We'll bring more creative capability into India: Alan Herrick

Alan Herrick, Chief Executive Officer of Sapient, the world's largest interactive marketing firm, spoke to BT's Kushan Mitra about how online marketing is changing its India growth plans.

The way technology is changing marketing is shocking. This is already a trillion-dollar industry amidst a massive change. In India we have people in the technical space and we also have a studio that is in creative production for digital marketing. What we want to do is to bring more and more creative capability into India.

We recently won an award at Cannes for a smileactivated ice-cream vending machine, where you walk up to the machine and smile. If your smile is big enough - it actually measures the amplitude of your smile - it vends you a free ice-cream bar and it simultaneously clicks a picture of your smile and uploads it to Facebook.

The whole convergence between the digital and physical world is just starting to happen. There has to be an integrated marketing and commerce process and the first part is to integrate the marketing process - web, mobile, kiosk and the second part is online commerce which is part of that experience.