Mak, CEO and founder of Formula Media

Recently we had the great opportunity to host a company visit with Formula Media, a new media advertising and buying agency backed by a wealth of experience. The session was led by Formula Media’s CEO and Founder, Manish Mak, for the social media master class students from Bayswater College.

Mak began with a story of the fascinating journey he has had in marketing; from working for different agencies and being involved in campaigns for major brands including Bose (wireless headphones), Shell (kinetic energy football pitch), and Sony (reactive campaign for Xperia). This was a great insight into the early adoption of digital technology into marketing just over a decade ago.

To better understand how significant the acceleration of transformation in marketing has been, Mak dived into the history of the industry. Students learnt about the early forms of advertisements in print and the audio-visuals of radio and TV, the introduction of digital marketing with the rise of the internet in the 1990s, and social marketing in the last fifteen years. That led Mak to provide an in-depth analysis of the history of social marketing and its rapid rise. He illustrated to the students how the growth of users in social media platforms in the few years has changed the landscape of marketing and how revolutionary it has been. Mak went on to describe the reasons behind the shift from offline to online and its fast acceleration (online advertising surpassing £259 billion in expenditure as of 2020).

The presentation had insightful details of the rise in streaming trends since the pandemic, especially podcasts and gaming, which added other channels for marketers to reach the audience. Mak also pointed out challenges for the agencies as more online content is being published than the consumers’ ability to consume.

The second part of the session was about discussing the future of digital and social marketing with the students, which led Mak to tell us more about the business model of Formula Media and how they specialise in new and emerging media to disrupt the traditional model. He emphasised that brand awareness has never been more important in the current marketing environment, and how Formula Media has tapped into that with Audience Driven Advertising. Mak also elaborated on great possibilities with the ‘democratisation’ of marketing into the future and how ‘two-way marketing’ will change the whole industry.

It was engaging to hear from him about the successful campaigns Formula Media ran for the Prince’s Trust and Anker(eufy), to name a few. Mak told us about the future technology and how it’s changing the way marketers and advertisers reach out to consumers in a new way. He elaborated on how Virtual Reality (VR), and with it, how Metaverse marketing is all about expanding the possibilities. Metaverse provides the unique opportunity to collaborate with brands and businesses we may have not thought of before. Mak discussed with students also: Augmented Reality (AR), voice recognition, Connected TV (CTV), and screen eye-tracking. All the above is transforming the approach of both advertising and marketing, and Mak showed us how future marketers must be well-positioned to monetise on these technologies.

Insider London is proud to partner with Formula Media. For a bespoke Company Visits to get further insight into the future of digital and social marketing contact us via contact@insiderlondon.com