right.

17:41 Right.

17:43 And and from there, you move on and try and, you know, narrow cast that only to your audiences, right?

17:52 Because you’re still very small.

17:53 Right?

17:54 So, you figure out your audiences who are the people who are the right people to narrow cast this information and then get that one or two clients to turn into five or seven clients.

18:04Once that’s happened, it’s about then establishing local teams and whatnot.

18:08Right?

18:08 But that’s the process I will follow.

18:11 And I think pr is not just about press raise.

18:16 In fact, that comes much later in the lifecycle of a company.

18:19 And it’s nice to do press release, it’s far more than being visible, and building thought leadership among your audiences as well, especially in the B two B domain.

18:30 If you are even, let’s say, a D2C brands, let’s say you were selling coffee or you were selling and you just have a website where you’re selling coffee, right?

18:39 And you want to be a global coffee player.

18:42 I think the first step is to get customers and then turn them into testimonials of how great coffee, you have to turn them into actual videos.

18:52 Make sure your those, you get your like an online recorded video of a customer who’s trying your gourmet coffee, let’s say who bought it from your website, you know, and whose sipping it and who’s saying it’s amazing.

19:05 I love it.

19:06 Right?

19:06 And then use that video as an ad, post his permission across instagram and other platforms, you know, Facebook, Instagram Snapchat TikTok.

19:15 Well, right.

19:16 So even that is your initial PR because then your customers are doing your pr right?

19:22 And there’s no bigger pr than a customer testimonial, right?

19:25 Whether you’re selling coffee whether you’re sending a health drink, Whether you’re selling a health bang, whatever it may be, if you see a lot of the due to see building brands are built that I don’t believe it in our entire focus is media effectiveness and we worked with a lot of marketers who want to be advanced and in future proof and already modern marketers who realized the value of unified data, dashboards and so on and so forth.

19:56 We have not given them, as of now media plus PR integrated.

20:02 So let me take an example, given your questions from my earlier chapter when I was in world concerned, I think my favourite campaign and also the campaign that I created by myself which actually won multiple global awards and was also shortlisted in Cannes Lion was Powerless Queen and it was an out and out pr campaign, right?

20:25 and we are not a PR company actually.

20:27 So essentially, I think for any integrated campaign to be successful from my experience, you need to have a core idea that’s recreated repeated in every format, shape, size medium and channel, right?

20:47 It could be recreated creatively, but the core idea can’t be lost in the search for creativity, hmm.

20:57 Got it.

20:57 So what happened with Powerless Queen is we created a game where you couldn’t move the Queen, you know, in the chairs game and it was an online game, right?

21:09 What ended up happening for us and we, the only thing we did is we actually brought on, you know Tonya, such tables woman grandmaster to be in our, you know, video to announce the campaign and got her to tag and that just blew out.

21:29Right?

21:30 We kept, we made sure our audience was leash, it was relevant audience that we were talking to.

21:37 And then you had harry christian also was a grandmaster come in, you had a dutch grandmaster joining, You had us grandmaster joining.

21:45 We had a woman grandmaster from europe, actually do a seven minute video of how he couldn’t defeat the queen.

21:53 This was all again.

21:57 and then we did of course we did some media behind it as well and it all sort of came out.

22:01 But I think I have a very sharp poor idea which is intelligent and possible.

22:07 But even if it’s simple, make sure the poor ideas recreated and repeated in multiple formats and platforms because only then it can have an impact as an integrated campaign that drives our well.

22:24 Right?

22:25 We do the same at every bit as well.

22:27 But from a media standpoint, if you look at the platform, we have certain social program and I take native all ad platforms integrated in one platform.

22:35 So we give the media buyer or the digital marketer the power to create the same message across 15 different platforms and activate them seamlessly, which otherwise he has to go in 15 different platforms and activate them and then correlate all those creatives as well, which you can do that on one platform.

22:57 That so I think the power of unified message, unified data, unified integrated approach is cannot be overstated in the media and marketing.

23:16 I think that’s slicing and dicing too much.

23:19 I think PR has to be tuned through, right?

23:24 Look at your customer journey depending upon whether it’s B2B or B2C.

23:29 Right?

23:30 if you get a bad PR when the customers that just the day before, like, think about it, right, Cadbury had those bombs and Cadbury, right?

23:39 And they acted really fast, you know, many years back because of the massive crisis PR campaign.

23:46 They were the bottom of the funnel.

23:48 In fact, I mean, you know, they just, you know, they they it was crazy for them because they’re like, oh, ship our sales will really go down the drain.

23:58 Right?

23:58 So how can you say Pr negative PR could have massive impact on the bottom of the funnel.

24:03 Right.

24:04 I mean, even if you look at the movie business, you know?

24:08 Right.

24:09 Great example how pr bad pr some quotes that the movie actors gave, which they shouldn’t have given right lead to the audiences.

24:20 I mean, maybe the movie would have not done too well anyways because the story or the marketing wasn’t that great.

24:26 But nonetheless, there was a lot of bad pr that had bottom of the final impact, right?

24:31 I think good PR is very much necessary for the top of the funnel.

24:37 You need to avoid bad pr or bad publicity for any bottom of the final impact in B2B business.

