Month: November 2015

Blippar

Shabbir Chunawalla

Blippar was developed in 2011, and has been continuously evolving. It has reached around 150 countries. There are close to 50 million downloads of the app. It is expanding. It has reached India towards the end of 2014. It is a reality ad platform. It is an advertising platform that brings products to life. It has revolutionized the way the consumers interact with the brands. It is backed up by the power of image recognition and augmented reality technologies. They keep on improving the image recognition technologies. That brings the consumer to interact with literally any object. Let the consumer point the phone at a food item, a chocolate or a ball.  They get engaged in an activity. They are likely to tweet about it. They like the brand page, participate in a contest and then consumer the product.

In India, they have 30 clients. Blippar is a content discovery app. Every time you blip a Pepsi can, different content will show up, ranging from interactive games to contests.

Betamax Tapes of Sony Phased Out

Shabbir Chunawalla

Sony is finally taking off the market its Betamax tapes, which have not been used for decades. They will stop manufacturing these tapes in March, 2016. Betamax was at war with the VHS format in the 1970s, but it has lost this war. VHS was launched by TVC a year after Betamax was put in the market. Betamax claimed better qualify recordings, but VHS was economical, and could store more. By 1980s, VHS had a huge market. Betamax continued losing the market. Amazon Japan still continues to sell Beta tapes.

Crafting Stories for New Age Screens

Shabbir Chunawalla

Advertising in new age depends a lot on story-telling to connect, keeping purpose and emotion at the heart of narrative, and allowing the brand/ product to remain in the background. Please do not see story telling as an extended TVC. A 30-second commercial extended to 3 minutes would not make a good story, unless it touches the hearts. The duration and space is incidental. Long format ads reach a different audience. It is not a passive TV audience. As it is possible for people to drop off after the first 15-20 seconds, it is better to aim at depth of engagement. It has to follow the format of inspire, interact and amplify. Long format ads must try to provide new information, and useful information. A good ad has to balance information and entertainment.

Eros Now

Shabbir Chunawalla

Eros is in cinema. Eros Now is the OTT version for the small screen. It provides entertainment anytime, anywhere. Eros is known for its production and distribution of films for the last three decades. Eros Now is the natural extension of   their distribution strength. One need not wait for the favourite TV shows or the films. It is available on Eros Now — movie, music and television. The company will be building an in-app payment mechanism. It is access without appointment. The customers are willing to pay for it. Apart from movies, they will also have exclusive shows, e.g. The Client is an action-packed thriller.

The OTT platform Eros Now has announced six new shows, each between 8 to 12 episodes.

Content Creation for Digital Formats

Shabbir Chunawalla

Digital formats do need content creation. Some exclusive firms have entered this space. There is a clamour for the eb-only content — the content for mobiles and desk tops. Entertainment channels such as Star, Sony and Viacom have launched over-the-top (OTT) versions HotStar, SonyLiv and Voot. Production houses like YRF, Balaji and Eros have entered into content space. It is great time to offer a platform and work on the content space. YRF Man’s World is a five episode series launched in September, 2015. The next web series for them is Bang Baja Baraat and Jumbo Jutts. It is  important to connect the present generation. The entry is not capital intensive. What is important is to understand the audiences. The content is very different from that on the traditional platforms. It is more edgy.

Web series will attract a whole host of talents — writers, directors, producers from the traditional space to the digital space.

Business model of the digital space is still evolving. It is to be seen how best to monetize it. Online revenues are still meager. Getting people to subscribe in a market where piracy is the in-thing is very challenging. There has to be a balance between subscription revenue and advertising revenue. At present web-based serials are advertisement-supported. They are sponsored by a number of advertisers. Smart marketers have realized that it is better to register presence in the digital space to remain relevant for today’s generation and audiences.

