Content marketing will take centre stage in 2019, says Isobar's Shamsuddin Jasani

2019 will be the year of content marketing, predicted Shamsuddin Jasani, Group MD, Isobar, South Asia as he sees Jio, with its high-speed broadband, set to transform the way people view television from appointment viewership to more and more on-demand viewership.

As Jio is gearing up for the commercial launch of its Gigafiber broadband services, the company is also expected to roll out its TV connection service soon, which will be bundled with the broadband connection.

“If appointment viewership is going up with more and more people subscribing to the likes of Netflix or Hotstar, then brands will need to do a lot of content integrations. So, in 2019, we will see a lot of content integrations. Content is going to become very important and ad-funded content is going to become even more important,” Jasani told BuzzInContent.com.

“With the exposure of video, the regular advertising inventories will remain but with people switching on to Prime, which comes at Rs 999 for an entire year and with no ads, how can brands reach their consumers? The only answer is through content integration,” he explained.

2018 saw video consumption go through the roof because of Jio, which is making the advertising budgets follow that shift. This also means that a lot of TV monies are going to shift to video.

“Earlier, digital was predominantly used for performance marketing and even though there were brand monies, they were digital-specific brand monies. But now, because of the reach of video, a lot of television inventory can be substituted with video,” added Jasani.

Jasani also believes that vernacular content exploded in 2018 and will continue to grow through 2019.

“Till 2017, it was predominantly English language which was being accessed for digital. But since 2018, a lot more local language content is being created and consumed. This is going to be a very important focus in 2019 because it will also bring in the next wave of people coming on to digital,” said Jasani.