Advertising is paid form of communication. It is mostly persuasive. To begin with it used mass media but these days it uses interactive media. Advertising is by an identified sponsor.

Advertising was targeted to the audience of potential customers. Either it covers the whole audience or small targeted or segmented groups. Advertising can now be customised, one-to-one advertising. It was formerly non-personal but is now changing to being personal on account of interactivity.

Advertising uses persuasion. It could be through emotional appeals or rational appeals.

Each advertising message is based on a strategy. A detergent advertising can decode that stain removal of the product would be our strategy. Advertising objective could be the improvement in current sales. The strategy is translated into a message , say a school returning child’s shirt is stained by mud splash and on returning home, the mother puts the shirt into the washing machine with the detergent being advertised. The shirt comes out bright and is totally stain free. This message can be put through print, outdoor and TVC. You can also use digital media. The whole thing will be managed by the Agency who gets compensated by commission received from the media.

After running the advertisement for some time, it is time to evaluate it. It is to be seen whether it improved the sales.

Advertising in formal sense coincided with the emergence of printing which could print commercial messages on handbills and posters. Before print advertising appeared, there were sign-boards and town-criers. Newspapers came on the scene in the 18th century, and started accepting classified advertisements.

In 1848, the first ad agency Volney Palmer was set up in Philadephia. In 1864, J. Walter Thompson was set up. In 1868, N.W.Ayer started the commission system for placing the ads. The JWT created the post of account executive — a link between the agency and the client.

Advertisers expected the messages to work for them and that paved the way for professionalisation of advertising. Slowly, advertising theory crystallised. Albert Lasker called advertising as salesmanship in print in 1880’s.

McCann agency called advertising ‘truth well-told.’ By the end of the 19th century, the practice of commodities being branded became prominent.

Advertising’s visual quality was much emphasised in Europe. To begin with only artists, and illustrators worked for advertising. In the 20th century advertising, we created the position of art director.

Television commercials appeared in the early 1950s. They were rated by Neilsen rating method (1952).

Marketing practices such as product differentiation, market segmentation, positioning ( Ries and Trout, 1969) evolved over a period of time.

Advertising in the 1960s and 1970s focused on creativity. Ogilvy relied on brand image and brand claims.

Advertising has to deliver results. It should be accountable. Advertising, therefore, must be effective. This was emphasised in the 1970s. There was testing and measurement of advertising in the 1980s and 1990s. Advertising, must be socially responsible too.

Late 1990s ultimately ushered in the digital era. The new concept of integrated marketing communication was widely adopted. In the early part of the new millennium, the social media era emerged. Communication became interactive. Consumers too generate brand messages. Organisations and consumers can have one-to-one talk.

In digital advertising ,both the client and the agency do not give representation to the creative people. The big consulting firms have technology, big data and platforms. However, they lack ideas and the creative people. These days media agencies hire techies. Similarly, consulting firms feel they will hire creative people. Media agencies are in competition with the consulting firms. And consulting firms command a premium. Creative excellence is secondary, and first comes the algorithms, the rising costs, the techies creating videos for the price of the pack of salted peanuts. There is focus on mobile screens weaning away the TV audiences. There is perception that you need youngsters to create communication for the millenial. There are AI applications. In all this, creative excellence is put on the backburner. Creative people too will have to adapt to the new environment. They will have to master new skills. They will have to be fast to deliver the ideas. They will have to learn how to create a post that leads to maximum engagement. In digital world, consumer processes brand information in a matter of seconds. Creative people can experiment, as the price of failure is low. Yes creative people can retain their insights and observations and moorings. They can have India-focus. At the same time they will have to blend their traits with the new context of longer formats, GIFs, interactivity and customised copy.

The new creative team will be crusader out to win respect back for advertising . They will have to care genuinely for the client’s business. They will have to establish contact with the CEOs who know where their company is headed. They will have to develop the contacts with the media so as to get the opportunities to contribute to the popular culture. No digital campaign has affected national consciousness.

Today, digital has reduced itself to the deals and discounts. Media companies have to build solutions around client’s business. That is not happening. They have just become agents again, rather than drivers of growth.

Digital business has prolific output. Every minute 46200 posts are uploaded on Instagram. It is rich content. Every minute 4,52,000 tweets are created. Millions of YouTube videos are viewed, and thousands are created every minute. Digital is a black hole, with the ability to hold unlimited amounts of content. Content creation is democratised. Here, you must have a piece of content that stands out in this clutter. It is much more challenging.

In advertising, there is now competition between big media agencies and tech companies. Both behave differently. A global pitch tends to go big media companies,

There is competition between ad agencies and consultancies. Consultancies specialise in project work and analytics. Agencies will have to develop deep relationships with clients by understanding the strategies to be adopted by them for their business. Agencies must have good talent profile to do so.

A tech company has an advantage over an agency. A lot of people could serve a client. The client executives know the domain. They organise verticals so that they coalesce.

Some agencies are reactive but this depends on agencies. Though they are not a tech company, they too are driven by data and technology and tools.

Clients have become sophisticated. They have a good understanding. They have in-house teams, Agencies have to add value and they have to reinvent.

