Branded content helps brands to get into the fabric of society: Gautam Reddy of ‘Hotcult'

The pandemic gave rise to several startups, local and indie brands. That was also the time when many national and global brands realised the competition these local and new-age players started becoming.

This made more and more national brands increase their focus on analysing ROI on marketing campaigns in the regional markets. They realised that to engage and relate with the consumers locally, they need to be part of their lives beyond just advertising.

While there have been creative agencies catering to brands’ local advertising needs, there wasn’t any company that fulfils their local/regional content marketing requirements. To fulfil this gap, Pad Group launched Hotcult, its branded content venture, with the aim to cultivate culture to produce distinctive experiences that have a long-lasting influence on behaviour by focusing on culture, consumption, and commerce. Its proprietary concept is going to be 'Connecting Loculturally’, as per the agency.

The reach one garners through ads are directly proportional to the amount spent on programmatic advertising. The more you spend, the more reach on ads you’ll garner and vice versa. Brands realised that they had to rely on branded content keeping the regional nuances in mind to drive love and organic traffic back to their brand pages.

“Programmatic advertising is sucking the funds of the brand and not really generating any ROI,” said Gautam Reddy, Founder and CEO of PAD Group, implying that the only way for brands to come out of this vicious circle is to create content.

Hotcult is positioned as a Glocal and Local solutions provider, catering to a diverse country like India, i.e. Bharat, with an understanding of the cultural landscape.

Reddy also pointed out that people are no more inspired by Western culture and they love local.  People are celebrating Indianness like never before. There are so many moments, in which, brands’ participation is inevitable, be it World Cup, local festival or trending issues.

Not just this, more and more people are becoming health conscious. These are some more reasons for brands to change the way they communicate with consumers. “With the help of the internet, there is a rapper in every city. Many ethnic art forms from each of the states are coming into retail environments. That is why brands and communication have to change. A brand has to get into the fabric of society and branded content helps do so,” he said.

Reddy said that this was the insight behind Pad naming its branded content division ‘Hotcult’ in which ‘Hot’ stands for trending and ‘Cult’ stands for emotions and cultural relevance.

Inspired by his father’s love for advertising who ran his own agency in Hyderabad, Reddy began his career with JWT in 2009, followed by stints at Leo Burnett and Ogilvy & Mather. Starting with a team of 10-15 people in 2013, he and his brother Vivek Reddy launched PAD. Now the company houses over 120 people and operates in Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru.

The agency has served clients like Paytm, Dabur, ITC, aha, Radha TMT, Zee Studios and Century.

Pad ventured into the entertainment and media business by launching Amusement Park in 2019 as a one-stop shop for all production and story-telling needs.

Before launching Hotcult, Pad had three subdivisions - Pad One, Pad Digital and Pad Play. Pad One is a creative, marketing consultancy and brand strategy division. As the name suggests, Pad Digital helps brands in digital marketing, and Pad Play is all about video content production.

Reddy said, “Most of our revenue comes from the combination of ad films and content, for which Padplay does most of the heavy lifting and creative and digital retainers. We also sign close to 15-20 projects every quarter across different categories and turn them around within a 3-4 month window.

Bootstrapped since the beginning, the Reddys launched Hotcult, Pad’s branded content venture earlier this year in May with a strong belief in the future of branded content in India.

Not just for national and MSME clients, Pad is seen as a one-stop shop for big companies based in Hyderabad for all their marketing needs. Reddy said, “Along with MSMEs, there are also large companies listed in NSE and BSE in local markets like Hyderabad, which lack marketing in their culture. While these companies continued growing, they didn’t have much competition a few years ago. Today, with the rise of competition, everyone has woken up to the importance of advertising and marketing.”

He continued, “Unfortunately, the directors in such a company end up taking marketing decisions because they haven’t nurtured the right breed in that function. Such people don’t want to have discussions with different agencies for different marketing needs. They want to sit down with one partner who manages everything for them. So, we almost become their marketing extension.”

Currently, Hotcult has expertise in the southern market, eventually, it wants to do branded content across regions and at the national level.

To excel in local content, content companies need to hire people locally, as per Reddy. Explaining the same, he said, “Doing a campaign for Tamil Nadu doesn’t mean making a Tamilian work on the campaign who hasn’t even lived in Tamil for the last 10 years. He's forgotten what is Tamil Nadu. His memory of Tamil Nadu is 10 years ago. I will have to find a person who is living there.”

For Hotcult, its current goal is to achieve a position where they are recognised as specialists in creating content in the boardrooms of the companies.

Adding to it, Reddy commented, “Our short-term goal is to actually dish out some category-breaking media-agnostic content pieces.”

Reddy believes that while branded content adoption is on the sharp rise, there is still time for it to match the power of content in some international markets.

“Ever since TVF launched shows like Tata Tiago Trippling, brands and agencies realised that they can’t ignore branded content. It's out there in your face, whether it be the really short format for Instagram, be it big format for YouTube or long format seasons for OTT. Brands have to have branded content play in their marketing strategy. Otherwise, they will not really touch the consumer in a very important facet of their life,” said Reddy.

To tackle the problem of measurability through content initiatives, brands are increasing their focus on social commerce. “There are enough companies with proper digital distribution who understand that having YouTube pages, Instagram channels is a great way to actually measure and give tangible results to brands, provided the content is as per the brand's consumer requirement and also the brand's standards in terms of palette and taste.”

He added, “One of the best examples in the country in the daily segment would be the brand “Country Delight”. It's not about what content they are doing, it's the fact that they believe in content. Every day they post 3-5 pieces of content.”

One thing that Reddy really wants to change is the perception of agencies and companies creating regional content. He wants to be projected as an ambassador for the regional content not being cheap.

“People need to change their mindset. Creating content in Tamil is as expensive as creating English or Hindi. In fact, creating quality content in regional languages should be expensive as its supply is limited,” he emphasised.