Online Portals of News

Shabbir Chunawalla

On Internet, there are online portals which cover multiple interests from politics, to sports, to entertainment. In fact, these could be considered as counterparts of a newspaper in print or a news channel on TV. Most of these websites are less than three years old. They can also cover the live events, e.g. the recent Bihar assembly elections with the help of smart phones, dispensing with the OB van set up. They are speedier and quickly accessible. They are less intrusive. Some popular portals are The Quint, The Wire, Quartz, Scroll and Catch News. There are video too on such portals with analytical articles. Such portals attract traffic — of course small, say from a few million unique visitors. Such portals are accessed on smart phones. Most users are young. They adopt a fresh approach to news — they are bold. Their content may not be available in the mainstream media. It is independent of conventional media. They attempt democratization of news. They are facing competition from the established conventional media, say ndtv.com or times ofindia.com. The established companies get the cost benefits of an already existing infrastructure.

Most of these websites employ a batch of reporters, say some 80 reporters are working for Quint to cover politics, sport and entertainment on the lines of  a mainstrean newspaper. The audience of these web sites is young and drawn from smart phone users and social media users. Online, it is to produce once and distribute endlessly. This is an advantage. Online sites too have started giving analytics of their audience to attract advertisers. It is still a moot point whether the business model of online news sites will sustain quality journalism. Such quality can be sustained if they are paid for or are subsidized. Indian sites solicit subscriptions and donations.

Enhanced Advertising

Shabbir Chunawalla

In the last five years, the growth of the base of advertisers is  remarkable — there were around 10 thousand advertisers in 2010, whereas in 2015, there are about 12,500 advertisers. Much of this growth is led by the new economy companies — e-commerce entities, start ups and internet-enabled services. There is good growth in regional advertising too.

The ratio of India’s advertising expenditure to GDP continues to be small — at 0.35 per cent. Other emerging countries like China (0.50 per cent), Russia (0.57 per cent) and Brazil (0.77 per cent) are better. The enhanced advertising activity may increase its share in GDP in future.

Online Advertising Fraud

Shabbir Chunawalla

It is a fact that online advertising industry is expected to a fraud that costs it several billion dollars. There are efforts to regulate this by announcing of certification of legitimate publishers and advertisers. This certification programme is called TAG or Trustworthy Accountability  Group. TAG will basically certify companies who create ads and web sites which display them.

You may wonder why an advertiser himself is not able to judge the quality of the web site. In practice, ads are sold often in automated auctions in vast networks. These networks have a huge scale  and are opaque. They can serve as traffic laundering operations for criminals. An advertiser may get ripped off on business alone on one of these networks. It is difficult to say whether the network was in the know of things or should have known them.

It is an effort to make the middlemen accountable. Whether this succeeds or not depends how TAG wards off companies that violate the basic standards from getting the certification. They have fixed a fee of $ 10000 which will be waived for smaller firms.

Ad Blocking

Shabbir Chunawalla

Advertising in digital format has spiraled out of control.Users resent this proliferation. Users are also concerned about the privacy issues. Ads in print and TV are not so unwelcome. Even if they are, people put up with them. People have have opted for ad blockers. But then how the online publishers could survive without the ads? And who decides which ads are to be blocked? When ads are blocked publishers will have to find alternative way to reach the people and monetise their inventory. There may be a return to affliate-links and revenue share models. There may be increase in native advertising. As more content on mobiles is seen on apps, ad blockers may not be effective. They are not effective on social net-works too. One valid reason for ad blocking is the use of personal data to customise ads. However, millennials have issues with the quantity of the ads. Some softwares block ads that violate the privacy.

Comedians in Advertising

Shabbir Chunawalla

Comedians do command a reach that is important for advertisers. A comedian as such takes anti-establishment stance. He is away from mainstream. Does his coming closer to brand dilutes his artristic capability ?  Could they be as acerbic and edgy? Comedians have not ventured into advertising. It is advertising that is coming closer to comedians. Comedy’s freedom cannot be had in advertising. Still comedians have realised that one way to make money is to be involved with the brands. Brands could sponsor comedy too. It all depends on the content. It should be  engaging enough . A corporate show takes you beyond the obscenity and insulting people. A person has to learn how to keep the integrity intact in different spaces. AIB has launched an advertising division — Vigyapati.