Digital too is measurable. It is as measurable as you set it up to be. In search, the digital metrics are clear. To get the effectiveness of display and video, and thereafter trading online and offline, the measurement should take notice of these. First understand what you are measuring.

It is desirable that agencies move away from briefs and campaigns but it is difficult to do so. It is easier for the right talent profile.

1. Nimble : Digital medium is content hungry. It requires snackable content. Digital can be guided by big ideas, but the voluminous content in digital wholly cannot be big-idea-driven. Big idea is replaced by hundreds of small ideas — those micro moments which engage the  audience. Digital agencies must be able to pick up snackable content by being nimble.
2. Content : Per se, the consumer is not intrested in the brand. He requires engagig content. Some content may not serve the marketing objectives. The content must be targeted to an audience. It should be valuable, relevant and consistent.
3. Eco-system : Multiple apps clutter a phone. There are integrating apps where one app enables bill payments, cab booking, food ordering and playing games. It is necessary to create a digital eco-system.
4. Bots : Bots are digital assistants. They are for cusomer service as well as for prompting purchases. They do entertain.
5. AI will make thins better.It will revolutionise e-coomerce, gaming, product design and health care.
6. Technology will generate ideas. There will be technology-based execution. It will be a new experience.
7. Chronological Facebook and Instagram changed completely with the advent of algorithm in 2016. It regulated free-flowing content. Businesses were made to pay for the ads. There will be more influencer marketing. Consumers trust less known influencers than celebrities. Micro-influencers will become more important.
8. Collaboration between social media and e-commerce will increase. Commerce gets to know consumer preferences and experiences. It helps marketers to improve their offerings. Users provide feedback of their experience on social media.
9. Big data has become a reality. It provides rich insights. Dataanalytics extract these insights. The core of the agency is likely to shift from creativity to data.

Advertising keeps the media alive. In an earlier era, print and TV survived on advertising. Of late, web sites and mobile apps survive on it.

Vance Packard’s book Hidden Persuaders in 1957 painted advertising in sinister light. He contended that psychology and sociology are used by advertising industry to persuade the average citizen to buy and get addicted to products that she did not really need. Some later books wondered whether advertising works at all. The End of Advertising as We Know It by Sergio Zyman in 2002 made a case that in this millennium advertising have become self-indulgent, and consequently the art and entertainment aspects have been overemphasised, rather than the ability to sell a product. Al Ries and Laura Ries wrote in 2002 The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR. Here they question the power of print ads and TVCs. They cite the examples Starbucks, The Body Shop, Walmart, Red Bull and Zara which have built up their brands without advertising. They conclude that marketers should relax on unpaid PR which persuade journalists to write favourably about their products and the values they stand for.

Advertising emerged in the US in the 1950s owing to a need for differentiation among  several commodity type of products. In the 1970s, as the colour printing presses became cheap, there was a magazine boom, which capitvated both the readers and advertisers. Satelite TV through cable at our homes led to another stimulation to advertising and boosted regional advertising too. The earlier formats struggled to survive, as new formats replaced them during this journey, e.g. early magazine ads looked like newspaper ads and early TV commercials looked like cinema ads. When Internet came on the scene, it adopted the outdoor ad format for the first five years, and called it banner ads. Later search engines thought of putting up ads corresponding to those subjects which we were searching. The innovation brought in was the offer that pay only when someone clicks the ad. It copied the format of direct marketing ads of 1950s i.e. action-proneness. Advertising adopted the maxim that it has to be performance-driven. It is now time to seek a suitable format for mobile ads, which finds that some videos are too loud and intrusive for the privacy of this user, and for offering him personalisation.

India is an intresting market. There are 400 million people online of which 300 million are on smartphones. By 2020, this is expected to go up to 650 million.

The in-thing in 2016 was the native advertising. Advertisers would like to be where the consumers are. Native advertising is doppleganger — the ads blend into the editorial matter. In 2017, the in-app advertisirs replaced the native advertising. The online time is spent on 11 apps. That led to appvertising. In-app ads offer immersive experiences, and has become a mass medium of 2017. It ranges from a six-second video to an augmented reality game. It targets the users based on first party data. Predictive analysis enables to customise the audiences and deliver compelling in-feed content. There is an element of location specific messages. It increases engagement and develops an on-the-go and organic audience. In-app ads target the audience at the right moment. The users are in the frame of mind to explore, engage and discover. It can nurture conversions and leads. It promotes repeat engagement. Many ads are interactive, and appear durig relevant moments.

The challenge is a lack of rich media inventory. It is harder to discover which users have already seen the ad in the absence of cookies. There should be additional efforts for retargeting.

In-app ads are relatively more expensive to develop than those for the mobile web. However, the net return is always higher as it avoids the waste on generalised and untargeted audience.

OTT is driven by the viewer. Should there be advertising? Advertising in the middle of a show or movie is considered a disruption. Having said this , this is the most difficult dilemma. India has 319 million internet users and 170 million smart phone users which allow them to watch video. At last count, 100 million did watch video. The videos watched are 1/4th of the total digital ad spend. The M & E industry is growing and ad spend and ad revenues too are growing. The Indian online services market will ride piggy back on advertising, although online video advertising is only a fifth of TV advertising today.

The challange are:

• differentiation
• strong regional content
• interesting and varying content.

The future is digital.