Mumbai: The 3rd edition of Indian Digital BrandFest 2023 kicked off and had brands, advertisers, and tech platforms discuss all these trends and more. The summit looked at the latest trends driving the change in consumer behaviour and how it has impacted the industry’s growth.
Whether it was a boom in influencer marketing or the popularity of short-video platforms, brands did not hesitate to jump onto the digital bandwagon to up their marketing game. So Indian television.com is taking this opportunity to bring a host of industry experts together under one roof to discuss all these new trends shaping the future.
The panellists for this session were FUTR Studios co-founder & COO Himanshu Goel, Chingari App co-founder & COO Deepak Salvi, Skoda Auto Volkswagen India Pvt.Ltd. digital products & Web3 lead Anuj Dound, Fandora co-founder Satish Kataria, CitrusAd head- India-South Asia Kushal Sanghvi. The session chair for this panel was APAC, BLIPPAR consultant - growth & partnerships - EMEA Arnav Neel Ghosh.
Ghosh kicked off the session by giving some realistic perspectives on where Web3 is and gave a quick preamble on where Web3 is today. He also asked the panellist the same.
Goel said, “The Internet used to be a place to make friends. It used to be a place where you can play games. You can find the actual value. Now on any post or any new technology. There is scepticism always on the Internet, whether it's AI, whether it's Web3. I think you could post the cure of cancer on the Internet and you would still get skeptics. I would say do not be deterred by scepticism because there will always be. Yeah, this is and I think Web3 is a place which is in a very early stage. It's not something we look at for one year, or two years. It's something we look at for the next 5 to 10 years.
Salvi said, Educating people is the first thing. Whenever your new technology comes in, you need to educate. Lot of new startups and a lot of new groups are trying to explain what Web3 is because the perception for people is that Web 3 means token Web crypto. It's not like you know there are a lot of things.”
Dound replied, “So as Deepak and Himanshu both were saying that the technology initially was used a lot to make this PR, there were no real real-life use cases. But as we are developing, as we understand the technology, as we understand from the failures of others, there is obviously a sweet spot wherein you need to understand what kind of value you're giving to the people. So for the NFTS that we launched, the intent was never to make money or to kind of create a different entity altogether. It was more from a perspective of what the existing users get from the product. Are we able to create a community out of it? Because Web3 is a new technology and not many people are aware of it. So it's also up to us to kind of evangelize this technology and also let people know.”
Kataria said, “One obviously is still the education awareness, kind of dispelling this entire misperception that Web three is equivalent to crypto. I think unfortunately that became the language of Web3 and that became the introduction of Web3 to a lot of people, and a lot of those people burn their hands also. So I think that education is a very critical factor and that has to be kept given continuously till you can understand that crypto is just a very small subset of what Web 3 can do.”
Sanghvi said, “When you break down Web3, it's not only crypto, not just putting currency or metaverse. I think for India to grow in this market of Web 3.0, the services and organisations need to try and create specialists or teams for people.
In the end, Ghosh concluded the session by saying that Web3 technology looks to grow positively in the future thanks to the various agencies and services continuing to educate people on the same.