2024 AME Grand Jury Spotlight Interviews celebrate the exceptional minds shaping the landscape of advertising and marketing communications. Our esteemed panel for 2024 includes visionary leaders renowned for creating influential, results-oriented campaigns for leading brands worldwide.This diverse jury coming from top-tier agencies around the globe represent some of the most recognized creative and strategic trailblazers in the industry.
Menaka Menon is President at DDB Mudra South, she brings years of leadership and strategic insights to the AME Grand Jury panel With experience across advertising, design strategy consulting, broadcast media & the non-profit world; and having essayed roles across both the business as well as strategy functions, her worldview is strongly anchored in effectiveness. Menaka has worked across categories from lifestyle to FMCG, BFSIs, entertainment and more. Throughout her career has worked with diverse clients and businesses, and across areas ranging from brand identity & positioning, to solutions targeted at specific business goals, to designing & orchestrating behaviour change solutions at an ecosystem level.
In the interview below Menaka provides her perspective on data, AI and corporate social responsibility, as well as sharing her insights on the attributes of award-winning work.
AME Awards: Why are effectiveness competitions like the AME Awards important?
Menaka Menon: Effectiveness competitions such as the AME hardwire accountability towards business outcomes and set high benchmarks for what good work is.
As an industry, the work that we’re all creating is ultimately targeted at achieving these outcomes, and having reputed bodies recognize such outcomes serves as a nudge for more and more such work to be created.
Of course, being a highly prestigious & much coveted award also drives healthy competition, which is always a good thing, given it makes the quality of output go up as well.
AME Awards: As a creative strategist, what stand-out attributes do you recognize in award-winning creative effective advertising?
Menaka Menon: Effective advertising and creative advertising are not two different things and award winning creative effective advertising truly drives that point home.
Increasingly, the work that wins creative accolades is also that which demonstrates impact on business.
It is the work that has the power to move consumers that dominates the conversation on effectiveness too.
AME Awards: How has the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence impacted the effectiveness of advertising campaigns?
Menaka Menon: While the use of data has allowed us to become more targeted in our approach and solutioning, helping us tailor unique customer journeys; AI has gone a long way towards helping us up the overall output significantly, by enabling various tools to optimize the usage of data and insights.
AME Awards: With an increasing emphasis on corporate social responsibility, how do brands effectively communicate their values and societal contributions in their marketing strategies?
Menaka Menon: The first step is of course finding the right cause to back, something that is in sync with what the brand stands for. A misalignment between CSR goals and brand goals can make it very difficult to find an effective bridge towards communicating societal contributions by the brand.
A true representation of the contributions is also very significant, especially in times when one false move can lead to any amount of vilification on social media.
Finally, not delinking the CSR efforts and the brand efforts, but instead having the same team work on communicating the two, can really help build synergies and help effective communication.