Venkata Bhonagiri Interview(s)

Viewpoints about Strategy/Planning

In a few words, can you tell us who you are what your job title is?

I am the Senior Partner, Group Director, leading the data strategy and analytics practice at Mindshare in Chicago. I have over 13 years of experience in media strategy, insights, and analytics. I developed, integrated, and scaled core service offerings, including business planning within Mindshare. In my current role, I spearheaded multi-channel data-driven planning, marketing, and implementation of bespoke global media solutions for major brands such as Kimberly Clark, Ferrero and Discover and supported businesses across verticals including CPG, B2C & B2B, Tech, FinServ, Travel, and Insurance sectors. To reach me, email: venkata.bhonagiri@mindshareworld.com.

Which aspect of your job do you enjoy the most?

Solving business problems is the part I enjoy the most. This experience is enriched as I bring in a different set of clients into the mix

What do you think will be the biggest challenge for brands in reaching consumers in the next five years?

The current media landscape is highly fragmented and proliferated. Identifying a consumer might be a lot easier than ever before as petabytes of data around them get generated every second of their lives. The challenge though is capturing that data and harnessing it in a way that advertisers are both ethically responsible and do it in the best interest of the consumer in mind. Navigating through this enormously complex media advertising space could be daunting. The good news is, this is happening at scale across a few advertisers, however, it's still early, and only the beginning

What project that you worked on are you most proud of, and why?

It is less of a project but more of an initiative at Mindshare that involved codifying end-to-end planning process to realize good growth for advertisers at scale

How can data make us more creative? Can you give a recent example?

Absolutely, data is the fuel to showcase and demonstrate the value of what we seek. Advertisers are hungry for trends. Post-pandemic, social commerce as a sales channel picked up. Think of social commerce as a special type of e-commerce where consumers get to search and buy on social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. With this trend, most of the advertisers and agency partners were bound to think creatively to activate social commerce advertising not just to drive revenue but also to enrich the consumer experience