24:47 For sure pr has impact across top to bottom of the money.

24:51 Right?

24:52 For example there might be a client who’s on the fence, who knows your product or platform and he’s agreed to be is a client of yours, whether you’re an agency or a platform or whatever and because you announce a new client in it triggers him to go and come and approach.

25:08 You know, he’s seen you he’s done your demos the last seven months, 10 months.

25:12 But good PR has bottom of the final impact.

25:15 Good PR may not have advertising has more bottom of the final impact in B2C.

25:23 Right?

25:24 Rather than PR is part of that, right?

25:26 When you do a campaign, so when they do let’s say for example of Iraq fully brand ambassador of the brand wrong.

25:33 Right?

25:33 So he does ads but he also does some amount of interpersonal interactions, some you know, pr gimmicks or whatever.

25:39 But that’s not essentially go going to translate into impulse buys is my thought process.

25:45 It may have small impact on impulse buys, but large sales is driven by branding and sort of in B2C.

25:55 It’s it’s more about experience buying experience as well.

25:59 So if you’re online buying experience is great, it’s possibly going to be more pr role in B2C.

26:07 Is the stop in the middle of the final, more or less bad PR and B2C can destroy bottom of the funnel.

26:14 And in B2B.

26:16 I would like to believe that PR is true and right.

26:20 Also, most of the time in B2B bad pr there’s never catastrophic.

26:25 Okay.

26:26 That pr would be like somebody just comparing you to some other platform and saying your platform scores 3.5.

26:34 The other platforms, it’s not life or nothing to do.

26:38 God, Yeah.

26:40 Until unless you have a employer-related news and you’re in the news for saying, you know, people should work 20 hours out of 24 hours.

26:48 And then that’s bad.

26:49 PR even if you’re about to be told I think firstly pr is very old age agnostic term for a lot of things today,right.

27:07 So what was pr public relations because public medium was just newspapers and then television PR became the outreach to journalists.

27:19 That’s the traditional understanding of pr right?

27:23 But today everybody is a part of the shop, right?

27:28 Everybody is published.

27:30 Even your customers are published.

27:31 So, what is PR today?

27:34 Right.

27:35 So, if you were to say data and pr let’s say 30 years ago, right?

27:40 Which is not, I mean, still 19 nineties, you would just say, okay, your list of journalists here is my list of tv journalists, they are the ones who cover my beat.

27:50 We need to keep them happy.

27:51 Take them out for lunches dinners, explain our products and they need to be feeling well about what we are doing finished more or less.

28:00 Right?

28:01 But data and pr now is a lot more things, Right?

28:04 Because, a small customer with create storytelling ability on the negative side can create a global PR prices for it.

28:20 Right?

28:21 So, I think real time data across every kind of consumer voice about your brand is step number one.

28:36 And I mean every kind not just online newspaper, everything.

28:40 Right?

28:41 The second is also real time data about your category itself.

28:47 So that you can find opportunities to insert your brand or opportunities for storytelling for position, opportunities for winning mindshare in a niche.

29:06 Right?

29:07 All of those come from the research in and around or more than your cavity.

29:12 Right.

29:13 So, these are two definitely.

29:15 And both of these datas are right.

29:17 The third is, data around publishers that are important for now.

29:25 The reason I’m calling them publishers because they could be influencers, vloggers, tiktokers, they could be journalists, journalists, of course.

29:34 Right?

29:34 But anything else is right?

29:38 So that would be the third data .As to who.

29:42 Right.

29:43 So, so three things basically are is, you know, everything about you, Everything about what else in the category.

29:54 Right?

29:55 And everything about who is talking about your category.

30:01 Right.

30:01 If you can get all of these data appointments and then start working on integrated outreach and engagement plan.

30:10 That would actually start making more sense.

30:15 And most of PR is about Externalizing the Internal right?

30:20 In a storytelling digestible format that’s easy to understand and share.

30:28 So you have an internal story right?

30:30 Sometimes that’s very technical alright.

30:33 Sometimes that’s very internal.

30:36 You need to externalize it in a way that it doesn’t lose its essence but becomes digestible and shareable easily because people externally can remember a word easily.

30:51 I can remember three words, can remember a sentence maybe, but anything beyond that they start to lose track.

31:03 So I think you externalize the internal into one word, three words and aesthetics.

31:09 And then look at how you can position that single message across multiple mediums across multiple stakeholders in you know, concentrated manner.

31:21 So there is no space in the future for a professional who is a domain expert but not data and technology adapt or friendly or whatever you call it.

31:41 Right?

31:42 So if you are young and starting out your career in any domain, learn how you can build a lot of research and data around that domain be able to be draw connections on that data to build insights and see if possible with the use of technology.

32:04 Automate that so that you are learning to use your time for making intelligent decisions rather than using your time for making manual intervention.

32:22 Right?

32:23 So if I were let’s take a simple example, if I were a pr executive, right, I would focus on how can I know who to contact went into contact having these answers right?

32:39 And what message works?

32:41 Rather than reading, you know, 2000 people list.

32:45 You know, you get 100 from manual intervention, you move to automation and focus more on difficult questions that need intelligent answer.