Moiz Sayed, who is Google’s Industry Head for Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka has shed light on what brands in Pakistan can achieve if marketers adopt a shift in mindset and break away from traditional forms of marketing and advertising in the digital era.

Compared to the 90s, the way Pakistanis communicate and connect has changed drastically. “Pakistan now has 169 million cellular subscribers, 85 million 3G+ subscribers, and 87 million broadband, subscribers.”

In the digital era, advertisement budgets appear to follow a traditional model, based on strategies that have succeeded in the past. “I’ve realised our industry believes Pakistan has limited internet penetration and poor access to smartphones, thus thinking digital won’t have sufficient reach.”

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Here are some of the facts presented in the article regarding Pakistan’s digital scene that you did not know :

Fact 1 : Despite being in the digital era 65-70% of current ad spend being allocated to TV by default in Pakistan.

Fact 2 : Most brands only leverage 20%-30% of the available reach on YouTube among their target audience.

Fact 3 : Over 90% of the campaigns don’t capture their full target audience because of low funding. 

Fact 4 : YouTube brand campaigns Drove an 89% increase in awareness and consideration of brands.

Fact 5 :95% brands saw a significant offline sales lift after a YouTube campaign.

Fact 6 : YouTube has a reach of over 36 million people

Fact 7 : Watch time for YouTube has grown to 45% from 2019 to 2020

How Nestlé Pakistan challenged traditional thinking

The company focused on their Cerelac brand.They did a two-years of brand activity, which included studying media investments, impressions, sales volume, and revenue across TV and YouTube.

This is what they found out :

 67% incremental increase in sales per dollar on YouTube than TV.

The study revealed that even without increasing the overall media budget, they could improve the incremental sales per dollar by 21% by simply reducing the dark periods of online video.

Constant coverage on YouTube could generate 40% more impressions per week than the 2019 average.

A similar study from Nestle Australia revealed that in more than 93% cases, YouTube had greater incremental sales per impressions than TV.

After the analysis, Nestle has since taken a more data-centric approach, rather than only relying on their past experience to guide their media strategy. Moiz suggests that experiment with new channels to keep up with ever-changing consumer behaviors.

This article was originally published on Think with Google.