Kylie Beats Salman Khan With Lipstick
Yo!
The Forbes list of top 100 celebrity earners is out, and from India there are two representatives - Akshay Kumar at #76 and Salman Khan at #82. But Kylie Jenner, aged 20, makes the list at number three and has made roughly 4 times our heroes with $166 million in earnings this year. Are you thinking, “But Kylie doesn’t do anything”? Uh-uh. She runs a 12-member startup 'Kylie Cosmetics' that sells a lot of lipstick. The firm doesn’t advertise much because Kylie sells directly to her 100 million+ followers on Instagram. She’s literally live content. And she’s monetising it. Makes me nostalgic for the old days when Baba Ramdev sold Patanjali through his TV shows.
The principles don’t change, just the medium of communication. We talked about this at yesterday’s roundtable co-hosted with censhare in Gurgaon on omnichannel content. Spotlights by Praveen Rao, Ashish Tiwari, Tejas Kulkarni, and Chirag Talwar helped us understand the multiple contexts of content and what makes for good strategy. Yes, attribution is often a challenge and hence ROI calculation, but clearly good content makes for good business. You can view the video highlights of our previous Roundtable in Bangalore here.
We all thought that the internet meant that no-one would pay for good content. But despite all the free stuff on YouTube, Netflix has half a million subscribers in India, and Hotstar a lot more. Publications behind a paywall haven’t gone bust as expected. Musicians still make money - there are a lot of them on that Forbes 100 list. Good content is addictive and digital technology now exists to customise content to your very specific tastes. In this context, I’d like to mention that we’ve just kicked off the hunt for the the Adobe Digi100 - a list of India’s top 100 digital marketers - and the LinkedIn Content50 - a list of India’s top 50 content marketers. The lists will be unveiled at the Futurist Business Conclave on August 24th at the Leela Gurgaon. To help us decide, we have a super duper jury — Virginia Sharma, Director, Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn, Ashish Bhasin, Chairman CEO, Dentsu Aegis Network South Asia, K V Sridhar, Founder & Chief Creative Officer, Hyper Collective, Dr. Ananta Singh Raghuvanshi, Executive Director-Sales & Marketing, DLF Home Developers Ltd, and Gagan Singla, CMO, Angel Broking. Email me to know more or apply for Digi100 online.
My colleague, Tuhina Anand, introduced me to an app called 'Farmizen', which, for Rs. 2,500 a month, allows you to rent a 600 sq ft organic farm plot on the outskirts of Bangalore. You can choose the crops you want to grow using the app and the farmers manage the whole thing for you, along with alerts that watering has been completed or that your groundnut plants have died. You get the weekly harvest on your doorstep. It’s a lovely, contextually-aware way to drive Farm-to-Plate. It also gives scope for AI-assisted farming. The farmers’ relationship with the ‘market’ changes quite dramatically. Of course, this app also takes away a small part of my grocery spend from BigBasket, just as Licious has chipped away a little bit by serving our hungry puppy (yes, she’s Indi, yes, she’s adopted, yes, she’s neutered) within two hours. Dunzo has taken away some of my spends from Amazon and Swiggy and diverted it to the local shops by offering sub one-hour deliveries and hyper-local inventories. So, just because there are two huge aggregators - Amazon and Flipkart - it doesn’t mean that there is no opportunity for others, especially if they have a niche: differentiated offering with a fantastic customer experience.
In a webinar we co-hosted with #letstalkcx we talked about the use of AI & Data in modern customer experience, and how it can be a differentiator with a super panel - Satyajit Rajput, Head of Oracle Digital Prime Solution Consulting, India, Kaushik Satish, VP Marketing, Belong.co, and Neha Gupta, Head of Marketing, Chai Point on The 'How-To' of Modern Customer Experience for Today's Marketers. Check out our site letstalkcx for great content on customer experience. If you have a differentiated offering, you should try to build your own channel - aggregators, whether it is Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra or BigBasket - eventually launch their own brands which you then have to compete with.
Of course, scale is a wonderful thing and benefits customers and business alike. I was a happy participant in Amazon’s Prime Day. I also thought it was a superbly executed omni-channel outreach campaign and interviewed Ravi Desai, Director - Mass and Brand about it. It’s rare to find a campaign that uses AR, VR, QR codes, radio, interactive video, physical installations, cabs in a seamless way - hats off to the Amazon team for pulling it off smoothly.
What’s up at Paul Writer:
July:
- LogMeIn webinar on Riotous Fun: 9 Insider Tactics to Turn Webinar Interactions into Engagement (25th July)
- LogicServe rountable in association with Paul Writer and Clairvoyant on Confluence of Digital Marketing and Data Science: Impactful Insights! (31st July)
August:
- TorcAI webinar on Beyond the Google and Facebook Duopoly: How Building Your Own Audience Data is the Growth Path (2nd August)
- The 6th Annual Futurist Business Conclave (24th August)
Have a great weekend!
Best Regards
Jessie Paul
@jessie_paul