Meta India’s Arun Srinivas on why AI is key to the next phase of digital advertising – Brand Wagon News

As many as 8 in 10 Indian shoppers now discover products via social media, and 96% of them do so through Meta platforms, a study has shown. As content, commerce, and conversations converge, the pressure on brands to adapt is intensifying. In this interview, Arun Srinivas, director & head of ads business (India) at Meta, speaks with Geetika Srivastava about India’s shifting discovery habits, the growing influence of creators, and why AI is key to the next phase of digital advertising. Edited excerpts:

Retail discovery has increasingly become social first. Does that come with a downside?

We augment discovery on our platforms. In a marketplace, brands are trying to compete to sell offerings. I think the context in our case is very different because you’re not competing to sell your pair of jeans versus somebody else’s pair of jeans. In our case, our platform is able to give an avenue to each of these brands for a pair of jeans, so they can really talk about who they are and what they have to offer. The transaction happens largely either on their own website or store. Our role is different than that of the marketplace, which can also be the seller of those goods.

India is one of Meta’s largest markets in terms of users. From an advertising perspective, where do you see the next big growth opportunity here?

If you look at studies, the overall digital ad market today has dramatically grown, and we’ve had significant milestones over the past five years. It became the largest medium in 2020, overtaking all other forms of media, including TV. It became more than half the market in 2021, and today is the fastest-growing ad medium in the country, and roughly constitutes about 60% of all advertising expenditure by marketers. If you look at developed markets, those numbers are as high as 80%.

The power of the industry is such that you have to communicate one to one, you have to cohortise, and whether you’re small or a large business, you can scale. The opportunity is huge.

How do you read broad consumer trends?

If I look at trends that we see on our platforms, and I’m also mindful that tech trends are evolving very, very rapidly, three trends are pointing towards a very promising future for India and Meta. One is short form video and Reels, because we see that today, more than half the time spent on our platforms is on video across Facebook and Instagram. For Instagram, particularly, more than 60% of time spent is on Reels. The second big trend is around the creator economy because we see that India is home to the largest creator base in the world, and there’s a lot of interesting content not just in Indian English, but in a lot of vernacular languages. Creators are able to bring lots of relatability and authenticity. We therefore see a lot of partnership ads taking off, where creators and brands come together . The third big trend is messaging. We see that all of us today leverage the power of WhatsApp, whether for buying metro tickets, downloading boarding passes, or even tracking order and delivery statuses. This trend has been increasing and we see a lot of businesses starting to message and engage with customers and make life much simpler rather than dialling a call center, etc. We have lots of flows and options, curated for the customer journey.

I would say underpinning all these three trends is AI. It’s on the Reels side, because AI plays a role in what kind of content you see, as well as for messaging, with chat bots.

How should brands approach content strategy on Meta platforms?

Creators and influencers are playing a significant role in doing that. Some of the largest companies in the country and their CEOs say that the rules of marketing have changed and that they have to build muscles in really leveraging creator content. It’s not just one asset or one ad that a campaign creates, it’s a 360 approach where you’re trying to look at all forms of media, or what will really make something go viral. I believe creators play a significant part in that whole mix. Increasingly, brands are coming to realise it.

We’ve been seeing Meta increasingly integrating AI tools for ad creation and campaign optimisation. How are Indian brands responding to this?

BigBasket used Gen AI to create some ad sets, and what they noticed was that Gen AI-created ads actually gave them a 3-4% incremental click-through rate versus the human-created ads. So, we are seeing companies both large and small experimenting, learning, and trying to build their own muscles as AI makes a bigger and bigger play in their work.

Is Meta seeing a growing shift in ad budgets towards conversational commerce?

They had an ad where you could scan a QR code, and you will open the Croma chatbot where you can start talking about what you want to buy because they have a sale going on. Whether it is ACs or TVs, you are able to narrow it down to a very specific query. And then you’re encouraging a store visit as well with extra discounts. So I think it’s an engagement medium. It’s almost like a lead. We are trying to make sure you are driving store traffic.

I wouldn’t use the word shift because this is just one more way to reach the customer. If it’s a high ticket purchase, or if it’s likely complex, you want to handhold the customer. Let’s take retail. There are brands like Croma, which have leveraged the power of WhatsApp.

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